Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets

A young man lives in Tokyo. His family is in disorder: his father is a former soldier who cannot find work, his grandmother steals, his sister talks to rabbits. He wants to get into a football team and does not. He wants to fly and does not. He walks the city, talks to people, joins groups and belongs nowhere. The film tells no straight story; poems, songs, speech straight to camera and pieces of documentary run through one another. At the opening the screen stays dark and a voice asks the audience what it is doing. Shūji Terayama directs and wrote it himself. It is a Japanese production. Terayama was a poet and playwright who had founded his own theatre company; the film was made with that company's performers. The source is his own book of essays and his stage play; the same title was used across three separate works. Its form is deliberately scattered; the colour changes, the framing breaks, and the film keeps reminding you that it is made. The matter it treats is the breaking up of the youth movements at the end of the sixties; the film offers no solution and no programme. Music is one of its main materials and the songs are sung straight to the audience. It was hard to find outside Japan for a long time and was restored later. Its limit is accessibility; the narrative is closed, the references belong to their period, and some scenes are uncomfortable. Who it is for: viewers who like experimental cinema and the Japanese avant garde. Who it is not for: there is no story, the form is demanding, and some sections are openly provoking.