Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971) — watch online on iFILM: the debut feature by Japanese avant-garde director Shuji Terayama.

A young man in Tokyo can't escape his family and can't find a reason to stay. His grandmother is slipping away, his sister is sealed inside her own world, his father's notion of fatherhood is blunt and humiliating. Terayama doesn't build a conventional story around this — he fragments it into street footage, direct-address monologues, and surreal ruptures that read less like a film than like a manifesto in motion. The result is a snapshot of Japan between two eras, when the old order had cracked and the new one hadn't arrived.

Stream Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971) on iFILM — disorienting in the best sense, and unlike anything else made that year.