The Independent Productions Fought Not for the Freedom to Make Films but for the Freedom to Have Them Shown

Last week I wrote about how Toho, just after Japan’s defeat, was drawn into the largest labor dispute of the postwar era. Why, then, did a labor dispute in the film industry require the US military to be sent in?

The reason was the Red Purge. As the Cold War intensified, the occupying authority, GHQ, had come to see the growth of communist forces in Japan as a threat. Then, in 1950, the Korean War broke out. When the occupation shifted its aim from complete control of Japan to holding back communist forces within the country, postwar history, in the true sense, began.

And the film world, as it happens, had historically been home to a great many Reds. On orders from the occupation, the Japanese government, the business world, and the right wing joined forces to crack down on members of the Japanese Communist Party and their sympathizers, and large-scale purges from public office and repressive dismissals followed one after another. In the midst of this, Communist Party members and the filmmakers around them were driven out of the Japanese film industry in quick succession. Radical filmmakers such as Satsuo Yamamoto, Tadashi Imai, Fumio Kamei, and Takero Ito found themselves forced out of the studios.

But the vitality of the Japanese in those days was something else. In that same year, the filmmakers expelled from the studios founded Shinsei Eigasha, the New Star Film Company. Its money, in fact, came from Toho. With the 15 million yen that Toho had paid to settle the dispute, filmmakers full of the spirit of resistance struck out on their own.

What is more, Boryoku no Machi (1950), “Town of Violence,” which Satsuo Yamamoto made with that money, earned more at the box office than it had cost to produce. This was because the close-knit networks of Communist Party members were mobilized in full. After it came Tadashi Imai’s And Yet We Live (1951), Yamamoto’s Shinku Chitai (1952), “Vacuum Zone,” and other robust films of social conscience, one after another, from outside the major studios.

Around the same time, others left the studios by an entirely different route.

The screenwriter Kaneto Shindo, who later became a director himself, and the director Kozaburo Yoshimura were known at Shochiku as a celebrated partnership. But the three films they made in 1949 failed at the box office, Shochiku refused to produce their next picture, and the company went on to press them to break up the partnership. In March 1950, the two left Shochiku and, with the producer Toshio Itoya, the actor Taiji Tonoyama, and others, founded Kindai Eiga Kyokai, the Modern Film Association.

They left not over ideology or repression but because their projects would not get through. Yet this spirit of making films on their own was the real force that sustained the filmmakers of that time. Shindo went on to release Children of Hiroshima (1952). Because Daiei balked at the project, it became an independent production and reached audiences through Hokusei’s distribution. Its star, Nobuko Otowa, left Daiei for the sake of this film.

A Red Purge serving the occupation’s purposes became entangled with the interests of studios cowed by sanctions, and filmmakers with a rebellious spirit began, one after another, to open their own paths to independence. When the term “independent production” took root in Japanese cinema in the early 1950s, it was not just a passing trend. It was a true symbol of the age.

The term itself had existed before the war, though. There was Makino Production, founded by Shozo Makino, who built the very skeleton of Japanese cinema, and there were the independent productions of Tsumasaburo Bando and Chiezo Kataoka, stars so great they were called “emperors.” With the arrival of the talkies, however, the cost of equipment mounted, and these companies were absorbed by the large studios.

The postwar version meant something different. “Independence” here meant independence from big business. It was a “no” flung in the face of political pressure and occupation, creation at the risk, quite literally, of one’s life. True creative work was nothing like the lukewarm thing it is today. One false step and you fell into the abyss of death, and it was a harsh world in which only those who came back from that edge could go on to what came next.

Yet within only a few years this movement too began to ebb. The reason was neither ideology nor talent. As I wrote last week, the major studios had the theaters in their grip. There was, in short, nowhere to show the films.

In this period, an independent production could somehow manage to make a film. You raised donations, the actors appeared without pay, and you scraped the equipment together. But where were you to show the finished film to an audience? This, in fact, was the greatest barrier in the whole history of film production. Theaters across the country were tied into the studios’ chains, and their programs were filled with each studio’s own pictures. Hardly any theater would give even a week to a film from an independent production.

So they relied on independent screenings organized by labor unions and film circles, showing their films in community halls, factory canteens, and school auditoriums. It was a movement of high ideals, but it was not a business, and it could not sustain itself. Above all, with no prospect of recovering their costs, they could not put together the next film. On top of that, from around the 1950s, yakuza organizations across the country, mobilized by the right wing (Yoshio Kodama) at the wishes of the occupation, had become involved in film exhibition, and so the chance that films from the communist camp would be screened shrank almost to nothing.

Foremost among them, rising to prominence, was the Yamaguchi-gumi, led by its third boss, Kazuo Taoka.

From around 1954, once the majors had perfected their system of mass production, the independent production movement quietly faded, and many directors, worn down in part by the severe social repression they had endured, went back to working for the majors. Kindai Eiga Kyokai survived only because Kaneto Shindo wrote screenplays in great numbers for the majors and used those earnings to keep making the association’s own films.

Seen this far, the question that runs beneath the history of Japanese cinema seems to narrow down to a single one.

It was not about the freedom to make films. It was a fight over the freedom to have them shown. This would come to matter, at a deep level, later on as well.

As long as production, distribution, and exhibition are monopolized along a single line, nothing that those outside the line make, whatever it may be, will ever reach an audience. This was the enormous wall that the independent productions ran into first, and the wall would go on standing through the sixties and the seventies, changing its shape as it went.

There was no way then, as there is now, to release your own film on YouTube or Amazon Prime. It was because those who came before us kept fighting fiercely for the freedom to be shown, in the thick of all that, that cinema was in deadly earnest. Put the other way around, once independent production becomes ordinary and the freedom to screen films has been won, cinema loses its allure. This structural contradiction seems self-evident when you look at people today, steeped in what passes for the freedom of streaming.

This is where the Art Theatre Guild (ATG), which I wrote about before, comes in. Why did ATG take the trouble to write into its third article the clause that every film “will be screened for one full month without fail”? The meaning of that single line should finally become clear here.

Next time, I will look at how the filmmakers of the sixties took on this wall. Having passed beyond the Red Purge and entered in earnest the season of struggle, independent production was raised to a new dimension.