Combining raw discomfort and unexpected beauty, Terayama’s first feature follows socioeconomically marginalized Eimei, who rages against conservative, “efficient,” and unjust systems that bar him from following his dreams. The subsequent rallies read as documents of an anarchist moment in Japanese history—seen through poetically placed colored gels and jaunty camera angles with graffitied literary references littering the streets. Meanwhile, if Eimei’s prospects seem bleak, those for women are worse. Terayama closes in on the catastrophic gulf between male projections of female experience and women’s actual experience through sexualized and violent images—which may or may not operate by the same logic they critique.

Opening with darkness and a whirring that could be either a camera or a projector, the film inserts us between its production and its consumption. Eimei confronts us in this darkness: “What the hell are you doing?” Later, he asks for the studio lights to be switched on. Images of the cast without costume scroll instead of credits. Challenging audience passivity through such reflexivity, Terayama relates the film to its book and theatrical versions, and his concurrent experiments in expanded cinema. Throw Away Your Books ends with Eimei bidding farewell to film—“Sayonara eiga!”—but Terayama’s images stay with us.