鈥楢 person receiving letters from an unknown sender鈥 will develop a tense relationship with the 鈥榟idden half-world鈥 where the sender resides.鈥
Sh奴ji Terayama, 1976
Terayama was simultaneously a poet writing in traditional form and a prolific horse-racing commentator whose outrageous predictions, based on word associations and literary allusions to the horse's names, parodied the game of predicting winners. Not surprisingly, the rich textual and visual imagery of his film and video work contains remarkably diverse combinations of words and images. In Les Chants de Maldoror, Terayama deconstructs Lautr茅amont鈥檚 proto-surrealist book with 鈥榓 reading film鈥 in which text from the Japanese translation is embedded within delirious imagery juxtaposing the book itself with glowing nude forms and the interaction of human and animal counterparts. The world of Les Chants is a world of fluid frontiers and free flowing forms.
Grass Labyrinth appropriates the look of pre-modern Japanese sideshows for a cinematic fantasia held together by the refrain of an enigmatic tune; a boy on the cusp of manhood is haunted by a lyric his mother sang to him as a child, only to leave the audience with this riddle unanswered.
In Video Letter Terayama and Shuntar艒 Tanikawa use rudimentary video equipment to compose Renga poetry, an ancient Japanese tradition for the exchange of letters. Terayama and Tanikawa, as senders and receivers, play both parts in this ritual correspondence, which recalls the Letter Drama of Tenj艒 Sajiki in which the protagonists were simultaneously actors and audience. The writer, Barbara London has described video letter as 鈥榓 kind of epitaph or mourning poem for Terayama鈥. It was one of his final collaborations, which took place over two years and came to an end with his death in 1983. Renga poetry can be seen as equivalent to the Occidental practice of literary correspondence and in this consumer video variation we can discern a portrait of Terayama that is elegiac against the more familiar image of an explosive enfant terrible.
Les Chants de Maldoror (Marudororu no Uta)
Sh奴ji Terayama, 1977 Japan, 16mm, 27 min
Grass Labyrinth (Kusa-meiky奴)
Sh奴ji Terayama, 1983 Japan, 35mm, 40 min
Video Letter
Sh奴ji Terayama & Tanikawa Shuntar艒, 1983 Japan, Video, 74 min
Curated by Thomas Dylan Eaton in association with 色控传媒.聽
With generous support from Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, Japan Foundation, Sasakawa Foundation, Toshiba Foundation, and All Nippon Airways.聽
Tate Film is supported by Maja Hoffmann / LUMA Foundation.