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Tate Modern Film

Shuji Terayama programme 5: Tokyo Puck

23 March 2012 at 19.00–21.00
Shuji Terayama Butterfly 1974

Shuji TerayamaButterfly 1974

© courtesy of Kujō Kyōko and Terayama World

  • TENJO SAJIKI: Children of God
  • Butterfly (Chōfuku-ki)
  • An Attempt to Describe the Measure of a Man (Issunbōshi o Kijutsusuru Kokoromi)

Tokyo Puck was a full-colour satirical journal that mocked an infatuation with western behaviour and ornamentation in the Taisho era of the 1920s. Terayama inverted its popular, vernacular style to fashion a world of artifice and self-conscious aestheticism in Butterfly. The setting is like the dressing room of a theatre where masculinity is feminised and destabilised in an orgy of luscious colour, caked face makeup, shadows and figures obscuring the screen; the Taisho era gleefully reconstructed as a modernity of increased intensification and consumption. This programme reconsiders Terayama’s ambivalent use of cultural memory through a grouping of works that approximate the elements of a seditious book of manners.

 The BBC Arena documentary TENJO SAJIKI: Children of God heralds Tenjo Sajiki’s 1978 London debut with a play derived from Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century manual of etiquette, Directions to Servants. In his introduction to the production Terayama wrote about a mechanical device called the ‘Saint-Master Machine’, which appears onstage: ‘It places a wig on to a bald man’s head and gives him a moustache, thereby making him a "Master". It seems that any Servant could become a Master with the aid of this Machine.’ 

 In An Attempt to Describe the Measure of a Man, Terayama depicts the remonstrations of a Tom Thumb character as he falls in love with a bubble-girl, and lingers on the image of her humongous body. The more he contemplates the less he lives, exclaiming ‘One day I will let you out of the screen, Mona!’ before his infatuation with the ephemeral newness of motion pictures is satisfied.

TENJO SAJIKI: Children of God

Nigel Finch, 1978 United Kingdom, 16mm transferred to video, 25 min

Butterfly (Chōfuku-ki)

Shūji Terayama, 1974 Japan, 16mm, 12 min

An Attempt to Describe the Measure of a Man (Issunbōshi o Kijutsusuru Kokoromi)

Shūji Terayama, 1977 Japan, 16mm, 19 min

Curated by Thomas Dylan Eaton in association with Tate Modern. 

With generous support from Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, Japan Foundation, Sasakawa Foundation, Toshiba Foundation, and All Nippon Airways. 

Tate Film is supported by Maja Hoffmann / LUMA Foundation.

Tate Modern

Starr Cinema

Bankside
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23 March 2012 at 19.00–21.00

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