Events

Time and Location

January 24, 7pm
Japan Society (New York, NY)

February 1, 7pm
Doc Films (Chicago, IL)

February 8, 7pm
Yale University (New Haven, CT)

About

Based on Shuji Terayama’s autobiographical collection of tanka poetry, Pastoral: To Die in the Country entrenches itself in the framework of a child’s game—“those long games of hide and seek”—as a filmmaker seeks out his own sense of self within the faint sketches of his past, re-imagining the countryside of his adolescence. Fragmented and prismatic, Terayama’s surreal manifestation of childhood is a refracted mémoire of broken time, inhabited by carnival acts, provincial superstitions and a chorus of cloaked women.

Shot in Terayama’s native Aomori against the backdrop of the haunted Mount Osore—a gateway to the underworld in Japanese mythology—Pastoral epitomizes Terayama’s unclassifiable brilliance. The film’s angura theatricality and phantasmagorical imagery are rich with symbolism, confronting the wounds of Showa’s imperial legacy, displays of the perverse amid sexual deviance and coupling desires, and the inevitable follies of youth.

Dir. Shuji Terayama, 1974, 101 min., 35mm, color, in Japanese with English subtitles. With Kantaro Suga, Hiroyuki Takano, Chigusa Takayama, Yoshio Harada.

For more information (Japan Society), please visit: Pastoral – Japan Society

For more information and tickets (Doc Films), please visit: Pastoral – Doc Films

For more information (Yale University), please visit: Pastoral – Yale

35mm print courtesy of The Japan Foundation