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Movies carved on the altar

- Shuji Terayama’s symbolic experiments and decadent aesthetics

Speaking of Shuji Terayama, people can easily associate him with the Italian Director Pier Paolo Pasolini. Indeed, the two directors have many things in common. Shuji Terayama was born in Aomori Prefecture, Japan in 1935. He graduated from the Chinese Department of Waseda University. The fact that he was born in Aomori Prefecture is very important to him and is involved in many of his films. This also explains the autobiographical nature of his films. Traits. He has been fond of poetry and haiku since he was a child. He won several national poetry awards as a teenager. In addition, he is also an excellent commentator on horse racing and boxing matches. Like Pablo, he is also a film author, poet director, and a first-class artist who combines film and painting. Pasolini's "Saro: 120 Days of Sodom" has a profound influence among domestic movie fans. Similarly, Shuji's "Shanghai Whorehouse" is also the most popular. The first intuitive similarity between these two films is that they both show a group of wanton revelers based on the ideological roots of "subjecting human desires to destroying natural principles." Until now, the works of these two people are still considered to be advanced. but few close friends.

Compared to Pashi, who has a vast body of work, as a director, Shuji Terayama only had five feature films in his life, but he had countless experimental short films and stage plays that are not known to many, and he also contributed to many movies. screenwriter. Due to the different spiritual habits of the two nations of Italy and Japan, Pasolini would use inappropriate humor to joke about it. Although this kind of joke makes people unable to laugh, Shuji Terayama's movies are serious in themselves. In several movies, there is no joking element from beginning to end, but strong feelings of compassion are substituted. Rather than saying that Shuji Terayama's films are opening up new territories, it would be better to say that he is exploring the "original ecology", or that he is paying homage to the irreversible images of the past. Shuuji's films are like altars, cold, strange, silent, and bleak, hanging on the ashes of the external time and space and the inner world that have been forgotten and burned in memory.

The first feature film directed by Shuji Terayama is "Throw Away the Book and Take to the Streets" (filmed in 1971, hereinafter referred to as "Throw"). The name of this film sounds like it is about youth and the streets. A moving film expresses much more than just intuition. Shuji Terayama was the screenwriter of "The Bad Guys" in 1970. The film's directors, Masahiro Shinoda, Nagisa Oshima and Yoshige Yoshida, together launched the New Wave movement in Japanese films and are collectively known as the "Three New Wave Heroes". New wave films often focus on the spiritual world of youth and student movements. Oshima Nagisa's "The Cruel Story of Youth" is one of the masterpieces of this movement. It can be seen that Shuji Terayama's film was also influenced by the new wave movement and focused on It focuses on the pain and confusion of youthful memories, and mixes individual emotions with factors of the time and region. "Throw" creates an image of a young man who is unwilling to settle for the status quo and longs for excitement, but feels that everything in life is nothing and therefore falls into a spiritual crisis.

The scars and turbulent politics of postwar Japan are the key to his growth The parent body of the film is also influenced by the sudden tide

of Western culture. In the film, we see groups of young people wandering the streets,

hippies in fancy clothes take turns smoking marijuana, Peace brand cigarettes are scattered everywhere, and the shadow of war is scattered in every corner of the world. Perhaps it was his first time directing a film, but Shuuji was still not confident enough in his own camera expressions, so the film included large sections of poetry, monologues, and philosophical sermons, using language to strengthen the film's intentions.

"Pastoral Festival of the Dead" is his reminiscence of childhood memories in his hometown of Aomori Prefecture. The film is divided into two parts: the first part is a movie being played in the studio, and the past is misplaced in the memory. The boy imprisoned by his mother was attracted by the circus and ran away with the young woman from his neighbor. In the second half, the boy came from the past time and space and told the real past. The young woman did not come as promised, and the circus was still absurd. Memories and reality are like moved copy paper, there is always a slight but irreparable difference.

In addition to his own screenwriting, the transplantation and interpretation of avant-garde novels is an important feature of Shuji Terayama's few films. Therefore, his works include both "author's films" and "writer's films" . "The House of Foreigners in Shanghai" is adapted from the novel "The Story of Mother O" by French female writer Pauline Réagne. His last work "Goodbye, Box Boat" is a famous Latin American magical realism novel. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is transplanted into the Japanese context. To be precise, Shouji extracted the soul and bones of these novels, but attached his own rich cultural flesh to the skeleton, so that these writers' films are more or less compatible with multiple cultural factors.

The "Shanghai Whorehouse" (hereinafter referred to as "Part 1") was filmed in 1981. This movie called "Shanghai" is actually set in Hong Kong in the early 20th century. His only film shot outside Japanese soil. A French girl O, who silently succumbed to Steven because of love, followed him to a place called "Shanghai Foreign Prostitution House" in Hong Kong in 1920, and began her prostitution career.

Steven took pleasure in abuse and observed O picking up customers. He chained her up and watched him having sex with his old lover to get a glimpse of O's reaction. In the end, he killed the boy with whom O was romantically involved and attempted suicide. Finally, when O was declared free, she felt so misty. Shuuji abstracted the plot, which was originally full of bold and avant-garde colors, and deliberately fragmented it. Therefore, the film context we can see is like the human body and continuous dynamics expressed by simple machines in the works of modern artist Duchamp, unable to find a full and continuous plot. The starring role of this film (played by Steven) was the famous German "devil actor" Klaus Kinski at the time. This shocking director-actor partnership pushed the film to the forefront climax.

This is a tragedy that cannot be more gorgeous, and the tragedy is so complete. In this bizarre world, no one is happy. The prostitutes are in pain because they are trapped in memories. The clients ask for all kinds of strange services from the prostitutes, but they still do not get happiness. No matter what, she still smiled during the scene between O and the young boy. This period of smiling faces was immediately overwhelmed by tragedy.

Personally, I think "Part One" is the one with the most commercial elements among all the films directed by Shuji Terayama. The characteristic of Shuji Terayama's films is a strong personal effect, but this characteristic is not highlighted in "Part 1". Instead, it is handled in a smooth way, making this film too advanced to be merely an erotic film, but it is far from The height of art is still missing.

The plot of Shuji Terayama's movie is absurd, and the visual subversion of the cross-dressing (male in female) brothel madam is still shallow and not enough to express his intention. His purpose is to Use the absurdity of the plot to completely subvert it. He is not a superficial and wanton act, but after careful consideration, he shows the scenes that we are moved and admired in an indifferent and cold way. When we say something is "beautiful", it is often a weak emotional tendency to show that such a thing makes us feel comfortable. However, Shuji Terayama's "beauty" is not the kind of beauty that makes us feel comfortable, but a kind of meticulous care. The aesthetics of shaping is a purely artistic level aesthetics, a decadent aesthetic that goes deep into the bones. This kind of decadence and subversion is similar to the aesthetics of Dada but is more profound than the latter.

For example, in "Part 1", the Japanese prostitute Xiaoyu has a regular officer who likes to lie on the ground to learn how to bark and receive whippings from the prostitute. When this person spins faster and faster on the ground, Jade's memory changes from one point to the next. Cutting to the chase, when I was a child, my father couldn’t afford a toy dog ??because of poverty. So he lay on the ground and learned to behave like a dog to coax his daughter. The daughter picked up a whip and beat her father like a dog. When the father spins faster and faster on the ground, the audience can feel a strong sense of dizziness. The psychological effect the director wants to achieve is that this kind of father's love for his daughter is not touching or emotional. A feeling of disgust, but a stronger, indescribable discomfort. A strange experimental scene based on realistic fiction. He has taken away the "human" characteristics and created a completely deconstructed decadent aesthetic. This kind of deconstruction is not something that ordinary people can endure in the spiritual world. If the audience thinks this scene is real, he will feel strong fear and feel that reality should not be deconstructed in this way and show its cruel face; if he thinks this is not reality , I feel that the plot of the movie is different from reality, but I can't seem to find the difference. Another example is that at the end of the film, a masked man in black from nowhere holds the skull of a revolutionary boy and declares O's freedom. This plot is so absurd that only expressionism is left. This bold and avant-garde plot concept makes people pores. Terrifying, this stimulation is not instantaneous, but a feeling of coldness that stirs up the heart after the stimulation, allowing us to consciously enter the emotions that the heroine O can feel (to be precise, the director's personal world).

If "Part 1" still has a complete plot that can be accepted by most viewers, then "Grass Maze" filmed in 1983 (hereinafter referred to as "Grass") is an out-and-out drama. Buttoned experimental piece. This film about a young man’s journey to find the “Handball Song” that his late mother once sung looks like a storyboard composed of performance art. The various elements in the film are mixed together like a nightmare, and there is an aura of weirdness and fear everywhere: a long stretch of red satin, a mysterious girl dancing with a handball, a group of ghosts who appear out of nowhere, and a mother's head being used as a handball. Throwing it is jaw-dropping and unbelievable.

"Goodbye, Hakobune" is the last beautiful and sad flower in Shuji Terayama's life. It was completed one year after Shuji's death (1984). The story takes place in a village that has removed time and turned into an ark: the souls of people in the village still remain in the village after death; the married cousins ??live a life of love and sex because of the chastity belt made by their father; and finally , time returned to the village, the villagers moved to other places, and the village disappeared from history, leaving only traces in family photos. The feeling of loneliness I felt when I first read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" pervades Shuji's film. This is a novel that is difficult to adapt into a movie, and only a film poet like Shuji can complete it. Unfortunately, the film has not yet been completed, and the master is already a guest in a foreign land.

Although the plots of Shuuji's films seem mixed and chaotic, there is always a symbol that serves as the clue to the entire film.

In "Field", the tool of time is the clue to the film, as is the rectangular frame in O's childhood in "Part 1". This square symbol surrounds the circular symbol, like a pair of shackles, making her lose Free, she became silent and endured, but at the same time she had nowhere to escape. Therefore, Shuji Terayama's symbolic aesthetics is one of the important features of his films. Symbols and plots are equally important in Shuji's films, and the latter is even more important than the former.

Techniques for processing picture and sound elements

The organization of picture and sound elements in Shuji Terayama's films is as mixed as its plot. Shuji Terayama's movies always have soothing local music mixed with harsh and short background sounds. After watching several of his movies, I found that my ears became more sensitive and I began to capture things in the air that I had never seen before. A small, short sound heard. In order to make the film artistic from both physical and spiritual aspects, Shuji did not care about the sound processing, whether it is those beautiful and carefully crafted Japanese folk songs, or the scene in "Toss" where the sister is gang-raped by the football players and the brother is helpless outside the door. At that time, the background sound used a chorus of shouts that sounded like shouting but not shouting; and the weird sounds of the demons dancing in "Grass" were all in line with the plot and left a deep impression on people. Similarly, through several of Shuji's films, we can find his preferences in color and composition. Sometimes he controls the lens to be as soft and natural as an oil painting to express the objective world, sometimes he uses ukiyo-e techniques to show bright pictures, sometimes The picture is grayish-brown, and sometimes some surreal color objects are used to express the inner refraction of the world. Long shots with meditative qualities and quick shots with rapid jumps are also constantly repeated.

For any substance that exists, it is unique as a subject, but the substance seen through each pair of eyes is not the same. It's hard to say what is real. Maybe the world we see, hear, and touch is not real. Only the objects projected deep into our hearts are the real substances that are loyal to ourselves. Most people still project the same angle, but Shuji chose another angle and expressed this feeling on the picture. He always adds color filters to the shots, or overexposes or underexposes the shots to enhance the impact of the shots. Therefore, in his films and paintings, red sun and sky, purple earth and rivers often appear. Even if they are black and white or gray-brown, composition and imagery are still used to increase the visual impact. Many visual elements in Shuji Terayama's films are very similar to his photography.

In "Toss", Shuji uses green and purple to distinguish different emotional colors. When the young man witnessed the oppression and helplessness of enduring reality, the lens turned into a desperate and dazzling bright green; when the young man longed for his ideals and imagined himself flying in the sky, the lens changed into an unusually soft and beautiful purple. . The two colors constitute the two ports of youthful emotions. This method of using psychological activities to cast color filters on the external scene was also used in Shunji Iwai's youth film "Everything About Lily Chow". "Part 1" is one of his most colorful films, so beautiful and enchanting that there is nothing to say. Shuji put a lot of thought into the costumes. Whether it's Steven's Chinese gown or the attire of the men employed in the brothel, it really makes people feel the absurdity of this "alien" brothel. The costumes of the film serve as a single Generally speaking, it can still be regarded as an "avant-garde art"; in "Field", the shots about the illusion of memories are always covered with red or green filters to distinguish different emotions; in the shots of the acrobatic troupe, the whole picture is also Color blocks are divided into purple, green, yellow and blue to reveal that "memory is nothing but a circus with heavy makeup".

Poem, symbol, metaphor

Defining Shuji Terayama as a poet is necessary to understand his films, including his semi-autobiographical feature "Pastoral Festival for the Dead" (filmed in 1974) (hereinafter referred to as "Tian") is a successful poetry film. Imagine that the fifteen-year-old self and the adult self twenty years later are sitting side by side, entangled with the real past and the remembered past. Shuji transforms his poetry into another form of art, integrating poetry and film. as one to explore the truth of time. The images of watches and wall clocks that often appear in "Field" are actually carriers of poetry. The director is looking for a real and only time. This is the time struck by the wall clock that the mother works hard to guard. However, the truth of time is always It is distorted by each individual's experience and shows its own differences. This is the time displayed by everyone's watch in the circus that the boy longs for. The concept of time studied in physics and the concept of time contained in poetry intersect here, "If you passed through a hundred-year time tunnel and assassinated your grandmother, would you exist?"

Not just in this movie, Shuuji’s poetic temperament permeates every movie he makes. In his films, fantasy and misplaced reality intersect, poetry, symbols and plot interweave. It can be seen that every shot of his contains the emotions of the inner world. It is not difficult to copy the external world and follow it accurately like a documentary. However, the external world only constitutes a part of our existence space and is difficult to show. It is a person's inner world, and the inner and outer worlds are connected by poetry. The difficulty lies in how to present this poetry on the screen. As a well-known young poet and later director, Shuji Terayama knew how to control the subtle relationship between the camera and poetry.

In addition to poetry, Shuji also likes to use symbols as metaphors. The portraits hanging on the wall, the strange spells scrawled on the white cloth, the human faces smeared white; the watch in "Field" and the wall clock that keeps ringing, as well as the young woman's lover's blood seeping out on the white cloth, like a A Japanese flag, the twitching of the inflatable women in the acrobatic troupe who need a pump are also hints of potential sexual desire. At the end, a finger points exactly opposite to the movement of people, it points in the opposite direction to "passing away"; the "O" in "Part 1" The name itself is a symbol, symbolizing a hole, an infinitely expanding inclusive space, similar to the box in which O's father imprisoned himself in memory. These are abstract images, and the specific images are worn by O. Bird-shaped rings, various shapes of sexual abuse tools; large and small handballs in "Grass", long red brocade, etc. In "Toss", when the brother is leading his injured sister home, a man passes by them carrying a dissected pig carcass; in "Part 1", a has-been actress loses control and kills herself as she falls into memories. At this moment, a piano floated on the river outside the window. These are all meaningful.

The ghost legends of this nation are also one of the symbols Terayama Shuji often uses. The portraits of women in red with long hair in ancient costumes hanging on the walls remind people of the images of snow girls and kappas in Japanese legends. The imprisoned woman Chiyome in "Grass" has shadows of the legend of snow girls in her body. The use of these folk symbols is full of national customs and philosophical implications, which is enough for the national audience to re-examine these images, and also increases the psychological mystery of foreign audiences. Not only folklore ghost legends, but also contemporary Western culture play an important role in the film. "Throw" brings together a lot of pop culture: posters, rock music, hippies, etc. Where will Japan go between its national attachment and the temptation of the West? Reflections on the nation are written into the film. The collision of the two cultures makes Japan unable to stay away and become anxious.

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, Shuji Terayama’s film is Still on the Altar. This film poet who has a sensitive and passionate emotion for the native landscape has written this emotion into his film. Pastoral, meadows, snow-capped mountains, abandoned railways, past memories and pianos are intertwined in this external world. As for the internal world, he is also committed to digging deeper. When I first watch his movies, I can't escape the bud of unfaithful love. . The ambiguous emotions between mother and son in "Grass" and "Field", and in "Part 1" because O lost his father who drew chalk frames for him, he transferred this self-surrendering Electra complex to someone much older than himself. For the 19-year-old Steven, in order to complete his sense of belonging under strong control. When this kind of "Electra", "Oedipus" or even "Love Son" complex is placed in the movie, isn't it the Orpheus complex and the Oedipus complex in people's libido proposed by Freud? Transformation? Freud used the Id, Ego and Super-ego to constitute a person's conscious world. Among several movies, "Grass" especially focuses on what is called the "Super-ego". It is not easy to excavate the world of the subconscious mind and display it in the form of images. The "superego" is a world that can be eternally explored. Therefore, films of this type often have a strong experimental nature.

But obviously Terayama Shuji still has a deeper meaning. We have seen that several sexual scenes in movies are often in the midst of despair and struggle, such as the gang rape of the sister in "Toss", the sexual relations between a young woman and a teenager in "Field" and "Grass", and the sexual relations between a young woman and a teenager in "Shanghai". "In the scene of O being raped by Steven and picking up guests, even the laughter between O and the revolutionary boy led to the boy's murder. Sex was originally a bait of happiness provided by God for the reproduction of human beings, but here, there is no happiness at all. If sex loses its mission, everything will be in jeopardy. In his films, sex is not only metaphorized by various symbols, but sex itself is also a larger metaphor. If it is just about playing tricks to release sensory stimulation, Shuuji's film cannot be called an art film. At most, it is a relatively advanced one among the AV products that are rampant in Japan. "Sex instinct" and "life instinct" (also the "death instinct") are the two major contents of life. Shuji intersperses life, death, and sex into his works to think about it. This is also an important theme of many Japanese masters. Many Japanese directors of his generation, including Shohei Murura and Nagisa Oshima, are also accustomed to using images to reflect on the views on life, death and sexuality that constitute their country's national identity. There is a detail in "Throw", a person is selling "acquisition of useless old men and old ladies", and there are several drooping and numb old people tied to the cart behind him. This kind of treatment for the elderly and weak due to limited resources is The cruel elimination is easily reminiscent of Imamura Shohei's "The Examination of the Dragon Mountain Festival". This island country with tight waters, this hegemonic nation that deliberately expanded, has given birth to a group of masters of compassion, who reflect on the individual's sense of "life (death)" and "sex", and care for the entire nation through individual care. fate.

Then, as a complete film poet, he failed to live up to his old age. Shuuji died of liver cancer in Japan in 1983 at the age of 47. In the following years, several of his films were gradually lifted from the ban and released at home and abroad.

It’s hard to say whether his unnatural death was related to his movies. Perhaps it was his excavation of human despair and tribute to the original ecology that prematurely led him to the origin and destination of all things. A generation of masters ended under the irresistible force of mankind. He is terminally ill, but fortunately there are movies that let us know the eternal altar he left behind.