Skip navigation

Main menu

  • What's on
  • Art & Artists
    • The Collection
      Artists
      Artworks
      Art by theme
      Media
      Videos
      Podcasts
      Short articles
      Learning
      Schools
      Art Terms
      Tate Research
      Art Making
      Create like an artist
      Kids art activities
      Tate Draw game
  • Visit
  • Shop
Become a Member
  • DISCOVER ART
  • ARTISTS A-Z
  • ARTWORK SEARCH
  • ART BY THEME
  • VIDEOS
  • ART TERMS
  • SCHOOLS
  • TATE KIDS
  • RESEARCH
  • Tate Britain
    Tate Britain Free admission
  • Tate Modern
    Tate Modern Free admission
  • Tate Liverpool + RIBA North
    Tate Liverpool + RIBA North Free admission
  • Tate St Ives
    Tate St Ives Ticket or membership card required
  • FAMILIES
  • ACCESSIBILITY
  • SCHOOLS
  • PRIVATE TOURS
Tate Logo
Become a Member
Tate Modern Film

Shuji Terayama programme 6:Letter Drama

24 March 2012 at 19.00–21.00
Shuji Terayama Les Chants de Maldodror 1977

Shuji TerayamaLes Chants de Maldodror 1977

© courtesy of the Terayama Museum

  • Les Chants de Maldoror (Marudororu no Uta)
  • Grass Labyrinth (Kusa-meikyū)
  • Video Letter

‘A person receiving letters from an unknown sender… will develop a tense relationship with the ‘hidden half-world’ where the sender resides.’

Shūji 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 Lautréamont’s proto-surrealist book with ‘a reading film’ 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 Shuntarō 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 Tenjō Sajiki in which the protagonists were simultaneously actors and audience. The writer, Barbara London has described video letter as ‘a kind of epitaph or mourning poem for Terayama’. 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)

Shūji Terayama, 1977 Japan, 16mm, 27 min

Grass Labyrinth (Kusa-meikyū)

Shūji Terayama, 1983 Japan, 35mm, 40 min

Video Letter

Shūji Terayama & Tanikawa Shuntarō, 1983 Japan, Video, 74 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
London SE1 9TG
Plan your visit

Date & Time

24 March 2012 at 19.00–21.00

Artwork
Close

Join in

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • YouTube
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
Sign up to emails

Sign up to emails

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Tate’s privacy policy

About

  • About us
  • Our collection
  • Terms and copyright
  • Governance
  • Picture library
  • ARTIST ROOMS
  • Tate Kids

Support

  • Tate Collective
  • Members
  • Patrons
  • Donate
  • Corporate
  • My account
  • Press
  • Jobs
  • Accessibility
  • Privacy
  • Cookies
  • Contact
© The Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery, 2025
All rights reserved