Arcades project

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971) (d. Shuji Tereyama)

It’s a young man’s film, screaming at the top of his lungs, from a provincial point of view, reacting to the changes in Japanese society, with a focus on the materialism and its entailing hypocrisies. The climax is an arresting tearing away of the fourth wall where the anti-hero and the cast of characters show up to address the audience. The movie theatre obliged by turning the house lights on for that sequence—a unique experience. However, its critical vision isn’t radical or deep enough. Even its flirtation with counterculture like the gay transvestite characters isn’t engaging as Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses, which was released only two years earlier. Also, there’s an attempt at including women to the wild party but stereotypes abound, including a highly problematic rape scene. It’s a straight young man’s cry, the film is. The ragged edges are the film’s draw as Tereyama is willing to throw in all sorts of tricks, from cinema and theatre. It’s also overlong and too self-consciously serious, and playful too, if I may add. The startling thing about the movie is how it captured a cityscape that’s both lost and still existing. The neighborhood where most of the action occurs is not much different from where the film was screened, near an aging arcade, right by a cluster of working class apartments, thus an odd location for an art movie theatre, where right in front of the place is an old style kissaten (coffee shop) that seem to have been stuck in the 80s.

#2019 #May