Avant-garde Narrative and Youth Expression under Experimental Audiovisual Aesthetics: A Study of Shuji Terayama’s Film Art

Taking Throw Away Your Books and Rally in the Streets as an Example

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-593-5_60How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Throw Away Your Books; Rally in the Streets; Shuji Terayama; audiovisual language; youth dilemma; experimental cinema

Abstract

In the history of Japanese experimental cinema, Shuji Terayama’s film Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets is highly emblematic. Through bold color design, fragmented narrative structures, and subversive audiovisual expressions, the film reveals the ideological rebellion and spiritual dilemmas of youth under the repressive order of postwar Japanese society. This paper primarily examines the film’s audiovisual language, integrating an exploration of thematic content with analyses of costume, props, and setting. It comprehensively investigates how cinematic techniques—such as camera work, sound, and color—are employed to represent, deconstruct, and articulate the director’s critique of traditional Japanese family ethics, the educational system, social discipline, and the transformations of the postwar era. Furthermore, it explores how experimental cinema achieves a profound synthesis of form and ideological expression through extreme audiovisual language.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yichi Zhang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/30
TI  - Avant-garde Narrative and Youth Expression under Experimental Audiovisual Aesthetics: A Study of Shuji Terayama’s Film Art
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 5th International Conference on Humanities, Wisdom Education and Service Management (HWESM 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 557
EP  - 564
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-593-5_60
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-593-5_60
ID  - Zhang2026
ER  -