Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 175: Thu Jun 27

Pastoral: To Die in the Country (Terayama, 1974): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

ICA introduction:
This event will celebrate the semicentennial of Shūji Terayama’s film Pastoral: To Die in the Country (Den-en ni shisu, 1974). Pastoral is a playfully painful, shrewdly surreal investigation into the mutability of memory & identity. At the foot of Mt. Fear, in a fever dream idyll of the countryside, a boy longs to escape a present that never was. Shūji Terayama (1935-1983) is considered an icon of the post-war avant-garde movement in Japan. Before establishing himself as a filmmaker and the leader of angura theatre troupe Tenjō Sajiki, Terayama broke into public consciousness as a poet. Pastoral shares its title and key themes with Terayama’s final tanka collection, Den-en ni shisu (1965). Rather than an ‘adaptation’, the film is an experiment in melding poetry with film to create a new way of expression. A screening of the film will be preceded by a polyphonic recital of Terayama’s poetry, co-directed by Kaisa Saarinen and Alan Fielden & in collaboration with performance artist Noe Iwai. The dialogue of poetry and cinema in Pastoral will be expanded into a trilogue of forms through this hybrid performance.

Here (and above) is the trailer.