Den-en ni shisu

Mesmerizing and stunning in every possible way.. A Masterpiece, folks. One of the greatest cinematic experiences i've ever had.

This is one of the best surreal film ever made right along Alejandro Jodorowsky's "Fando and Lis", Frank Zappa's "200 Motels", and Wojciech Has's "The Saragossa Manuscript." The film is based on Terayama's original play and series of his haiku about his childhood (IMDb's biography on Terayama is excellent and will give you in-depth view of Terayama's art.) The film has timeless Freudian theme about the adolescent trauma, loss of innocence, and deconstruction of self and memories. I have a Japanese VHS copy and watched with my American friends. I tried to translate dialogue as much as possible, it is very hard to keep up with the pace of film and especially his haiku are very hard to translate. However, even with my poor translation, my friends loved the film. I still think in order to understand Terayama's intention of the film, it is important to appreciate his haiku.

I was wondering how I could get a copy with English subtitle. I want to share the film with American friends. If you have seen this film in the U.S., let me know where you have seen it.

Childhood is something that cannot ever be exploited.

In every film where a childhood is depicted, it's never 1 to 1. It's never reality. Reality is boring and it's not interesting, except for the originator. Shuji Terayama, another director I discovered because of LB, knew this and had to Fellinicise, to Parajanovicise, poeticise, abstracise his childhood. Maybe something thin of reality is still there, but something that's common to all of us.

I will not revisit this film, ever. I didn't connect to it and the visual style alone is not something that powerful for me to cling on. But I can appreciate the symbolism of it, the cinematography, the little stories, and what those stories tried to tell, but I will be frank, not all of them were understandable and need multiple viewings to be really digested.

Time is another big theme here and somehow present in every scene through watches, ticking clocks, time paradoxes and even cicadas in the background.

Few films are as audacious and unrelentingly imaginative as this one. Set in a dreamlike rural Japan, the story starts out to be about an adolescent boy's attempt to escape his overprotective mother and then surprisingly becomes a filmmakers desire to confront his own elaborated creation. There is also an effort to reconcile the individual with the collective or old and new Japan through this parade of emblematic images. Gossiping women wear sinister eye patches. An outcast simple-minded woman drowns her own baby and later returns as a sophisticated prostitute. A circus fat lady yearns to have her fake body inflated by a dwarf. Curious and astounding scenes abound, all contributing to an overwhelming experience of a creative mind interrogating itself.

In what may or may not be an auto-biography, Terayama explores his past and the relationship we have with our memories, in a grotesque serie of poetic symbolism, bizarre surrealism, haikus, tragic tales of love and innocence, beautiful scenery and interesting cinematography, all wrapped in a self-referential, intellectually thought-provoking exploration of how our lives are affected by our childhood memories. A magnificent balance between indulgent surrealism and thoughtful objectivism, while still not being really experimental.