Why the Art Theatre Guild Was Born｜The Defeat of Anpo and Kashiko Kawakita

Art film. Most people are unfamiliar with it as a genre, and no wonder, since art film was a single flower that bloomed in the vortex of a particular era and was then swept away by a muddy torrent.

When and where was that “particular era,” and what happened in it? This time, I want to introduce the fascinating world of art film.

Art films generally come with the label “difficult.” That difficulty does not exist because filmmakers deliberately set out to make obscure work, nor because the films were merely dressed up as engaging with the spirit peculiar to their time. It exists because they emerged from inside the era itself. Trying to “understand” an art film is therefore futile, meaningless, and worthless, because that is not where its true value lies. This is where we have to stand.

So when and where did art film flower in Japan, and what was happening at the time? The answer is the 1960s.

The 1960s were an era that began in defeat. There were the Anpo protests against the security treaty with the United States. Hundreds of thousands of people surrounded the National Diet, a female student named Michiko Kanba died in the turmoil of the demonstrations, and the treaty passed anyway. Those who lived through that time began the sixties with an enormous defeat.

They had believed that politics could change the world, and it could not. Faced with that reality, young people felt a hole open up in their hearts, one that neither street slogans nor marches in locked arms could fill, because what lay at its bottom were raw questions buried deeper still.

Why do people die, and why do they live? What is meaning? Can I truly meet another person? Is there a god? What will become of the world? Carrying questions that politics had failed to answer, with nowhere left to go, young people happened at that very moment upon art film in dim movie theaters.

The stage for art film, however, did not appear by itself. Behind it lay a crucial mechanism of film distribution at the time, the government quota system. It may be hard to imagine now, when streaming lets us consume countless films, but back then the import of foreign films was directed by the government, which fixed for each company how many foreign titles it could handle in a year.

Naturally, under such a system, imports concentrated on profitable entertainment blockbusters. In those days, who would spend a precious slot on a difficult art film? From the standpoint of profit, that attitude was only to be expected.

But someone appeared who drew on the energy of the young people of the new era and argued for the importance of opening up new possibilities for cinema. It was Kashiko Kawakita, whom I introduced recently.

Kawakita, who had spent years bringing European masterpieces to Japan, took the lead and, following the art theater movement then underway in the United States, set out to build a system devoted to screening art films. Iwao Mori, the vice president of Toho, was moved by her vision and provided funding and theaters, and on November 15, 1961, the legendary Art Theatre Guild of Japan, known as ATG, was born. Had Kawakita not acted, and had Mori not gladly offered Toho’s money and distribution network, ATG would never have come into being, and art film would never have resonated in Japan. Art film was a path opened by people whose lives had been shaped by falling in love with cinema, and for us it is a memory of that time.

On April 20 of the following year, 1962, ATG began screenings at a handful of theaters, among them the Shinjuku Bunka and the Nichigeki Bunka. Its memorable first release was Mother Joan of the Angels (1961), by Jerzy Kawalerowicz of Poland.

What, then, was so brilliant about this system? The films were chosen by a selection committee made up of critics. In other words, the choice turned not on whether a film would make money but on whether it was artistically genuine. People with discerning eyes who truly loved cinema came together to import and screen only genuine sensibility and expression, and so to inspire the young Japanese filmmakers who encountered the real thing.

The greatest obstacle, the import quota, was overcome as well. Kawakita’s vision moved the industry, and other companies, starting with Towa, passed some of their own allocations over to ATG. Because the companies pooled their slots, ATG was able to bring to Japan, one after another, the most advanced art films (and experimental films) of the day, by Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, and others.

Film companies set moneymaking aside for a moment and joined hands to show good films to young people. Compared with today’s corporations, which think only of their shareholders and of protecting themselves, it seems like a miracle. The fervor of young people left with nowhere to go by a season of politics and defeat found a home in Kashiko Kawakita and, for a single moment, moved the very machinery of an industry. The rise of art film, in other words, happened when the hunger of the young and the complicity of adults with heart met at this one point. These were not merely difficult films. They were, unmistakably, a culture. Where in the world today, in Japan or anywhere else, is such a point of intersection to be found? The existence of ATG presses that question upon us.

And in every age, culture is born in a small place, gets underway, and quietly comes to an end. Art film was no exception. Its current was born in one crucial place and grew into a powerful culture.

That place was Shinjuku.

Tear gas and wooden staves, the heat of underground theaters, and at the very center of it all, the birth of art film. Next time, I will write about ATG as a culture that took shape in Shinjuku.