Why Did ATG End? With Full Financing, ATG Ceased to Be ATG

When a culture comes to an end, almost no one notices.

In 1974, the Art Theatre Guild, ATG, released two masterpieces, Shuji Terayama’s Pastoral Hide and Seek and Kazuo Kuroki’s Ryoma Ansatsu, whose title means “The Assassination of Ryoma.” They marked the summit of the ATG method and, at the same time, the end of an era.

That same year, the Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka, ATG’s base, or rather the base of an entire era, came to the end of its role, twelve years after it opened in 1962. It began with the resignation of its general manager, Kinshiro Kuzui, who stepped down because the theater was turning from a place that put questions to the world into an ordinary commercial cinema. Around the same time, ATG stopped distributing foreign art films.

Import, nurture, produce. The first of those three pillars was quietly pulled away.

Why did the fever cool? The reason is plain. The audience that carried those questions had disappeared. In the first installment of this series, I wrote that what set the 1960s in motion was an enormous sense of defeat. What, then, dealt that season its final blow?

It was not repression but collapse from within. In the same year that ATG came to an end, a symbolic event took place, the United Red Army affair of 1972. At their mountain bases, members killed their own comrades in the name of sokatsu, “self-criticism,” and then came the Asama-Sanso incident. Television broadcast it all day long, and the whole of Japan watched. In that moment, a heavy fact settled on top of the defeat of having failed to change the world through politics. Those who had tried to change it had killed their own.

Then, in 1973, came the oil shock. High growth was over, and the mood of the streets changed completely. Why do people die? What am I? Those questions were no longer spoken aloud. It was in these few years that the word shirake, a jaded, disengaged indifference, became the name of a generation.

Once the young people carrying those questions were gone from the streets, a cinema that answered to those questions could no longer survive, and the radical, avant-garde, experimental works that gave rise to the questions in the first place lost their reason to exist. ATG’s decline was, in fact, this very history.

Yet on February 12 of that same year, 1974, when Shinjuku Bunka disappeared, a screening movement began at Iwanami Hall in Jinbocho. The person involved this time, too, was Kashiko Kawakita. Together with Etsuko Takano, the hall’s general manager, she launched Equipe de Cinema, and its first program was Apur Sansar (1959), The World of Apu, by the Indian director Satyajit Ray.

The fire had moved from Shinjuku to Jinbocho.

This movement became the source of what would later be called mini theaters. In 1981, Cinema Square Tokyu opened in Shinjuku, followed by Eurospace the next year and Cine Vivant Roppongi the year after that. In 1980s Tokyo, flush with a booming economy, small cinemas were born one after another. It shows how deeply a person like Kashiko Kawakita sustained the film culture of Japan.

ATG, meanwhile, retreated inch by inch throughout the 1970s. Some of its films won rave reviews from critics and still drew no audiences, its member theaters dwindled, and its finances only grew tighter. In the early 1970s, riding the porn boom of the day, so-called art porn woven through with ideas did well at the box office, among them Akio Jissoji’s Mujo (1970) and Mandala (1971) and Koji Wakamatsu’s Ecstasy of the Angels (1972).

In 1979, Taneo Iseki, the company’s president since its founding, stepped down, and Shiro Sasaki took over.

The new president announced a groundbreaking policy. A director’s share of the cost could be 50 percent, or even 10 percent, and if the director had no money, ATG would pay for everything. The production budget was also raised from 30 million yen to 35 million. At first glance, it looks as though ATG had become kinder to filmmakers. I believe, however, that this was the moment ATG ceased to be ATG.

ATG’s second article, “no interference whatsoever,” did not rest on goodwill alone. Because the filmmakers put up half the money, ATG had no standing to meddle in the first place. Just as Shohei Imamura and Kihachi Okamoto mortgaged their homes to keep making films, the people doing the making were staking their lives on it. It was that equality which upheld the miracle of non-interference. The moment ATG became the party paying for everything, it became just another production company.

Still, it is also true that new shoots grew from here. Under Sasaki, ATG actively took on young directors who had come out of independent film and Roman Porno, and celebrated filmmakers emerged one after another, Kazuki Omori with Disciples of Hippocrates (1980), Nobuhiko Obayashi with I Are You, You Am Me (1982), and Yoshimitsu Morita with The Family Game (1983).

ATG’s style had clearly changed. Yet the real problem lay elsewhere. ATG’s inventions had become the industry’s common sense.

In 1977, Pia launched an exhibition of self-produced films, which later became the PFF, the Pia Film Festival. In 1979, Toei opened its doors to directors from outside the company, with a policy of splitting production costs down the middle. Low budgets, young directors, a first feature. What only ATG had been doing, the major studios copied and began to do themselves.

A movement does not always end in defeat. It can also end by winning and being absorbed, and that was how ATG’s final years came to a close. A culture had been absorbed and digested by commerce.

Then, in 1992, came Kaneto Shindo’s The Strange Tale of Oyuki. It would be ATG’s last film. The company lay dormant for the next twenty-six years until, on November 1, 2018, it was absorbed into Toho in a merger and disappeared. In the meantime, in 1993, Kashiko Kawakita had died.

So what did ATG leave behind?

It left people. Nagisa Oshima, Toshio Matsumoto, Yoshishige Yoshida, Kazuhiko Hasegawa, and Yoshimitsu Morita. The mere fact that they passed through that place is itself the backbone of Japanese cinema.

And it left words. Art Theatre, the magazine sold only at its theaters, carried complete screenplays and criticism, and it turned audiences who watched and consumed films into people who read, thought, and argued, and then carried them one step further, into making films of their own.

Above all, it left a system. Put up only half the money, and never say a word about the work, but in exchange always provide a place to show it. Not a lavish budget, and not a polished system for discovering talent. Filmmakers staked half of themselves, and grown-ups quietly offered a place. With that alone, Japanese cinema rose to those heights.

Today, we look out on a different landscape. Everyone has a camera in hand, and the places to show work seem infinite. Yet when I look at ATG, I feel that something has gone decisively wrong. The true legacy ATG left behind remains with us still, as a question as fierce and as radical as ever.

Shinjuku 3-chome, next to Isetan. Culture is born in small places and ends quietly. The building that defined an era is gone. But we must not forget that there, young people carrying an anger with nowhere to go and the grown-ups around them became accomplices.

Offer works that make people think, kindle the will to create, put up half the money, keep out of the way, and keep a place open. Those who watch become people who think, and then people who make. That chain is Japanese culture. What ATG left behind was, perhaps, not films so much as a way of being.

Does the creativity of today carry even a little of this spirit? Or are we talking about “creativity” without even knowing this history? Kinshiro Kuzui left behind certain words when he passed from this world. Let me close with them.

“You know, my dream was always that the next artists would be born from among the audience of the Art Theatre.”