This is Where Rhodes Jumped!

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971) - Terayama




A college student talks to the camera in the beginning, that we the audience are sitting here doing nothing. He starts smoking, because he is free. We can't because we are not. Terayama was directly addressing young moviegoers in Japan in the late 60s early 70s, in the height of Vietnam War, when the US was using Japan as a one big military base. He addresses the audience time and time again, not so subtly- "I had a lizard I kept in a Coca Cola bottle. I fed it and it grew. It got too big and I couldn't get it out of the bottle. After years of humiliation, do you have to guts to stand up for yourself, Japan?," "This is where Rhodes jumped!" and so on and so forth. Throw Away also highlights the post-war dysfunctional Japanese family- senile granny is a shoplifter and liar, war criminal father is a pervert and a wimp, once innocent younger sister now nothing but a whore in training (after a gang rape in a soccer team's locker room). With the hodge-podge visual style and Holy Mountain style conclusion ('This is all movie, it's all bullshit'), Throw Away Your Books is kind of a let down. Surely the movie is filled with ideas and messages to the brim and extremely playful. But like Jodorowsky who incidentally was making films around the same time and shares the same experimental theater background with Terayama, it is more of the same as Pastoral. So unfortunately the first impression/impact isn't there anymore. I guess I gotta move on to Wakamatsu and Yoshida.

Subjective Memories

Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974) - Terayama







Terayama's take on the subjective nature of memories and time is a dazzling array of surrealistic whimsy. Pastoral takes place in a small mountain village and concentrates on core group of people- a 15 year old schoolboy and his pestering, war-widowed mother, an unhappy housewife next door, a village girl with an illegitimate newborn baby and a circus woman with an inflatable suit. Faces of the boy and his mother's as well as some other characters' are painted white, as if they are some sort of disclaimer, that they are fictional characters. The boy's yearning to leave his home and be free of his mother, as well as burgeoning sexuality is presented with constant mention of trains and train tracks. The film is full of contrasts : the villagers are stuck in the past, oblivious of the fast changing society elsewhere.

Then the film becomes metaphysical, movie within a movie half way. But it's not all celebration of the creative minds like Fellini's 8 1/2. As the lights come on in the screen room, the director (or an actor playing one) discusses the subjective nature of memories. He is conflicted as to how to proceed. On one hand, he feels exploitative, on the other, the film is an embellishment of memories. It's the director's love/hate relationship with Japanese past full in display and is pretty dark: as the director contemplates his existence, he proposes to kill his mother when confronted with his younger self, wondering how it would've turned out if he were never born or became someone else.

Pastoral is a very Japanese film, a reflection of changing times still under the shadows of its war past. I loved its messy lyricism and playfulness. More Terayama films are in order.