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Tokyo Puck was a full-colour satirical journal that mocked an infatuation with western behaviour and ornamentation in the Taisho era of the 1920s. Terayama inverted its popular, vernacular style to fashion a world of artifice and self-conscious aestheticism in Butterfly. The setting is like the dressing room of a theatre where masculinity is feminised and destabilised in an orgy of luscious colour, caked face makeup, shadows and figures obscuring the screen; the Taisho era gleefully reconstructed as a modernity of increased intensification and consumption. This programme reconsiders Terayama’s ambivalent use of cultural memory through a grouping of works that approximate the elements of a seditious book of manners.

 The BBC Arena documentary TENJO SAJIKI: Children of God heralds Tenjo Sajiki’s 1978 London debut with a play derived from Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century manual of etiquette, Directions to Servants. In his introduction to the production Terayama wrote about a mechanical device called the ‘Saint-Master Machine’, which appears onstage: ‘It places a wig on to a bald man’s head and gives him a moustache, thereby making him a "Master". It seems that any Servant could become a Master with the aid of this Machine.’ 

������ An Attempt to Describe the Measure of a Man, Terayama depicts the remonstrations of a Tom Thumb character as he falls in love with a bubble-girl, and lingers on the image of her humongous body. The more he contemplates the less he lives, exclaiming ‘One day I will let you out of the screen, Mona!’ before his infatuation with the ephemeral newness of motion pictures is satisfied.

Nigel Finch, 1978 United Kingdom, 16mm transferred to video, 25 min

Shūji Terayama, 1974 Japan, 16mm, 12 min

Shūji Terayama, 1977 Japan, 16mm, 19 min

Curated by Thomas Dylan Eaton in association with ������. 

With generous support from Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, Japan Foundation, Sasakawa Foundation, Toshiba Foundation, and All Nippon Airways. 

Tate Film is supported by Maja Hoffmann / LUMA Foundation.