RAGs film report part 2: Shuji Terayama

My summer holiday just finished, but in the first week of it, I finished watching all the movies on my list to keep clear the rest of the holiday for other things, I dont want to watch movies again til the end of the year. I watched 45 movies that week! I did nothing else, usually 6 movies a day. So I'll try to pick up again even though the last post was months ago.

I cant remember quite how I found out about him but Shuji Terayama is a neglected arthouse director whose time will come eventually for revival in interest and reissues, because there is extremely little of his work on dvd or even vhs. The only thing I could get on dvd that interested me was Grass Labyrinth in the erotic anthology film Private Collections and these are screenshots I taken from it, the Grass Labyrinth section is now on Youtube, so is his extremely contoversial film Emperor Tomato Ketchup, which inspired the title of a Stereolab album and is notorious for scenes of young children simulating sex with older women, so be careful if you watch it! It even got some scary imdb users saying they wanted to kill him for making this film, but he is already dead.

He was involved in all sorts of professions, including horse racing commentating and made some highly regarded progressive rock albums that are also hard to find. To be honest, I'm not that interested in the political commentary of his work, but his films have some great imagery, the pictures I taken from Grass Labyrinth only represent a small part of the film. Here is some more nice imagery, much like Suehiro Maruo...