Shuji Terayama’s youth is without a doubt a reason of the rebel orientation of his future work. Shuji was born in December 10th, 1935 in the city of Hirosaki, North Japan. His father serves with the colours as a policeman in 1941 and dies shortly after the end of the war without having had the time to reach his home. His mother then forsakes Shuji to work in an American military base. At the age of ten, Shuji has not spent much time with his father and is left to himself in a city that falls in ruins. His great-uncle rescues him. Owner of a cinema, he makes the young boy discover the seventh art. Shuji spends most of his time watching films particularly occidental movies, since these films were abundantly circulating during the after war time. But it is through literature that the future film director will make himself known. Thanks to his tanka (poem composed of 31 syllables), he receives in 1954 an outstanding prize. Moreover, the importance of his poems in the Japanese literature is such that since 1996, every year, the prize « Shuji Terayama » is awarded to the best authors of tanka. The same year, he is seized by a passion for boxing but an illness confines him to a hospital bed and forces him to abandon sport. However, he stays into boxing and even becomes sport critic specialised in this field and directs a film, The Boxer, in 1977 for the Toei studio. During the three years of his hospitalization, he discovers surrealist works by Antonin Artaud and Lautréamont that upsets him and whose themes (re-dramatization for the first, adolescent revolt for the second) will have an immense influence on his art. In 1959, Terayama travels to Tokyo and meets with the producer Eiko Kujo who he marries the next year and with whom he will never stop collaborating, even after their divorce.
Hyperactive, he works on the composition of his first plays, his first novels and scenarios, notably for directors of the Japanese new wave Masahiro Shinoda (five movies between 1960 and 1970) or Susumu Hani (Inferno of First Love, 1968). In parallel, he gets down to the cinematographic media with the now lost experimental short Catology (1960). In 1966, with his wife and a handful of artists, he creates his company Tenjo Sajiki (Children of Paradise) in reference to Marcel Carné’s film and puts his theatre conception into practice : experimental and interrogative. This approach is present in his films, most of them being produced within his company. On the cinema side, beyond a second short entered in 1964 (The Cage), Terayama will only expand in 1971 with the release of the full length Throw Away Your Books, Rally into the Streets, and then the sulphurous and controversial Emperor Tomato Ketchup the following year. Rebellious youth together with absurd warlike world are present in these films: many autobiographical elements coupled with an outlet rage (Throw Away Your Books… is in this sense forewarning of the punk trend) and a surrealism that only asks to open up even more. This will not be long to happen with the Fellinian Pastoral: Hide and Seek (1974) and his following shorts that will explode the frame of a simple projection by bringing the audience into play. In 1979 and 1981, he works on two French-Japanese co productions, commission works of erotic nature (Grass Laryrinth, segment of the triptych Private Collections also signed Just Jaeckin and Walerian Borowczyk, and Fruits of Passion). Affected by cirrhosis, he dies in 1983, just after completing Farewell to the Arch, his last full length that goes back to a more personal style. This film competes in 1985 in the Cannes Film Festival. Soon after, the Tenjo Sajiki is disbanded. With nearly two-hundred published books, Terayama is today a literary incontrovertible reference in Japan. In the West, he is above all a visionary avant-garde film-maker whose stylised images of a stolen childhood and an ambiguous parental presence have, in its own time, impressed the biggest festivals in the world. Without any big surprise, because of the resolutely peculiar nature of his work, his films are today only and mainly represented in fringe cinemas and festivals.
