Sho O Suteyo, Machi E Deyou
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DIRECTED BY: Shuji Terayama
FEATURING: Hideaki Sasaki, Masaharu Saito, Yukiko Kobayashi, Fudeko Tanaka
PLOT: An angry, aimless young man drifts along in search of purpose, despairing at society’s shallowness and cruelty.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Terayama’s filmed essay defies traditional elements such as narrative or a consistent point of view. It is, instead, a howl of righteous anger using a cinematic techniques to depict a society in chaos and an individual’s profound isolation.
COMMENTS: A legend that has arisen over the years about philosopher Henry David Thoreau focuses on a single night in 1846 when he was arrested and jailed for failing to pay taxes, a stance he took to protest government policy on slavery and the Mexican-American War. In the story, his friend, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, discovered that he had been imprisoned and rushed to visit him. As dramatized by playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, a despairing Emerson asks, “Henry, what are you doing in jail?” Thoreau, fueled by his righteous commitment to civil disobedience, replies indignantly, “Waldo! What are you doing out of jail?”
Thoreau would find common cause with Eimei, our guide through this kaleidoscopic tour of 1970-era Japan. Eimei opens the film angry… at us. He’s been standing by as we’ve sat through a couple minutes of a solid black screen, and he has had it. He castigates us for mindlessly tolerating the nothingness like an audience of sheep. Don’t be offended, though. We will soon see that he has much to be angry about. He has little money, no respect for his family, his community is obsessed with sex and lacks any other ambition, and his culture is becoming uncomfortably Americanized and subsumed by rapacious capitalism. By the end of the film, he dabbles in a small-scale dream of his own, only to be attacked and robbed. He ends screaming his hatred for Japan—but no one truly escapes his wrath.
We see the subject of his ire first-hand. Eimei wanders through a series of scenes with an air of disconnection, not because he doesn’t care but because he can find no way in. The local school does nothing but practice soccer, where Eimei lamely offers to tidy up the locker room. Showcasing society’s whacked-out priorities, the coach happily takes him down to the local prostitute for a chill-out deflowering, which does nothing for him at all. His grandmother, knowing she’s about to be kicked out of the house, lies to strangers about her dead family in a bid for sympathy. Eimei’s father, who fought in the war, is a shiftless layabout whose only profession is molesting young women. Most tragic is Eimei’s flighty (and possibly mentally compromised) sister, who initially has an unhealthy attachment to her pet rabbit until her grandmother arranges to have the animal killed, which somehow leads to her terrible assault at the hands of the entire soccer team. It’s an extraordinary set of circumstances, but the film in no way sensationalizes or finds dark humor in the accumulation of miseries. Imagine living in a world where each day brings not just bad news, but a completely different kind of bad news (if you can even picture such a scenario), and you get a sense of the struggle Eimei has just to get up each day.
Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets is reportedly adapted by Terayama from his own play, which is an extraordinary notion, because the movie feels in no way tied to the stage. Terayama has a vivid and far-ranging approach to visual storytelling. He mixes film stocks, employs surprising framing and shot angles, toys with film tinting and superimposition, and stages scenes with the eye of a Surrealist. He also has a solid appreciation of the power of sound, often staging scenes with repetitive sound effects or scoring transitions with proto-punk anthems to soundtrack Eimei’s oppressive surroundings. Interspersed among the scenes of Eimei’s world are staged interviews, fantasy sequences, and dream-like images of early pioneers of flight. This is one of Terayama’s first films, emerging the same year as his controversial Emperor Tomato Ketchup, and it mixes a newcomer’s urge to play in his new sandbox with an experienced storyteller’s confidence in abstract and nonlinear storytelling.
There are no rallies in Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets. There are barely even books (although urgent quotes are graffitied across the landscape). That title isn’t a synopsis but a call to action, a demand from Terayama. Look at your world. Why do you tolerate this? Aren’t you going to do anything about it? Given what he shows us, it’s not hard to understand his contempt. If we’re not rallying in the streets, just what are we doing?
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Adam. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)