ATG's Ten-Million-Yen Films｜Half the Money, and Three Clauses That Promised Never to Interfere

Perhaps the time had come not only to import films but to make them ourselves. That idea at ATG, born of the success of Yukio Mishima’s Patriotism (1966), became reality the following year, 1967, in an unexpected form.

It began with Shohei Imamura, who had made his name at Nikkatsu. Tired of being told how to spend his budgets and whom to cast, and of seeing his avant-garde projects turned down, he gave up on the major studios and in March 1966 founded an independent production company with himself at its head. From there he brought a single project to ATG.

The idea was A Man Vanishes (1967). The film would follow a woman as she walked the length of Japan searching for her missing fiancé, but the actor Shigeru Tsuyuguchi would accompany her, and the process of the search itself would become the film. Somewhere along the way, no one could tell any longer whether it was a record of fact or a fiction.

No major film company would ever have approved a project like that. Only ATG did. Ever since founding his own company, Imamura had mortgaged his house for every film to raise the budget, then recouped the costs and paid off the mortgage, working in cycles of about three years. He was a big man with a big appetite, yet he was perfectly willing to go without food if that was what it took to make a film. He was a man who, quite literally, staked everything on cinema.

Won over by the hungry, glittering eyes of this big man and the fierce heat he gave off, ATG proposed a scheme. ATG would put in five million yen, Imamura Productions would put in five million yen, and together they would make a film for ten million. ATG had devised a way, by splitting the cost down the middle, to let individuals and independent companies make the films they wanted to make. On top of that, ATG would take on the distribution.

At the time, it was taken for granted that even a low-budget feature film cost thirty million yen. Whether a film could be shot for ten million, and whether an avant-garde, experimental film at that could earn its money back, was a gamble no one could call. But in this world you know nothing until you try, and ATG had that spirit.

So the phrase “ten-million-yen film” was born. The scheme, which came to be called the ATG method, consisted of three clauses.

One, of the ten-million-yen production budget, ATG provides half, or five million yen.
Two, ATG reviews the project at the planning stage and does not interfere with production in any way.
Three, the film is screened at ATG’s theaters, in principle for one month.

It was the second clause that was decisive. Normally, whoever puts up the money gets a say. That is common sense in any industry. Cast this actor, the script isn’t working, and so on. And if you were putting up a full half of the money, the world would assume as a matter of course that you had every right to step in. Yet once ATG had approved a project, it said nothing. It did not come to the set. It made no demands about the edit. It did not frown at the preview screening. Whether the film was a huge hit or a total flop, it said nothing.

Let the makers make exactly what they want to make, and take full responsibility for giving that expression a place to be shown. Nothing like it had ever happened in the history of cinema.

It is surely not meaningless for us today to ask how this was possible. The answer is that the people who created ATG had not come together to make money in the first place. As we have seen in earlier issues, ATG was a gathering of people who shared the conviction of Kashiko Kawakita, and it had begun as an organization in which critics chose the films to be screened.

They wanted to bring art films chosen with genuine sensibility to young people in Japan, and one day to see those young people make films of their own. That first conviction of good-hearted adults who had set profit aside held firm, unchanged, when they turned to production. Looking back from today, it can only be called a miracle.

And this scheme set free the people who had been stifled within the established film world.

By then Japanese cinema had entered its decline. Television was spreading, audiences were shrinking, and the studio system had begun to creak. Young talents who had left Shochiku, such as Nagisa Oshima, Yoshishige Yoshida, and Masahiro Shinoda, had lost their places to make films and were scraping by on film criticism.

Young people with nowhere to go, and gifted filmmakers with nowhere to go. When the two crossed paths in Shinjuku, a chemical reaction no one could have named took place. What ATG offered was not lavish funding but complete freedom in exchange for very little money. Yet those who lived through the turmoil of a violent era and burned to express themselves were not looking for a film like Akira Kurosawa’s, made on an ample budget. They were looking for the chance to express themselves from the heart, even on a low budget, and to reach the people who watched. And ATG was there.

So an eruption began from a small theater in Shinjuku.

First came Nagisa Oshima’s Death by Hanging (1968). Through a young Zainichi Korean man who is hanged yet does not die, the film relentlessly interrogated the violence of the state. It was screened at Cannes and set off an Oshima boom abroad. This was the first feature film made under the ATG method, and everyone knows how Oshima went on to become a figure of world stature. The same year saw the release of Kihachi Okamoto’s The Human Bullet (1968) and Susumu Hani’s Hatsukoi Jigokuhen (1968), whose title means “first love, the inferno chapter.”

In 1969 Toshio Matsumoto’s legendary Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) appeared. It moved the framework of Greek tragedy into the gay bars of Shinjuku, cast the now-legendary Peter in the lead while he was still an amateur, and dared to let the film crew appear on screen and the actors step out of character to talk about their roles. The same year saw the release of Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide (1969) and Oshima’s Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1969).

With the arrival of 1970 came the release of Yoshishige Yoshida’s Eros Plus Massacre (1970), which delivers the overwhelming experience of the Taisho-era anarchist Sakae Osugi and the young people of 1969 melting into one another in white light. The crowning works came in 1974 with Shuji Terayama’s Pastoral (1974), whose English release carries the subtitle To Die in the Country, and Kazuo Kuroki’s Ryoma Ansatsu (1974), “the assassination of Ryoma.”

Because the constraints were so tight, the films grew ever more radical and the methods of making them ever more experimental. If there was no money, those who made them had no choice but to solve their problems with ideas, and that single fact produced the uncanny density of the era. It was probably so full of chaos and heat that even the people at its center could not tell what was happening. This was expression that could never have been born in any other time, for the era had entered the turbulent years of the student movement. And it ended in defeat.

ATG also published a magazine, Art Theatre, for each film it released. Each issue carried the complete screenplay along with critical essays and was sold only at the theaters, which was a groundbreaking idea. ATG, in other words, kept telling not only the makers but also the audience about the joy of creating. To be satisfied merely by watching is consumption, but ATG put before the world a cycle in which watching leads on to creating.

ATG’s Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka was “a place where it doesn’t end with watching.” The audience changed from receivers into people who read, think, and argue.

In fact, Toshio Matsumoto and Yoshishige Yoshida had graduated from the University of Tokyo and Nagisa Oshima from Kyoto University. They were what we would now call the elite, and since the early 1960s they had also made their names as sharp-edged voices in film criticism. They read, thought, and argued for themselves, and by running that cycle at high speed they became the core that drove ATG to be ever more radical. The adults who gave them a home could not, of course, keep up with the ideas of these young men. Yet they watched over them without saying a word, and took it on themselves only to create the opportunities. In this way, what the young could not put into words was carried all the way through to finished work and delivered to an audience.

Screenings, theater, criticism, and production. All four were in motion at the same time in a single building in Shinjuku 3-chome, and that is why art film was able to become culture.

And ATG did one more thing. It let newcomers make their first films.

Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s The Youth Killer (1976) was produced by his mentor, Shohei Imamura, who had him research an actual case of a son who killed his parents down to the last detail. A full year passed between the decision to make the film and the first day of shooting. This debut feature swept the Kinema Junpo awards, taking first place in the Best Ten along with best director, best screenplay, best actor, and best actress.

A newcomer’s debut stood at the summit of Japanese cinema that year. After it, the first films of the directors who would shape Japanese cinema in the 1980s, Kazuki Omori, Kichitaro Negishi, Kazuyuki Izutsu, and Yoshimitsu Morita, came out of ATG one after another.

ATG was born as a company that imported art films, became a company that made them, and in the end became a place that gave birth to the people who make them. Yet culture is born in small places, and it always ends quietly.

Next time, I will look at the years when this heat receded, and at what ATG left behind.