This is Shuji Terayama memorial performance of The Hunchback of Aomori from 1983 (featuring Akihiro Miwa). Terayama gathered dwarfs, circus freaks, itinerant magicians, acrobats and untrained youth for his burgeoning troupe, Tenjo Sajiki. The troupe's premiere offering, written and directed by Terayama, was Aomori-ken no Semushi Otoko (The Hunchback of Aomori, 1967).
Every Monday, a young woman is murdered in the subway, leading psychiatrist Setsuko Suma to investigate Dr. Rei Aku's deprogramming of former sect members.
Taking place thirty years before the events of Ringu, Ringu 0 provides the shocking background story of how the girl on the video became a deadly, vengeful spirit.
A hit man looks to protect the daughter of one of his victims against CIA assassins.
Three stories. A solitary sailor falls from his boat and washes ashore on a tropical island. While seeking rescue, he's found by a nearly naked woman who is playful and compliant. He decides to erase his signs of distress and remain on the island. What awaits? In the second, an adolescent searches for the words of a nursery rime he remembers bits of. His journey takes him into dreams, sexual awakening, and Oedipal fantasy. Third, a man of wealth in late-nineteenth century Paris hires a prostitute for the night. She's also cabaret performer and takes him to her room. He fears he's about to be robbed. What's her secret?
Third is an aimless young man who hangs around with a couple of girls who are amateur hookers. One day, while acting as their pimp, he gets into a conflict with a young gangster and winds up killing him.
An experimental short featuring people and nails.
The smallpox virus has created its own unique atmosphere in Terayama’s film where the skin of a bandaged adolescent and the surface of the filmic image are subjected to a bizarre ‘disturbance’ as snails cross the screen and nails are hammered into the skull of the ailing patient. Illness in this film is as much a psychic entity as a physical one and manifests itself in an array of theatrical tableaux from grotesque women rigorously brushing their teeth to a snooker game where the players in white face makeup behave like automata. A Tale of Smallpox uses a medical theme to chart the traumatic dream life of Terayama’s times, evincing deep-rooted concerns in the Japanese national psyche that hark back to the upheaval of Meiji modernisation and the devastation of World War Two.
Akira is haunted by a "bouncing ball" song that he remembers his mother singing when he was a small child, and now on the verge of a sexually active adulthood, he wants to find the origins of the song. The young man ostensibly wanders into a time-warp in which aspects from his childhood and adulthood mix together. In this never-never land he comes across a beautiful woman/witch who is lost inside the labyrinth of her mansion, just as the young man is lost in the labyrinth of time — and on some levels, perhaps the labyrinth of his subconscious.
Nagisa, a high school girl who has been given three months to live. Without telling her widowed father where she is going, she sets out from the city to the small town where she was born. She recalls her childhood memories, and her love for Satoshi begins to grow stronger. However, she is shocked to discover that Satoshi is having an affair with Eriko, a married woman.
A surreal, isolated village sees its inhabitants gradually leave behind their mutual traditions and superstitions as they leave for the city. Among them are two cousins who love each other and who get into a quarrel with other villagers.
In this Borgesian satire on knowledge and technology, bibliophilic desire leads to the construction of a pedal-powered reading machine. Resembling a combination of gymnastic contraption, printing press and early cinematic apparatus, the machine’s purpose remains ambiguous. And like this machine, Terayama’s film connects his work in poetry, motion picture and graphic design by weaving together printed and projected, still and moving images.
Kawamoto works and lives in a dilapidated pool hall which also serves as a rehearsal space for him and his friend Chikako. They seem contented to while away their hours doing nothing much at all. Meanwhile, an old pool shark meets some people from his past that he is none too happy to see again. How will this affect their private haven?
A Professional sniper, Ryo has executed so many missions with his partner, Narushima. But Ryo is caught in between a multitude of emotions, when he realizes that his newest target will be an old acquaintance of his.
Reiko comes to Tokyo to search for her sister Sumiko, who has disappeared. However, before she knows it, she has fallen in love with her sister's boyfriend, Kazuyuki. A hidden camera captures the two of them engaged in lewd behavior. Behind it shine the mysterious eyes of the man and woman who kidnapped Sumiko. Now another woman is about to become the beasts' prey...
This second version of the play follows Wan and Tsu, two apprentice cooks who, as they eavesdrop on their neighbors one day, are shocked by the sudden disappearance of a wall separating them from the next flat. As they try to understand what happened and how to fix their wall, the line between reality and fiction begins to crumble, their endeavors continuously halted by weird and disrupting characters.
Shuji Terayama and J.A.Seazer's phantasmagoric folk-psych-symph-prog-rock opera. Historical Tenjo Sajiki performance from 1978.
A girl named O loves a rich, and much older man. She is subjected to a variety of humiliating experiences to prove her unconditional obedience to him in a Chinese brothel. A poor boy sees her and falls in love with her. To get the money needed to sleep with her, he takes part in rebellious acts.
Todo Shunnosuke is a movie director who passed away thirty years ago. Just before his death, he told his wife about three short films which contained a secret. Years later, Todo's wife, who is on the verge of death, asked Madame Marmalade to solve the mystery. (2nd part of the 2-part Quiz movie : the audience gets to find out the answers to some questions asked in the "Question Version" film, and the people who got the answers right get their names placed in the film).
Todo Shunnosuke is a movie director who passed away thirty years ago. Just before his death, he told his wife about three short films which contained a secret. Years later, Todo's wife, who is on the verge of death, asked Madame Marmalade to solve the mystery. (1st part of the 2-part Quiz movie : questions were asked to the audience at the end of the screening and the answers were given in the follow-up film, "Answer Version").