ABSTRACT
Butoh performers have had a long productive interaction with the cinematic form – from documented butoh performances to the spasmodic butoh-inspired performances in E. Elias Merhige's 1990 film Begotten. The ideas that stimulated Hijikata's imagination and fueled the development of butoh emerged from a fecund mélange of cultural sources including the cinema. While butoh has been the subject of films, or used for cinematic storytelling, it may be possible to conceive of a further combination of butoh and film, a "butoh film." The cinema, even avant-garde practice to some extent, is supposedly obligated to adhere to "narrative exposition and tends to be constructed according to a strict optical organization; to watch a film is to distinguish objects and human forms at the level of representation, already distinct and encoded". Butoh has been incorporated into a number of narrative films, such as Ishii Teruo's 1969 film Horrors of Malformed Men.
