Les chants de Maldoror, a 19th century poetic novel by Comte de Lautreamont, was a huge influence not only on the surrealist movement of the next century, but also on the young Shuji Terayama, a multifaceted Japanese artist who dedicated this 27-minute short film to Lautreamont's work.
The novel in question is a hallucinatory, nihilistic depiction of a misanthropic godless figure Maldoror, and Terayama's film, I guess, is comprised of short scenes following some of the poems. Neither have I read the novel neither are there subtitles, but you get the gist of it. Essentially, it's a collection of mild perversions seen through overlapping images and Akio Suzuki's mystical soundtrack that occasionally delves into weird sounds of distorted voices and what sounds like police sirens underwater.
Content of the film in short: Turtles crawling through text and video effects while the actors do odd movements with their tongues. A hand writes text over more text. Snails, turtles and lizards crawl over human bodies. A naked girl plays with her parrot. Lautreamont's book gets slowly lowered into an aquarium and later set on fire. A woman breaks eggs and spreads the yolks over a nude girl's body. The seashore background from Terayama's short The Eraser appears. Enjoy.
The novel in question is a hallucinatory, nihilistic depiction of a misanthropic godless figure Maldoror, and Terayama's film, I guess, is comprised of short scenes following some of the poems. Neither have I read the novel neither are there subtitles, but you get the gist of it. Essentially, it's a collection of mild perversions seen through overlapping images and Akio Suzuki's mystical soundtrack that occasionally delves into weird sounds of distorted voices and what sounds like police sirens underwater.
Content of the film in short: Turtles crawling through text and video effects while the actors do odd movements with their tongues. A hand writes text over more text. Snails, turtles and lizards crawl over human bodies. A naked girl plays with her parrot. Lautreamont's book gets slowly lowered into an aquarium and later set on fire. A woman breaks eggs and spreads the yolks over a nude girl's body. The seashore background from Terayama's short The Eraser appears. Enjoy.
