Grass Labyrinth (1979)

In this 40-minute avant-garde film based on a story by the surrealist writer Kyoka Izumi, director Shuji Terayama uses the pretext of a young man’s determination to recover the lyrics and music to a song he loved in his childhood in an exploration of widely variant perceptions of reality. Akira is haunted by a “bouncing ball” song that he remembers his mother singing when he was a small child, and now on the verge of a sexually active adulthood, he wants to find the origins of the song. The young man ostensibly wanders into a time-warp in which aspects from his childhood and adulthood mix together. In this never-never land he comes across a beautiful woman/witch who is lost inside the labyrinth of her mansion, just as the young man is lost in the labyrinth of time — and on some levels, perhaps the labyrinth of his subconscious.