 So I would like to ask our panel to come here and our Chair, Peter Ekassal, so please take a seat. We're going to get some microphones, not only so you all hear better, but we're also live streaming it and recording it, and it might be the first live streamed showing of that piece. So again, thank you all for coming and I hand over to our Chair of the panel, Peter. Thank you, thank you, and thank you everyone for, I think it was quite remarkable to see those films, and thank you also for your wonderful performance, thank you so much. My name's Peter Ekassal and I'm a professor in the Graduate Center here in the PhD Programming Theatre, and my work on Japan is in theatre, so I come to Tidio Masudji through the theatre, but of course I've seen many of the films, but I'm very fortunate to have seen these films tonight. And we do have, I think, a really interesting panel to have, I hope, quite interesting, but unfortunately quite brief discussion tonight because we have to finish at a certain time. But just very briefly, if I can introduce the panel on studying from the far left, we have Tom Lucer from New York University, Tom's professor at works in the programming nation studies, specialised in Japanese contemporary performance, media and culture. So we welcome Tom. Second, Chizuru Usui from the National Film Center, and you brought those wonderful prints to us today. Thank you very much, and I do agree that the restorations are quite remarkable, the colours are quite extraordinary. On my left is Henriku Teriyama, round of applause for our performer, please. Henriku is an artist, performer, graphic designer and writer. At the age of 17 he left his family home and joined Teriyama Tsudji's theatre company, Tenjou Sajiki. I think he's very well known to us who have some familiarity with the company, whether it's in theatre or films or some of the spectacular images that we can see in books and so on. A central figure in the 1960s, sorry, he joined the troupe as an actor, a stage manager, sound designer and eventually became an assistant director for Tenjou Sajiki's film productions. He's also an editor and an art director for the photo books by Nobuyoshi Araki. So quite a remarkable career. Thank you for coming tonight. Just on my right, Julia, I'll have to pronounce Alex Zuvia. How did I do? As she's a film scholar from Cooney, Brooklyn, so a fellow colleague from City University of New York, and she works on Teriyama's films. And then further to my right is Alex Zaltem, who's a film scholar from Harvard University and works on films in 1960s Japan with a particular interest in Teriyama's films. And Alex, of course, has been at the Harvard event for this performance as well. So we thank him for coming down to New York and really great to have you on the panel tonight. And, you know, Frank, on the end of the chairs there. Perhaps if I could just begin. I'm sure most of you are familiar with the work of Teriyama Shuji, the director of these films. But Teriyama was a major figure in the 1960s avant-garde of Japan. A key figure in the Japanese theatre, so-called Angora Theatre Scene of the 1960s and 1970s. His company produced many great theatre works and he was a playwright, director, filmmaker, experimental television producer. He made plays for radio. He wrote songs for Enka and he was an award-winning poet as well. So he truly is one of the great, most important figures in 1960s or perhaps in 20th century Japanese film, theatre and literature. And a truly interdisciplinary artist, I think, who was equally interesting in all the forms. As a maker, as you can see, gather from some of the work we've seen tonight, he has some fascinations for certain things. I think he obviously has this very strong fascination for a kind of mixing of the everyday world with fictional realities, moving between the everyday and the fictional and blurring the distinctions between them. He famously made theatre works where audiences would enter the theatre from different entrances and experience, a different theatrical experience as a result. In 1975 he made his perhaps one of his most famous works, Nock, which was a two-day performance event that took place in many venues across Tokyo. And one's ticket was a map for all the performances that took place in parks, gardens, houses, factories, theatres, and perhaps most notoriously, a bathhouse. And one entered the bathhouse not knowing who was the audience and who were the performers and who were simply just people there expecting to have a regular bath, which is quite a well-known piece. I think from my interest, I wrote about Teriyama in my first book on the 60s avant-garde and I saw him as one of the most primary thinkers of a tradition in Japan on the avant-garde, particularly with his ideas about the radical imagination, the way that he could think through... His cultural vision was, I think, quite extraordinary, turning to the grotesque, to the bill, to classical Japanese ghost figures really bringing together an extraordinary array of influences into his very powerful work. And his company was well known for making extraordinary performances that often involved the audience, if not literally in an audience participation like we just saw, certainly in some kind of repetitious sonic disturbance, some kind of provocation for the audience to endure. Hamas are a frequent feature of his work and he would often use them in the theatre percussively according to people who were there really to annoy them with the sound that just would continue for a very long time. And there were many other tropes that we can see in his work, the grotesque, the carnival, the focus on fascination for fetish objects and so on and so forth. I won't continue tonight but I'm going to ask each of the panellists to speak briefly about their... Well, first of all, I think I'll ask Henry Gu to talk about his experience of both participating in this film and then reviving it now for...reperforming it and reimagining it in the current era. And then I'll ask each of the panellists to briefly respond to the films that they saw tonight and then we'll take questions from the audience. So first of all, Henry Gu, if I could ask you to speak just a little bit about your experience of, I guess, working with Teddy Armour, working in this film and both what you were doing back then and how you think about reviving this film now for a kind of retrospective performance in a very different time and place. It's a very difficult question but first of all, I was working with Mr. Tarayama from the end of the 1960s to 1983. For 17 years I was working together with him the whole time. And at first I wanted to be an actor but I was told that I stood out too much so I was helping him with sound design. I was helping out with the art design and in addition Armour was living with him the whole time as well. It's already been 30 years since his works were made and I think society has changed quite a lot since then. Every morning I would get a call and we would go to a kisaten or a cafe and that's where he would write his works. In terms of the play scripts, we didn't have a copy. No printers, no photo printers. So I would just endlessly be copying his scripts by hand. And I repeated that for as many actors as there were so three or five times as many actors as there were. So by the end I had almost the same handwriting as Mr. Tarayama. Nowadays we have Xerox machines and phones and I think the speed of communication has increased so much since then. So I don't necessarily think that faster communication is better but I do want people to think about the frequency. And I don't think many people on a daily basis get a chance to see a 16mm film. So we have a much more convenient time of taking videos but I don't think it's necessarily better to be convenient. We need to make sure we have the imagination to value that. So today I'm very glad and thankful that Frank suggested that we have the 16mm for the sound of it as well. I'm very thankful. So perhaps if I could ask Tom just to make a few comments and we'll just go along the line a little bit. Sure. Sometimes we don't feel rushed so much. I think I'll just talk about the first and the third because the second one I think is more straightforward although I really like it. I wanted to say a couple of comments about what seems to be the anarchism of the sign that he's playing with but the kind of radicality that Tarayama was playing with. And the first one, I mean the third one, I'll start with the third one, the ones about the nails. The nails themselves seem to be reduced, you can make a story out of it, but they seem to be reduced to a kind of brute materiality of qualities maybe and of actions so that you can see a nail could also be a phallus, it could be just a weight, somebody has to load that you have to bear in other words, it could be a set of acts that involve penetration etc. They seem to work through the film and that they exceed the screen itself so it's a kind of materiality that is immaterial but it's also physical, that you can participate in, you almost have to participate in and then question what kind of materiality is it that you are when you nail into the wall there, what are you participating in? It's unclear, right? So there's a kind of radical uncertainty that attaches to the sign of the nail or the nail as a sign that you only can figure out by deciding for yourself. That quality of having to decide for yourself is part of the anarchism, typically a nail would be used for instance to build a structure, the question then becomes what kind of structure of meaning are you using those nails or are you participating in when you're hammering those nails into that screen slash wall. It's really unclear, that could be a problem, maybe not. I think it's an interesting sort of radicality at that point that seems to be more visible and perhaps more pessimistic in the first one, the documentary and in that documentary in the very first scene with the father and the son you can see the kind of imposition of political meaning that the father is attaching to the son. The son is almost incomprehending of the questions, he has no idea how to answer them or even necessarily what the questions are, but the father is essentially telling the kid how to respond and apparently politically appropriate responses like Cassius Clay, great guy, or something like that. But again you can see even at the level of clear politics that's not real politics at all, that's simply the imposition of meaning. And after that basically the film seems to devolve into a set of randomized questions that reduce the questions difference themselves to something like digital information, where you just say what you had for breakfast is the same thing as answering whether you like your friends or your country better. And so then the only way you can say that series of documentary questions would add up to something would again, sort of like the nails in the structure, be a structure that you would have to impose, but in this case it almost seems to resist that. There's no way for me that I could come away from that documentary saying this is what Teriyama wants you to see about America. This is what all those questions add up to, in which case it's actually really kind of nihilistic, it's kind of empty of any meaning at all. And so that seems to be one potential carry through of precisely the radical anarchistic qualities of the Teriyama sign that ultimately there is no sociality, there is no commonality, there is no meaning that becomes a kind of negativity. So some of the radicality seems to be this tension between a really productive openness and an absolutely emptiness of the sign itself. Thank you very much. We're going to come back to many of these questions in our discussion, so we'll move along our circle for now. Sui-san, could you speak a little bit about your interest in Teriyama and also I guess because you're also representing the National Film Archive and obviously Teriyama's status as a filmmaker is extremely important in Japan. Perhaps you could say something about that as well. When I was in high school, I think it was the first time that I read Teriyama's poem. I think it was something very symbolic. After that, I think it was the next time I saw some of his films. As a person in the film center, I'm not technically involved in the film itself, but through this project, I studied how Teriyama's works were reproduced in the film industry. Of course, the director of the film is a great materialist, but I feel that Teriyama is really controlling a lot of things. My first exposure with Teriyama was his poetry book when I read it in high school, which includes the very prominent girl character. In my 20s later, I saw his full-length films, and now today I'm here as part of the National Archives as he mentioned, but I didn't necessarily work on the restoration myself, but in the process, I was able to learn how these films work. In terms of my interest with the Teriyama films, I agree with the materiality, but I also think that he has a very high degree of control that he exerts in the films. This time, I think that the film center has done a great job in the restoration work. It's a very important point for the film center to be able to get closer to the original when it comes to the restoration of the film. I'm going to speak a little bit about the technical aspects. One of the things that the archives is very careful about, usually one tries to make the restoration as close to the original in terms of color as possible. The printing machines that Mr. Tayama would have had are completely different to the ones that we have today. We used a film which was not screened today that he had printed at the time as a reference to base our color off of. We also contacted the technicians that he worked with at the time if possible to ask and confirm if they were the right colors. In addition to being as loyal to the original as possible, we were able to find out that Mr. Tayama used a very wide, he really broadened the spectrum of color possible in the printing process at the time. So I was initially very moved in the lab to discover this, but as I came here to America, this time, and I was speaking to Mr. Heniku, I realized, or Mr. Heniku pointed out to me that that might not have been the case. So I was very moved in the lab to discover this, but as I came here to America this time, and I was speaking to Mr. Heniku, I realized, or Mr. Heniku pointed out to me that that might not have been the case, and it might have just been a choice of the cameraman. So we've made a lot of accomplishments with restorations at the archives, so I would love if you could come see them at some point. I worked on making sure the black and white high contrasts and the colors are very loyal to the original, so I hope you can see that. Thank you so much, and I appreciate this very technical discussion alongside the kind of cultural reading of the film. I think they go very nicely together and we'll talk about the copy perhaps a little bit later on, but perhaps we could have your response. So since I'm sure these are quite controversial and interesting films, I'll keep my response rather brief, but I just wanted to touch on a couple of rather important points, I think, in Terayama's work. The first of which is the concept of everything as theater, as everything turned into theater, a radical theatricalization really of everyday life. So at first you might not think that this as being particularly tied to something like the 1920s in places like the Soviet Union, but actually I think there is quite an important tie to filmmakers of the former Soviet Union who wanted to rid a film of fictionality, but what actually Terayama is doing by imposing fictionality on everyday life becomes a rather similar project where in this process of turning the everyday, turning the post office, and he has a quote about everything, the post office, the street, the grocery store, everything being turned into theater, it becomes actually a rather similar radicalization of everyday life experience and has rather parallel goals I think to this early period in film history. Another thing I wanted to touch upon is his desire to create a dialogue between the viewer and the filmmaker and the viewer and the film. So this endlessly porous space where as everyone witnessed in especially the second and third films, this creation of a porous space between the viewer and the filmmaker and the ability of this very rare interpenetration which was according to Terayama one of his main purposes for making art and specifically making films. Another point I wanted to talk about was that for Terayama the idea of play is quite serious. So his films are very playful and this is something that I think many people noticed. The first film is rather funny, there is a lot of laughter, there is a lot of playful joking responses, but this is actually quite serious. So something that is very very playful is simultaneously a very serious act and we can probably talk in the Q&A about what exactly, how it's serious and what he means by play and what is playful in Terayama, but it's an important thing to think about. Something that he used to call his, what is called in English the sort of ceiling gallery, which he called his, how he called his performances, performers, can sometimes sort of subtitle the laboratory of play, which I think is rather interesting. Both play as theatre and also play as a space of free aesthetic play or something that you can undergo as if you were a child, engaging in a space like the cinema or the theatre. And just a couple of other notes, in the first film that we watched, I don't think it was an accident that the first few interviewees were black because actually Terayama sort of famously noted that he considered himself a black version of a Japanese man, which is rather strange and controversial in its own right, but he really thought of himself as participating in this sort of more, you know, sort of discriminated person, because he came from Aomori which is a, you know, from the north of Japan and he was considered to have been rather large and so he sort of thought of himself weirdly as a black Japanese man. And so I don't think it's an accident that, of course it could all, it's just my thought that the first few interviewees that we see happen to be black Americans. And the last thing I just wanted to mention is the idea that Terayama had of theatre being a crime, and he wanted this, right, for him a theatre, a theatrical experience has to somehow be criminal, and he really praised this about both cinema and the theatre. And so, you know, it was very common for him to get into a lot of trouble in his theatrical performances, but this is something he wanted, you know, it was his iconoclasm, his tendency for these sort of radical nihilistic acts that tended to, you know, get him into trouble, but also revealed, I think, something very profound about what he viewed filmmaking to be. Thank you. Thank you. Alex? Yeah, I mean, watching these films again, it just reminded me of how far what Terayama is doing goes beyond film or goes beyond maybe even a single, any of the single media that he was working in. Someone who is now a very well-known media professor of media studies in Japan was a graduate student in New York in the 1980s and was tasked with driving around Nagisa Oshima, one of the best known Japanese directors of the 60s and 70s when he was visiting New York for a retrospective. And he asked him, he told me this once, he asked him, well, who do you consider your greatest rival in the world of Japanese film? And he told me he's now very embarrassed about asking a question like that. But Oshima responded in saying, well, clearly that's Terayama Shuji, and I just couldn't compete in the end. There was no way I could compete with Terayama. And at the time this struck my acquaintance as very strange. Terayama is known as someone who worked in many, many different fields, but because of that in some way he's also not really known primarily as a film director or so. So he just didn't understand why would someone like Oshima, who's seen as one of the great masters of Japanese cinema, feel that he couldn't compete with Terayama. I think watching something like this, and if you have a chance to see some of the films that are showing at the anthology film archives in the next few days, I think you'll understand this, it'll make sense to you too. It's partially because Terayama is going well beyond what Oshima can do. He's not trying to tell stories. He's not creating single works that convey a kind of narrative or even a kind of message of sorts. What he's doing is really going beyond something like, he's doing world building, and that's a very new kind of strategy at that point in time. He's creating a gigantic kaleidoscope, going across different media, connected through different motifs, through themes, through kind of narrative fragments that pop up again and again in different kind of variations. Through that, he sets the media against each other, creating these weird overlaps and tensions. In that interplay, they create a whole variety of new media. It's really a kaleidoscopic kind of strategy. As Julia said, that extends beyond just kind of the world of the mediated. This goes, reaches into the everyday and tries to utilize the everyday as kind of fragments of information and parts of what might become a work in a sense as well. One of the very famous examples of this is when Terayama helps to organize an actual funeral for a fictional character from a famous boxing manga called Tomorrow's Joe, after that character dies in the manga. Several hundred people come to attend, and this is big news in the newspapers. The newspaper headlines are like, this is scary, this is weird, people are going to a funeral for a fictional character. There are several other examples in the following years, so this becomes much less worthy of being reported upon in newspapers. At the time, this was quite shocking, but it's two weeks after this funeral that the Japanese Red Army hijacks the Yodogo airplane, a passenger airplane from Narita Airport and flies it to Pyongyang in North Korea, and they issue a manifesto as they do this. And the final sentence of the manifesto reads, we are Tomorrow's Joe. So even the radical left is not quoting Marx or Lenin, they're referring to a manga. So something is changing significantly, and Terayama is someone who really has his finger on the pulse in this, and he's trying to utilize that, these changing sensibilities the way we're constantly entangled with media the way we're not really, we can't be separated from them anymore. And he sees that as working, you know, for that he works across the entire spectrum. The way that he kind of calls the audience to action to pick up the hammer without really telling you what it might mean to pick up the hammer, but first of all, pick it up and do something, right? Try to generate some kind of action that leads to something, that's part of that larger project I think. Thanks very much, Alex, and I very much appreciate the focus on action, and it's a strong interest of mine in relating the theatre to the milieu of the times and that time and time again you look at the records, whether it's the artistic practices or indeed the manifesto of student protest groups or radical protest groups, and there's this really repetitious focus on action above anything else almost. It's the Uber keyword of the period. Thank you very much. I think that those comments are all very helpful in helping us understand something more about the nature of this remarkable performance and films that we've seen and I think it's now a time that we'll go to the audience and please, if you've got a question, please perhaps indicate who you would like to answer it because we've got rather a large panel here, so just one. And please keep your questions brief because we will have a reception. Just a brief comment. I've been exploring experiential storytelling and this is what really touched me, and I think I thought of two quotes, one by Saul Bellows, which says, we're so shock-resistant, maybe the only thing that can touch us is poetry. And I see that as well as a quote by Peter Brooke, which says that this is our playground and I get that feeling he's playing with us and that my question is what is the sexual element in his time, in his culture because here we were founded by Puritans? I have no concept of the Japanese sense of sexual innuendo. Can you get anybody to comment on that? Perhaps if we could just put it out there as a provocation and a question to think about. I'm sure we all have perspectives on that, but would you like to say anything about that in particular or perhaps some other members of the panel? The reason I'm hesitating is it's probably a very large question to answer and it would take quite a while. I think if I can just say that whatever sexual mors are, if the question is about sexual mors in Japanese society then Tarayama is clearly trying to go against the status quo. I'm not sure if the films necessarily reveal what is the average sexual experience of nature of sexuality in Japan, but rather he's always trying to go towards a very, very uncomfortable location. For instance, Emperor Tomato Ketchup, one of his most famous films that has a long and short version. There's an infamous sequence with many prepubescent children appearing to, they're feigning sexual activity, there is sexual activity with adults and middle-aged people and it's an extremely controversial sequence, but you clearly can't look at that and make something up about Japanese sexual mors because he's just going so far into the extreme of the opposite. We are in a context where a lot of artists are experimenting with physicality in the body and it's also a very common experience for many artists of that particular generation but there's also this very lively sense of play but also fascination for particular repetitious actions I think is something that comes up again and again in many, not just Tarayama but many of the other, perhaps you could compare that to some of the Buto performances at the time, for example. I was wondering if anybody could address how Mr. Tarayama was seeing his work in relation to the work of other director in Europe and in America at the time. Maybe if Mr. Morisaki could tell us if there was any particular director outside of Japan that he admired or he spoke about. I liked Tarayama the most at the time. He was the director of Ima Mara Shohei in Japan and the other director was Federico Ferini. At the time he was interested in the Japanese director Shohei Ima Mara and Federico Ferini in terms of performing arts cantor in Araba he had relations with them. We were so also when he saw the films he rediscovered the potential of what is possible. That's Robert Wilson. I forgot. I forgot. There was also director Ronconi and Tarayama realized, I'm sorry, noticed how violent his performances were and always wanted, aspired to be as violent. The other really interesting aspect of this is that of the 60s generation, Tarayama was popular in Europe. He's worked to it. Many of the other generation of artists at that time did not do their work to Europe. Karajuro only toured in Asia. Buto companies were later than Tarayama to go to the world. So I think there was this. Tarayama was a very interesting case of a Japanese avant-garde that had some relationship to European audiences. Formed at Lamama. So as you mentioned also Lamama, but I think his works were popular overseas because there was something beyond words that was being communicated, that was being reached to these audiences in his works. We probably have time for one more question. Okay, okay, sorry. I hope we have to finish. There was one at Lamama. It was before the stage. There was an episode. Do you know what Shosa-Zai is? It's a song called Shosa-Zai in Kabuki. But on the opening day, on the day before the opening, Tarayama-san said, please open the shack. Opening the shack means there is no such thing as a shack. It's 12 cm. So what would the actor do? He would say, you idiot, you should have fallen. Would you like to say that? This is Mr. Mayada. He performed for Lamama. So he was mentioning that there is usually a set for no or Kabuki performances. But for the performance for Mr. Tarayama, he told us to get rid of it. So there was no shack. There was no shack. So there was a set for Kabuki. He wrote and brought it from Japan. It was a set. When it fell, it remained on the stage. Kabuki would listen to it. You can listen to it on the right. But for Mr. Tarayama, he had to bring it down. So there was no shack. It was not in Japan. There was no one to open the shack. The episode that he is sharing with us reveals that Mr. Tarayama completely changed the conventions for the performance of the no Kabuki at the time, which wasn't done in Japan. There is something, there is a dropping performance that's usually swept away to the side. Keeping that space open, he said just drop it straight through. So he changed the conventions of that performance entirely. This is a fascinating discussion. Thank you very much, all of you, for your comments. I really enjoyed it. I just happen to have the good fortune of meeting Mr. Tarayama years ago. In fact, I saw the third film in 75 or 6 years in California, shown there once, at the University of the Pacific. I got to know him a little bit, and I know that one thing he was trying to do, which is kind of alluded to by several of you, was almost, we could call it like meta theater or meta filmmaking. These things are about the making process itself, the creative process itself. And if there's any ultimate goal in there, he wanted people to question things. There are questions in the first one. Who am I? Who are you? What are you? These are really profound questions when you start thinking about them. I think he wanted people to think about those sorts of things. And in one of his plays, he's got the characters controlled by puppets, strings. And as the play is dissolved, the actors come out on stage and he just wants people to talk about it. Who's controlling these people? Who's controlling you? How do you believe anybody there? How can you even believe the play right? That's a really... I'm envious that you actually met Teri Hamashuchi, but it's a fantastic experience. It's a really interesting comment. I think the first thing I ever saw was an essay that was published in TDR, which was the Tenjo Sajiki Manifesto of the time. And I'm sure some of you have seen this. The way that it was printed was that it was intentionally illegible. So you had to read across light and dark sections of the page in order to put the sentences together. So there's constantly this deferral of meaning, but also this invitation to come into this kind of meta-spectatorship, I guess, or meta-theatrical event. So it's a really fascinating comment that you've made, I think. So thank you. Okay, go ahead. He was writing a turtle neck. He had a pet turtle. I'm sorry. One turtle was named Question, and the other was named Answer. And in terms of which turtle is larger, it was the Question Turtle. When I asked him why, he said there are many answers inside of Question. These are Tarama's words. I don't want to become a large person. It's a large, large question mark. Thank you very much. Sometimes you have the perfect end to a symposium, and I think we just had it there. So always think to the big turtle. But just before we go tonight, and we are going to have a reception, I'd just like to thank one or two people. Frank also mentioned so many of the people who put this event together. There are very many organizations that have sponsored this event. Again, so thank you to the Harvard Film Archive, the Anthology Film Archives, the George Eastern Museum, the Japan Foundation, the National Film Center, the National Museum of Baudenard, and the generous support of the Kinoshita Group. We also thank Goul Hirasawa and Julian Ross, both of whom couldn't be here. But it was actually Goul-San who came to us first and said Frank immediately said yes. So the next group of people I need to thank, Frank and the Segal Center because Frank and his staff really do the impossible sometimes. Small public programs organization a part of the Graduate Center of the City of University of New York, very much attached to the PhD program in theater, but basically they are Frank and the staff you see here tonight and all of the people who've really put this together. So thank you, Frank. And thank you to everybody for coming out tonight. Please join us for a short celebration, short compo. And to remark on your call to action, maybe if you want nine of the hammers are up for grabs so you can take them home and continue hammering. We're going to keep here at the Segal reception here not for too long 10-15 minutes and then walk over to the archive bar which is on 36 between 5th semesters in your program and hope you can join us. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.