Shuji Terayama Japanese experimental filmmaker

Shuji Terayama was one of the more interesting experimental filmmakers I stumbled across when I returned to the field about 10 years ago. 

I went looking on YouTube for interesting experimental filmmakers, particularly those I hadn't heard of or encountered before. 

I had already seen works by Man Ray and Jean Cocteau, Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger,  Hans Richter and Guy Maddin, Dziga Vertov and Jan Svankmajer, Kurt Kren and Maya Deren, sometimes as far back as the 70's. 

I wanted to find even more adventurous filmmakers to fuel my own inspiration, and suddenly found myself literally gob-smacked by the works of Shuji Teryama. 

A brief outline of his career from Wikipedia: 

Terayama Shūji, December 10, 1935 – May 4, 1983) was an Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. His works range from radio drama, experimental television, underground (Angura) theatre, countercultural essays, to Japanese New Wave and "expanded" cinema.^[1][2]

Many critics^[3] view him as one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan. He has been cited as an influence on various Japanese filmmakers from the 1970s onward.^[4]

Here is the first film I saw by this remarkable film artist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E0E0vYKA9Q&list=LL&index=130&t=335s

Clearly, not everybody's cup of camomile but an incredibly inventive talent. Here is another film I found fascinating. This one comes with a touch of BDSM and an almost depraved eroticism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBVVnJJZWVo&list=LL&index=131&t=527s

These clips have been posted to YouTube by others and the file quality is obviously not the best. 

But this is a filmmaker who, along with many others, I totally admire. I admire his bravery, his dedication, his single-minded focus. I admire the fact that he obviously didn't care what others (outside of his own reality) thought, especially in a country like Japan where what others think of you is usually of utmost importance. 

When he made these films in Japan in the 70's, he would have most likely been  almost ostracized by most Japanese people. 

But it wouldn't have worried him very much because he had his 'own world', his own theatre company, his own studio, his own people around him who believed in him. His wife was one of them. An artist in her own right.

He married Tenjō Sajiki co-founder Kyōko Kujō (九條今日子) on April 2, 1963. Kujō later began an extramarital affair with fellow co-founder Yutaka Higashi. She and Terayama formally divorced in December 1970, although they continued to work together until Terayama's death on May 4, 1983 from cirrhosis of the liver.^[5] Kujō died on April 30, 2014.

He also made conventional narrative feature films, one of which was 'The Boxer' (1977).

Japan's Shuji Terayama was similar in some ways to Germany's Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Both had an incredible output and both thumbed their noses at 'The System', even though their films and filmmaking styles were so very different.  

Fassbinder was more of narrative traditionalist while Terayama was mostly more of a wild experimentalist. But both were classicists.  You can see the classical discipline in the framing, the logic, the underlying understanding of narrative reason for doing something, anything, in both of them.  

Both also had their own theatre troupes with a ready supply of talent both on-screen and off to draw from.   

I'm happy to say that today, Shuji Terayama is considered something of a national treasure in Japan.  I say "something of"  because there are no doubt many more much bigger and better-known national treasures. But at least he has been properly acknowlegded... at long last. 

I've attempted to contact the Terayama estate to see if I could screen one of his works in the Blast From The Past section of my Animation + Experimental + Avant Garde film program for the North Bellarine Film Festival. 

So far, no response but I'll keep trying.  Pray I break a leg!

David.