Kashiko Kawakita Put "Conveying" into Practice Through Film Preservation and the Founding of ATG

Last time, I wrote about Kashiko Kawakita, who carried out a mission not of “making” films but of “conveying” them, bringing one Japanese film after another before the world. The first thing I want to say is that understanding her relationship with the film world is far from irrelevant to us. On the contrary, I feel it matters more than ever now that “making” and “conveying” are no longer separate. The spread of AI and no-code tools keeps dissolving the boundary between the two, and making has opened up to everyone. There is a pitfall here, though. Making has become easy, but conveying has not changed in the slightest.

When production is democratized, human value comes to rest in what AI cannot replace, namely what to make, why to make it, and whom to deliver it to. Whether or not one understands what this means is the key to surviving in the coming age.

Looked at calmly, what is happening now is a flood of shoddy mass production. Because the line between professional and amateur suddenly vanished from every kind of content, it has become normal for outsiders to take on professional work almost overnight. Yet only a few actually stand in such positions, and most people have become parts in a machine that mass-produces information without meaning or value.

Why on earth does this happen? Making has become easy, but anything that is made always has someone it is meant to reach. For some reason, many people do not see this obvious fact, and so we are now awash in self-centered content, churned out by people lost in production with no recipient in sight.

Delivering what one has made always involves the act of conveying. This is something a broad span of generations, my own included, for whom social media became universal, tends to forget. Put the other way around, understanding it can become a weapon for standing out. Personally, I see a fault line around the late 1990s. Many people born in the mid to late 1980s understand this, but the younger the generation, the thinner that understanding becomes.

You make it yourself, and you convey it yourself. But conveying is truly difficult, because it takes years of facing the people you are giving to, sincerely and without pause, and of cultivating their trust. The generation shaped by social media cannot cope with that linear axis of time measured in years. Production has become nonlinear, but conveying remains linear and always will. Here a boundary line has been drawn.

Looking back on my own life, I believe that noticing this and learning it requires meeting good people. It begins with seeking out those who actually do it, going to where they are, and learning a great deal from them. Seen in the context of film history, Kashiko Kawakita stands out as a great light.

While carrying out her mission of conveying Japanese films to the world and delivering them there, she went on to take up two major undertakings. The first was the preservation of film. Preservation is taken for granted today, but the Japanese film industry of the time had no notion of it. A new direction took shape within her, moving beyond conveying what had been made to preserving what had been conveyed for generations to come.

But the Japanese film industry would not budge. So she joined forces with Henri Langlois, France’s foremost figure in film preservation, who had founded the archive known as the Cinémathèque Française with funding from the government. She connected Japan to the world of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and kept arguing for the importance of preserving film, work that contributed greatly to what is now the National Film Archive of Japan.

The other undertaking was a movement to screen art films. As I mentioned last time, Towa Shoji, the company the Kawakitas had founded as husband and wife, had excelled since before the war at importing and screening European art films. Drawing on that expertise, she now set out to root art films in postwar Japanese society and to get Japanese filmmakers making them in earnest.

By the 1960s, Europe and America already had cinemas devoted to art films, known as art theaters, and Kashiko Kawakita wished to create them in Japan as well. So she founded an association of her own, which she named the “Japan Art Theater Movement Society.”

This move was closely tied to the circumstances of Japanese society at the time. Because of a shortage of foreign currency, film imports were tightly restricted, and highly artistic works were shunned as unprofitable.

To realize her hope that the Japanese, too, would make art films, the art films already being screened in Europe and America first had to come in, or nothing could move forward. Breaking through that wall required someone who could negotiate directly with foreign producers and distributors, choose the films, add the subtitles, and command international trust. No one was better suited to that role than she was.

Kashiko Kawakita drew on the network she had built in the international film world and offered her knowledge unstintingly to young Japanese filmmakers. And so, in November 1961, the Art Theatre Guild, known as ATG, was born.

Iwao Mori, the vice president of Toho, who shared the Kawakitas’ vision, became the pivot. He secured the cooperation of the theaters connected to Toho, and Toho also put up most of the capital. Taneo Iseki, an acquaintance of Mori’s and the president of Sanwa Kogyo, a company in the Toho group, became ATG’s president, and the guild set off on a thoroughly solid footing.

ATG’s first period, roughly 1961–67, was one of thorough input. It did nothing but import European and American art films and keep screening them. The experimental, rebellious spirit of those films caught the hearts of a certain number of young people. After all, this was an era when young people seething with frustration teemed in the cities, and the new sensibility of art film had an immense influence on young filmmakers.

Alongside this thorough input, ATG proposed a groundbreaking arrangement to give Japanese filmmakers, too, a chance to make art films. With production costs capped at ten million yen, ATG would put up half, and the filmmakers would raise the other half themselves.

At the time, art films were thought to make no money, so the major studios would not take them on. But this was an era when edgy underground artists were surfacing one after another, and it became the first decisive moment in the democratization of film.

There is far more to say about ATG than I can say here. For now, it seems to me more important than ever to learn once again from Kashiko Kawakita the importance of “conveying,” in film and well beyond it. Now that everyone has become a maker, the question is whether you know how to convey. That is where the next dividing line has quietly been laid.