Morbidezza: 書を捨てよ町へ出よう

Film Review: Throw Away Your Books and Go Out Into the Streets
1971 Japan. dir: Shuji Terayama

I recently obtained a copy of a film called Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets made in Japan in 1971. Two weeks prior to watching it, I watched another film from the same era, Easy Rider, with someone from Japan who had never seen it before. Mulling over the Japanese film for several days afterward, I pondered the similarities between the films, and realized bemusedly that "書を捨てよ" probably had the same effect on me that Easy Rider had on my Japanese friend. Probably, neither of us quite grasped the full impact of certain visual (or musical) references, but we each understood that the films represented a bas-relief of the specific cultural attitudes from which they emerged.

I know next to nothing about Shuji Terayama (the film's director), but I have gleaned that he was a member of a group called the Art Theater Guild, which played a crucial role in the independent Japanese film industry starting in about the late 1960s. The Art Theater Guild was a kind of filmmakers cooperative, whose chief purpose was to provide a distribution outlet for struggling independent filmmakers. Japan's film industry at that time was a studio system not unlike Hollywood's of the same era, so forming such an organization made a lot of sense for art filmmakers who would other wise have little chance getting distribution. The Art Theater Guild was able to make one-on-one arrangements with theater owners to give their titles limited runs, at times when theater owners might otherwise be facing programming slowdowns. A by-product of this coalition was that many of these filmmakers collaborated on each others' work - so it became a kind of production workshop/studio in its own right. The roster of Japanese filmmakers associated in one way or another with the Art Theater Guild is an impressive roll call, and includes Nagisa Oshima and Toshio Matsumoto. In this regard, Terayama and ATG occupied a similar space in the Japanese film industry as Hopper, Fonda, Altman and others occupied in Hollywood - at the crest of a wave of changes in film aesthetics and industry business practices.

As a straight narrative, Throw Away Your Books is much more loosely wrapped than Easy Rider (which, as a buddy-road movie, is essentially a "quest," and one of the oldest narrative models known to Western culture). Terayama's film is a series of vignettes, following a young protagonist and his family and friends, intercut with documentary elements. It is bookended by two sequences in which the narrator breaks the 4th wall and addresses the audience in a monologue on the artificiality of cinema. Obviously, these filmmakers who contributed to what became known as the "Japanese New Wave" took much inspiration from the French movement of the same name. However, in content it clearly urges Japan to reclaim an identity that is free of Western influence.

In the film's symmetrical bookend sequences, the narrator speaks directly to the audience, mockingly identifying himself as "no one," a figure of no historical importance. He questions our willingness to sit in the dark and wait for something to happen, for events to be revealed by insignificant shadows on the screen. At the film's end he chides our readiness to stroll out of the theater and let the events we'd witnessed be banished from our memories as daylight banishes the image from a movie screen.

Cueing the lights to come up, the narrator reveals himself to be standing amongst all of the crew members. "Although it is true that movies themselves can exist only in the dark," he tells us, "[from them can be born something which we can take away, into our daily lives.]"

There is almost a pre-punk, anti-Establishment ethic to the film. It swears off Western capitalism, it burns the American flag, there is a "Primer For Young People on How to do Drugs" vignette. It's easy to understand where this comes from. Japan's entire post-war identity was modeled after the US.

Terayama blasts Japan for being "like a lizard, captured in the Cola bottle" of the US, humiliated and incapable of escape. Over a shot of trashed empty cigarette cartons, branded "Peace," one of the film's many songs shouts "We want real peace." It's not just real peace that seems to be the bone of contention, but a real identity of this generation's own making, rather than an inheritance of the legacy of WWII.

All of the angst, the loud music, wild handheld camera, sexuality and drug use is part of the generational rebellion that was ocurring all over the world in the late 60s and early 70s. For American youth as much as Japanese, the generational rebellion was probably influenced in part by the legacy of WWII, since in the US it was the righteous victory against Fascism that was turned upside down in Vietnam which ignited the youth movement. In Terayama's depiction of Japan, WWII hangs over the family, even though the official Occupation has ended. Father is a "beaten dog, a war criminal," who drinks, pilfers money from his son and spies on women in the toilet. "Home is a pigsty," and father wants grandma to go to an old folks' home run by American-influenced Christian missionaries. Terayama's protagonist's urge to leave "home" could be read as a desire to escape the paternalistic shadow of the US.



There is a recurrent image in the film of the protagonist at the helm of a lightweight glider, trying to take flight, but always just barely skimming over the ground. At the film's end, the glider burns in an empty field.

In his epilogue, the narrator tells us that while filming, each actor became their role and thus, each situation became real. And while it played on screen, it was real for each of us in the audience. The glider cannot escape the bounds of the film screen; it crashes and burns, showing us again that reality of art is finite. But the implied hope I think is that the audience will be provoked, and move "skyward" by other means. Terayama was acknowledging that his art was a seed that needed minds to take root.

Lastly, the film has a really cool final credit sequence. There are no names given (at least not on the version I saw). It is merely a long dolly past all of the faces that appeared in the film. Long ago, I saw a student film titled "Morbidezza." The term originated during the Renaissance and described an extreme delicacy in the rendering of human fleshtones. In that film, the filmmaker gathered his family around a dinner table and had them hold a pose for 10 minutes, then slowly tracked over all of their faces. In Easy Rider also, Dennis Hopper films this type of "morbidezza" sequence (to re-appropriate the term). The scene takes place in the hippie commune, during a prayer of thanks for the food they have struggled to farm. I always thought it was astoundingly sensitive and real, and kind of epitomizes a film which has become a time capsule of a specific generational attitude. In Terayama's hands the shot is equally effective, especially following his character's overt bids for anonymity, which the shot proceeds to disprove. "I am no one." "You will forget us," the narrator says. These words lead into the shot, tracking across dozens of faces, in full silence, re-familiarizing the audience with every single cast member of the past two and a half hours. In their plainness and silence, they are rendered un-anonymous. All of their individual characteristics are thrown into relief and we can stare directly into their eyes and see each living soul that played a role in creating this work. It reminds us that each of us has the power to be creative and collaborative in an infinite variety of ways.



One further note -- the last face is that of Akihiro Miwa, a famous drag performer in Japan who has a small part in the film. I really loved Kuro Bara no Yakata (Black Rose Mansion), so it was a surprise pleasure to see him pop up in another film.


A reviewer on IMDB wrote that this was the "strangest" and "best" Japanese film they had ever seen. I would describe it as neither, but it's worth checking out if you can find a copy or catch a screening.