The smallpox virus has created its own unique atmosphere in Terayama’s film where the skin of a bandaged adolescent and the surface of the filmic image are subjected to a bizarre ‘disturbance’ as snails cross the screen and nails are hammered into the skull of the ailing patient. Illness in this film is as much a psychic entity as a physical one and manifests itself in an array of theatrical tableaux from grotesque women rigorously brushing their teeth to a snooker game where the players in white face makeup behave like automata. A Tale of Smallpox uses a medical theme to chart the traumatic dream life of Terayama’s times, evincing deep-rooted concerns in the Japanese national psyche that hark back to the upheaval of Meiji modernisation and the devastation of World War Two.
To engage with Shūji Terayama’s avant-garde short Smallpox Tale (also known as Hôsô-tan, 1976) is to willingly subject oneself to a cinematic infection. Long revered as a towering polymath of the Japanese counterculture—a poet, dramatist, and the visionary founder of the Tenjō Sajiki theatre troupe—Terayama approaches the filmic medium not as a canvas for narrative, but as a biological organism ripe for disruption. In a lineage of transgressive cinema that stretches from Luis Buñuel’s surrealist optical assaults to the structuralist materialism of Stan Brakhage, Smallpox Tale stands as a masterclass in anti-cinema. It is a profound existential riddle that violently dismantles the fourth wall, transforming the very act of spectatorship into an experience of visceral, psychosomatic contagion.
The Materiality of the Celluloid Contagion
At the core of Terayama’s cinematic thesis is the weaponization of the apparatus itself. The titular disease in Smallpox Tale is not merely a diegetic affliction suffered by a bandaged adolescent; rather, the variola virus infects the epistemology of the image. Terayama subjects the film strip to a series of bizarre ontological disturbances. In moments of staggering meta-cinematic rebellion, the illusion of depth is shattered as living snails crawl across the physical surface of the screen, and nails are viscerally hammered into the two-dimensional skull of the ailing patient.
This aggressive foregrounding of the medium recalls the self-reflexive torture of the celluloid found in Peter Kubelka’s structural works or the corporeal panic of Shinya Tsukamoto’s later cyber-punk body horrors. By playing with the physical mechanics of the projection and the screen, Terayama forces the audience to confront the fragility of the cinematic illusion. The “smallpox” becomes an aesthetic rupture—a disease of the image that corrodes our passive consumption of light and shadow, demanding an active, almost tactile engagement with the celluloid carcass.
Theatre of Cruelty and the Somatic Image
Drawing heavily from his roots in experimental stagecraft, Terayama constructs a series of deeply unsettling, oneiric tableaux that channel the raw energy of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. The film is devoid of conventional psychological realism, relying instead on a relentless procession of grotesque, somatic performances. Women are depicted rigorously, almost violently, brushing their teeth—a mundane hygiene ritual twisted into a display of compulsive neurosis. Elsewhere, a hauntingly sterile snooker game unfolds where the players, caked in ghostly white makeup, move with the rigid, mechanized apathy of automata.
These sequences serve as a direct visual dialogue with the ankoku butoh (Dance of Darkness) movement pioneered by Tatsumi Hijikata, utilizing the distorted human form to articulate unutterable existential dread. The white-faced snooker players evoke both the mechanized dread of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the silent, absurd voids of Samuel Beckett. Through this intense stylization, illness is elevated from a mere physical pathology to a psychic entity, manifesting the spiritual decay and absurdism inherent in modern human interaction.
Excavating the Trauma of the Japanese Psyche
Ultimately, Smallpox Tale operates as an archeological dig into the historical trauma of the Japanese national consciousness. By utilizing a medical theme, Terayama charts the traumatic dream-life of a populace caught between eras. The scarred, bandaged figures and the thematic obsession with disease serve as potent allegories for the deep-rooted anxieties of a nation—harking back to the violent cultural upheaval of Meiji modernization and stretching forward into the apocalyptic devastation of World War II.
Where his contemporaries in the Japanese New Wave, such as Nagisa Oshima or Shohei Imamura, often tackled these historical wounds through radical political narratives, Terayama prefers the realm of pure poetic abstraction. Smallpox Tale offers no catharsis or neat ideological resolution. Instead, it leaves the viewer adrift in a feverish, avant-garde delirium. It is a testament to Terayama’s genius that, nearly half a century later, this brief descent into celluloid sickness remains as potent, shocking, and profoundly necessary as ever—a true magisterium of experimental filmmaking.
