Limitations of 16mm film volume

Shuji Terayama often used "完全暗転 (complete blackouts)" (complete darkness with all emergency lights turned off) in his experimental plays.
At those times, he played loud music.
The loud sound made the audience's bodies and chairs vibrate like an earthquake.
Harada wanted to try this himself.
In MIDORI, he wanted to make the volume loud only in the scene where Masamitsu goes wild and in the final scene where the cherry blossoms fall like snow.
However, when he asked the film sound engineer, he was told that the volume of 16mm is fixed and it cannot be recorded any louder than that.
In the end, the 16mm film version of MIDORI was recorded at a slightly lower volume except for the parts with the highest volume.
Therefore, manual volume adjustments were required at each screening.
When another projectionist was in charge, Harada always asked, "Please make the volume louder. Please turn up the volume of the in-house speakers to the maximum during the two climax scenes."
Currently, the master tapes for screening MIDORI have been digitized and the volume has been adjusted beforehand (digital has a wider range of sound), so Harada's intended effect is achieved without having to turn the volume knob during projection.

Harada also had one more unforgettable theater experience.
It was at a Seazar theater company performance, but the experiment had originally been carried out in Terayama's Tenjosajiki days.

・The theater went completely dark.
・The actors surrounded the audience.
・They made noises and shouted at different times (specifically, they clapped their naked bodies with their hands or blew on them).
・The sounds were released with a delay of about 1/4 second, so the sounds rotated around the audience as if in stereophonic sound.

In this way, many other experiments are possible in the theater.