The Trial (1975) begins with a man hammering nails into a city street before normal social order collapses and the ‘disturbance’ spreads to an act of violent audience participation. Terayama made this work for projection on a specially constructed screen and provides white leader at the end as an invitation for audience members to abandon their position as spectators and take possession of their own energies, hammering nails into the surface of the image.
Questions were an important part of the work of Shūji Terayama whose striking creative work exists in a liminal space between fact and imagination. Terayama’s career recalls a fairy tale of Japanese folklore in which a face shifts to become a different face. An acclaimed filmmaker, poet, radio and stage dramatist, essayist, photographer and horse racing tipster (with no less than eight volumes of commentary to his name), Terayama was, in the words of theatre critic Akihiko Senda, ‘the eternal avant-garde’. Terayama always made work that was interrelated, often producing visionary and unexpected outcomes in whatever his chosen form.
