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.



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