Screaming Silence-Terayama Shuji & the Problem of Freedom

It is hard to know what to say about Terayama Shuji. Most accounts begin with lists of his various titles and capacities in different media and he apparently considered himself a poet first and foremost, but the futility of this project is underscored explicity in one of his final works (he died in the middle of it). Video Letter, in which he exchanges a series of video letters with fellow poet Tanikawa Shuntaro, he seems to be somewhere between all of these explanations. About half way through the exchange, in which the two poets discuss meaning and non-meaning, identity, life and other grand topics, Terayama begins a letter by photographing his name written in characters and then asks, is this me? No, he replies, it is simply letters on paper. A photo proves to be no more than a photo, and even his speaking voice is refuted since he is “no longer here” (a statement that would pick up increasing resonance less than six months later). As photographs pass and break up, with one figure remaining and the other a white space reverse silhouette, he asks if he is an invisible man and then concedes that he is probably a series of things: Japanese, from Aomori, a poet, the leader of Tenjo Sajiki, an earthling, single, an only child, not Tanikawa Shuntaro, a liver disease patient, and so on and so forth. At the end he remarks that the very inability to dedide which is “correct” is precisely Terayama himself. This video letter is a response, in fact, to Tanikawa’s, in which the latter drops a series of items on the ground in front of a still camera (battery, mikan, doll, flute, tissues, photo, eyeglasses, Jimmy Guiffre album, keys, a picture book called “watashi”, and then asks, Who am I? Is this my poem? But like the dialectic relationship between meaning and non-meaning (in which a synthesis of meaning-likeness [imi arige]) emerges, all of life and artsistic creation (which weren’t too far apart—Terayama himself grew up just behind a movie theater screen for some time in Aomori) seems to take place in between, a point emphasized, to no small extent, by the very fact of exchange through which this particular work appears. Who is the author of this work? Is it one or the other poet, both, or neither? Terayama points out at one point, “Aren’t we attracted to words precisely because we cannot cleanly separate meaning from non-meaning? Life, I feel, is something like meaning-likeness, but my body is slowly falling behind this.” If creation and life are like the electricity that flows through filament in a light bulb, eventually, that bulb will burn out, the copper wires no longer able to sustain fresh currents. But, to paraphrase Edna St. Vincent Millay, the brevity of Terayama’s flame was nonetheless quite a lovely sight, in a twisted sort of way. I used to watch some of his shorts and marvel at his audacity and anarchist imagery—pissing directly on the camera lens in An introduction to film for Youth, or the notorious scenes of writhing naked women with a young boy in Emperor Tomato Ketchup. But rewatching some of his films, including the longer works that were produced by ATG, in the context of the socio-political turmoil of the time (following the second Anpo renewal and debacle) and particularly in light of the emphasis of people like Adachi Masao, Wakamatsu Koji, and Oshima Nagisa, to use film to transform society, his works are more profoundly provocative than a series of shocking visual images (though they certainly are that and remain so to this day). Emperor Tomato Ketchup is as good a place as any to begin, with its dystopian myth of a children’s revolution with strong Nazi overtones. “Can this become a fantastic community sufficient to replace th concept of the ‘nation’ created by adults? In the least, won’t the children become Hitler Youth inside a toy box,” Terayama wrote. The nazi connection here, emphasized not only through clothes but even through the taped recordings of Hitler’s speeches spinning in the background, is a curious one since Mao might have been the more immediate example. But in 1970 or 71, the atrocities of the cultural revolution had perhaps yet to surface and there was no shortages of romanticized Maoism among the extreme left in Japan (as elsewhere) at the time. The use of Mao therefore would not have had the same impact as the much loathed Hitler. In one quick punch, Terayama blew through many of these pretentions, however sincere and important, questioning the basis from which authority should be tackled and freedom sought. The highly absurdist promulgations of the child-emperor, including that adults must lick his boots and his favorite food, ketchup, shall become the national symbol (presumably spilled in a small dollop in the middle of a white handkerchief) are recanted in classical politico-legalese fashion in one scene, while children drag off adult dummies through the mud elsewhere. Scenes of bondage reinforce the tensions of entrapment and the twisted eroticism of childhood, its polymorphous perversity, shine through in the Flaming Creatures like scenes of the young boy stripped bare and held in the arms of nude Japanese women who cavort around him, a jigsaw puzzle of arms and legs, big blond wigs and a little penis.

Careening back and forth dangerously between obscene pedophilia and the most natural of family games, it is difficult to watch the scenes without a certain degree of tension. Wartime letters warning of the hazards of breaking the rules and the brutal banality of working in the concentration camps furthers the nationalist socialist satire; the entire proceedings are shot through with a high haze sepia, frequently overexposed, and lurching along to JA Caeser’s prog-rock inflected psychedelic and shambolic tunes, interspersed with ridiculous children’s choirs. Many of these elements are equally present in his other works, which tend to rework similar themes. Grass Labyrinth is ostensibly an adaptation of an Izumi Kyoka work, but it bears a striking resemblence to Pastoral, seemingly extending the dynamics of the young boy’s manically ambivalent relationship to a domineering mother and the failed attempt to elope with the hot nymphomaniac who lives next door. As with Emperor Tomato Ketchup, almost once in each film, boys are stripped and sexually harassed by woman, an inversion of the political pink film of the time as well as the new wave, in which the rape of women was a convention through which filmmakers asserted their radicalness. The men in Terayama’s works seem to have traumatized relationships with their mothers and remain sexually innocent at best, and more often confused. Both Pastoral and Grass Labyrinth are replete with unique and haunting imagery, bold colors, brilliant otherworldly landscapes, and Steve Clark has pointed out that much of the artistic success of Terayama’s works (which were shot in 35mm) must be credited to his DP, Suzuki Tatsuo, and art director Awazu Kiyoshi. Pastoral is also liberally sprinkled with Terayama’s tanka as intertitles and while he was no slouch as a poet, it is the visually stunning scenes of Mt. Osore with its blackclad coven (in between kuroko and greek chorus?), its red-filtered lakes, and so forth, but the presence of a convulted time (use of the Grandmother paradox now made trite by pop-sci-fi) manages to add yet another layer of significance as the older and the younger version of the main character meet and discuss the possibilities for change, highlighting the traps of memory and the question of a certain determinism. All of these find their material component in the watches and clocks, the innards of which are as crucial as the circling hands. It is the indeed the material and inner elements of mechanical time, neither of which are visible, that seem to entrap our narrators. Space, on the other hand, seems anarchically open and flexible, following none of the logic of narrative. Instead, doors within interiors open up to deserted beaches, fields magically transform to central Shinjuku. But all of these are more or less subsumed with a narrative framework that is much more difficult to determine in Terayama’s first feature film for ATG, Throw Away Your Books. Although this work also can be read as a narration of the main male character and his trials and tribulations, a sort of bildungsroman, Terayama uses a narrative of visual images constructed as a sort of collage (street theater, soccer matches, whorehouse—all appearing tinted by the extenseive use of filters) rather than any kind of linear storytelling. It is only as the film progresses that we begin to get a sense for how these jumbled scenes fit together and arguably, it is less important to follow them than to feel them and imbibe them. Like any great filmmaker, Terayama imbues each of his films with its own language and mythos (Jodowarsky comes to mind, and, though of diminished talent, Matthew Barney). It is only through watching the films that you begin to understand how they are assembled, where past images, like Benjamin’s image of history, flash up in a moment of danger, like lightning in the distance that illuminates greyly the obscure scene before our eyes. If one had to choose an overarching theme (obviously one doesn’t but it can prove an interesting challenge), it would seem to be a relentless entangling with the issues of authority and freedom. The paradox of freedom within enlightenment was faced as the primary issue of politics at the time in various guises and strategies (for the left-largely revolutionary). Still, these films must be seen in the context of a post-utopian moment, the 1970s, a time when the studios were hurting, the blood and sex were flowing, and genres were nearly the sole means of survival for creative filmmakers. Terayama might not have considered himself a filmmaker first, and many of the works he did make were based on his written works, but it would seem that he brought the same creative criticism and anarchic energy to all of his projects. In one of the final video letters made by Tanikawa, Terayama appears, looking no different from any salaryman, as a talking head in black and white.

Though no diegetic sound is present, we hear a woman screaming violently over the image. The combination is unsettling and its significance not immediately apparent. But in the final letter, as Tanikawa reads a poem while the camera slides vertically over a graphed life-line, accompanied by an increasingly heavy drone, before it stops completely, we look back at the ways that the banal image of his talking head screamed out. Tanikawa asks in the penultimate letter, what kind of world awakes when words fall asleep? Initially an off-hand comment, the poignancy of the question comes alive when we realize that someone who brought so many beautiful and challenging words out into the world has fallen silent. Such silence is cause for screaming in terror, indeed.

Matsumoto Toshio

Matsumoto Toshio’s Attack on Fixed Vision

Matsumoto Toshio is one filmmaker of whom it might be said that he moved from politics to art. In his first documentaries, like many other filmmakers working during the tumultuous period preceding and up through Anpo, Matsumoto was interested in the student movements and even made a doc called Anpo Joyaku in 1959. His book on avant-garde and documentary film, in which he tried to find a synthesis which he called neo-documentarism, locating subjectivity in docs and objectivity in AG productions, has been called a “bible” for a generation. His most famous feature film, Bara no soretsu (funeral parade of roses) was among the first to document the queer scene in Shinjuku, mixing it with the myth of Oedipus (from Pasolini rather than Sophocles) and anticipating the crying game by a couple decades. And although he continued to make feature films, he seemed to move closer to video and shorts as time wore on. He also participated in expo 70, which pretty much alienated him from many of his radical peers, since it was seen as a cooperation/co-optation with the rising Japan Inc. Of course, this is not to say that he has totally given up on politics, but perhaps that his politics has taken a different form. Remaining consistent with his initial efforts to forge a space in between objective and subjective, his shorts unrelentingly engage with the world not as an ordered and fixed space (objective) or as chaos and anarchy (subjective) but rather seem to view the world as nearly modular. Long before Sean Cubitt posited the pixel as one of the primary foundations of the image, Matsumoto was already carving and shaping and rearranging pixels on screen, shifting time and space around to alter our very perception. It is perhaps here that some form of politics, however obscure, may be detected, but this politics can never be subsumed within any preformed theoretical ideology. It is for this reason, perhaps, that he would be criticized although it is not clear that more direct forms of politically engaged cinema necessarily affected anything but the filmmaker’s and very small audience’s sense of their own importance. From utilizing multiple projection in For my crushed right eye to images of images within images in any number of films, Matsumoto consistently attacked any notion of a single fixed vision. One could even argue that the eye-gouging at the end of Funeral Parade, represents an attempt to fasten such an interrogation to a classical narrative form. And indeed, nothing in that film is what it first appears, beginning with gender and sexuality itself, and moving through genre and out to reality. But where the audience always knew what Oedipus didn’t (i.e. the source for dramatic irony) we seem to be catching on at times in that film along with the character. He would also incorporate images from that film into his shorter experimental works like 1969’s Ekusutashis, plying them over and over as a DJ samples and loops, in shifting patterns reminiscent of structuralist film. Another well known short, Aatoman (1975), in which a camera zooms and swirls around a masked demon (aatoman refers to “ego” in classical Indian texts), was composed of over 50,000 single frames shot from over 500 different camera angles, and each frame was slightly differently tinted, creating a nearly stroboscopic effect and quite intense viewing experience. The film made before that Phantom, which cuts between different types of image to capture the daydreams of a young girl, was the first to use infrared film in Japan. The way that it captures the man performing yoga, in a minimalist style with the palette changing and repeating slow enough to not become a blur, but fast enough that we can never alight our vision on it for long, remains compellingly frustrating. In contrast, his kaleidoscopic images of Ando Warhol’s visit in honor of a Warhol exhibit have the odd effect of almost giving a very natural image of the mysterious artist; further, though Warhol did use split screens on occasion (as in Chelsea Girls) one would be hard-pressed to find a less Warhol-like impression of the man himself. In other words, like Deleuze’s writing on Nietzsche, for example, the work is more Matsumoto than Warhol. Later video work from the early to mid 80s, in which Matsumoto was teaching, first in Fukuoaka (where his composer for these films was one of his students, Inagaki) and then in Kyoto, where he had gone to work on his adaptation of Yumeno Kyusaku’s Dogura Magura, take up the modular idea and visuality even more explicity. The titles alone—Engima, Connection, Relation, Shift, Sway(all exotic foreign loan words as well)—indicate the importance of motion and the rejection of identity. But these are complemented visually of course where time and space are expanded and contracted within frames within frames. 1981’s Connection is built of frames and circles traversed by cloud images but each frame divides the others and the distinction is created by shooting one positive and one negative. Then two spheres, one small and the other large, circle over the framed clouds (there are no interiors—just frames) changing in their sweep the positive to negative and vice versa. But like the very short film he made just before it, Enigma, which traces a small red ball through a swirling psychedelic 3D tube of purples and blues, there are distinct, though unmentioned in the commentaries, images of eyeballs that recur and that are remolded by their constantly changing environments. It is difficult not to see the red ball as a kind of eyeball, or the two spheres of Connection forming a rotating pupil in which we see the reflection of clouds, shifting its tone from dark to light and back. The films that follow, Relation and Shift, push the modular rearrangements even further with the screen broken up into many little squares, each with its own distorted time and space, and often relying on objects, whether natural (the tide and the horizon in the former) or manmade (a building in Shift), that are ostensibly solid and fixed. But those things which we most rely upon are shuffled as if they were mere building blocks. While the use of the graphic pointed finger in both films seems totally extraneous, we must still marvel at the fact that all of this was created before digital photography made these tricks simple to program. Matsumoto went through these works frame by frame, using optical printers, and creating his own architecture of the image (explicitly in Shift) in which the original image (if we ever had one outside our own mind) has long since vanished. In this way, the films also touch on memory as an important keystone in perception (perhaps Matsumoto is among the most Bergsonian of filmmakers!) and this resonance is doubled through the use of still photos that then contain moving images within those photos (also employed by Kota Isao’s 1974 Dutchman’s photographs). Further, the use of images within images was also put to use (and possibly inspired) by Matsumoto’s student, Ito Takashi, in his quite stunning exploration of space within images, Spacey (1980). Undoubtedly, the mysticism and shifting patterns are reminiscent of pop culture images of that great symbol of opening the doors of perception, LSD (or mescaline/mushrooms, etc), but what is most attractive now is the craft itself. Matsumoto, like many experimental artists, should be considered an animator (Esther Leslie draws up the close connection and central position of the two forms and discourses in her fascinating work Hollywood flatlands). One may wonder if the position between documentary and avant-garde that Matsumoto explicitly addressed could be extended then to animation and then to early cinema itself, with its close links to avant garde attractions as well as the recent attention it has gained prompted by discussions of new media. When we look back on the 20th century, we may decide that standard narrative film was in fact peripheral to the development of cinema and that instead, it was the most marginal of film forms during the 20th century that in fact played the key role.

Scanner Darkly

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, even as I was also fully known.
-- Paul of Tarsus

This passage from Corinthians may or may not have been what Philip K Dick had in mind when, with his novel A Scanner Darkly, he transferred the gesture of reflection from mere temporal distance to the mediations of modern technology; nonetheless, they feel appropriate, at least to Richard Linklater’s rewriting and animating of Dick’s novel in his film of the same title. Focusing largely on the “Substance D”-addled undercover agent Bob Arctor (Reeves) and his circle of agonizingly paranoid friends, nervously scratching and babbling away in his decrepit living room, A Scanner Darkly takes up the issues of surveillance and its deep reverberations through our personal relationships and our sense of individual identity. These questions are augmented and further besmudged by Linklater’s use, once more (as he did with Waking Life) of rotoscoping, a process of animation in which live footage is shot and then traced into rough-hewn blocks and patches of color that nonetheless bear a striking and unmistakable resemblance (the use of stars like Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson is helpful here) to the original objects and people represented (the above is not an accurate sample). The entire framework is built by New Path, the uber-corporatation that both plants and prosecutes D and its hallucinatorilly incapacitated users. Arctor is an employee (first seen giving a typically empty speech extolling the fine work of the corporation in front of a room full of suit-clad businessmen who clap automaton-like even as his consciousness streams off into a murmuring trickle of incomprehensibility). Arctor wears his own suit, one of the more inventive vehicles of the film, which turns his face into a ceaselessly reshuffling jigsaw puzzle and thereby stymies anyone from learning his identity. Including perhaps himself. And, importantly, his boss. Though nominally assigned to monitor a group of users and dealers (including himself) in order to bring a halt to the dreadfull D trade, he reports to another identity-scrambling-suit clad operative, all the while sucking down the little red pills that foggify his andhis friends' ability to make judgements about even the slightest action (like the worth of a stolen mountain bike). The connection between narcotics and media (our addiction to watching ourselves, and the increasing sense of distance and alienation we may feel as a result) is perhaps not a new topic (after all the book was written in the conspiracyplot bound 70s, apparently when Dick was in a real bad way), but one with renewed resonance as daily reports emerge confirming the US administration’s ceaseless efforts to learn the color of sprinkles adorning our morning donuts. From imagined aphid infestations to (possible) sexual apathy, the intentionally blurred lines between reality and hallucination are more than a simple technique of animation fruitfully employed. While the stoned ramblings of conspiracy dorkiness are exposed for what they are (even with the dangers of their violent inclinations), the more sinister implications of the corporation suggest that this isn’t mere paranoia but that indeed we have reason to be concerned—any effort to speak out is quickly extinguished; yet against, or, more accurately, within this anonymous and invisible onslaught, an equally murky resistance movement infiltrates the corporation itself, dropping blue-flowered hints that only make sense as the film goes on and we puzzle over the double-helix of fantasy and reality. Ultimately, it is, for example, not at all clear why the resistance needs to place Arctor in his role of surveyor of himself since this is not motivated by standard narrative logic (presumably they could have achieved what they wanted by simply allowing him to continue to participate in his increasingly deteriorating dirty ashtray of a world), but it makes much greater sense on another level that the form and the content of the film fully support. He is not merely “the chosen one” again. Moreover, it would seem to be the case, as is confirmed in a speech near the end, that here we cannot simply ‘just say no.’ We don’t even know who to say no to. Instead, we will have to listen closely and try, amidst the murk, to keep our eyes open to those floral punctums. The above quote ends with the equally famous: “And Now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” The split between these lines emphasized by Dick’s fragmentary title suggests a distant and utopian resonance to the latter, as if these three concepts were wearing scrambling suits themselves. Perhaps the greatest of these three should instead read “clarity.”