Independent Films of Japan.

The first independent productions (dokuritsu puro) appeared in the 1920s when directors as well as actors left the studios in order to establish their own companies. Theirs was a deliberate reaction against the studio system that had developed since the 1910s and in this the dokuritsu puro differed from the various earlier small production companies. Some became independent for artistic reasons, e.g. Teinosuke Kinugasa, who wanted to direct his ambitious masterpiece A Page of Madness (Kurutta Ippeiji, 1926), one of the most important avant-garde films of all times. Kinugasa would not have been able to realize this project within the studio system. In most cases, however, it was economic considerations, which prompted actors and directors to establish their own companies. The stars who were responsible for most of the studios' income began to demand a share in the profits. Tsumasaburo Bando and Chiezo Kataoka, the major stars of the popular jidai geki, were able to make more money by leaving the studio. Also, they were no longer dependent on a single employer, they now had the choice. This brought them higher salaries and greater freedom, but they still depended on the studios, just as the studios were dependent on the popularity of their stars.
Because of increasing centralization many of these independent production companies were supplanted by the big studios in the 1930s. In 1941, the government ordered all movie companies to merge into the three blocks Shochiku, Toho and the newly established Daiei. Thus the first phase of independent productions came to an end.
In the late 1940s there was a second wave of independent production companies, this time for political reasons. After the war, the studios had to conform to the new demands of the allied occupation forces headed by the United States. They also had to deal with the trade unions that were established under the influence of the allies. The studios were under an enormous amount of pressure from these trade unions. Toho, for instance, was shaken by three major strikes, which almost ruined the studio. Later on, during the so-called Red Purge, Toho and the other studios took their revenge by firing undesirable, i.e. left-wing artists.
The outbreak of the Cold War led to a change in occupation policies and to the suppression of the communist-dominated trade unions. In 1950, members and sympathisers of the Communist Party were removed first from official positions and later from private companies by order of General MacArthur. Altogether there were 336 people in the film industry who lost their jobs in this way. Many left-wing directors such as Satsuo Yamamoto, Tadashi Imai and Kaneto Shindo therefore established their own production companies. With the backing of the trade unions as well as the Communist Party they made films about the proletariat and the citizens' struggle against the bureaucracy and the state in which they exposed the contradictions within Japanese post-war society. This second phase of independent cinema did not last very long, however. The studios soon regained their old strength and quickly got rid of the competition.
In the 1920s when studios had suffered from the lack of capital as well as in the late 1940s, independent production companies profited from the big studios' weakness. They successfully occupied certain gaps in the market, but were often dependent on the studios either as sub-contractors or because they had to fill out their repertoire. Because of the block-booking system the studios had to constantly supply their cinemas with new films. If they could not keep up on their own, they had independently produced films to fall back on. However, in the 1950s, when the studios flourished, there was hardly room for independent films. In 1959, when the Japanese studio system reached its zenith, there were no independent productions at all.
The 1950s are generally regarded as the Golden Age of Japanese cinema. They were certainly the Golden Age of the Japanese studios. After the painful adjustments of the post-war period, Toho, Shintoho, Shochiku, Daiei, Nikkatsu and the newly established Toei dominated not only film production but, as they were distributors and exhibitors at the same time, all other levels of the movie market.
In addition to radio the movies were a favourite pastime. Many people went every week to see the new double feature. At the end of the 1950s Japanese cinema reached its zenith. In 1958, 1.13 billion people went to the movies, and in 1960 production reached an all-time high with 547 new films. In order to satisfy the ever-increasing demand for new material, many young assistant directors were permitted by the studios to direct their own films and thus had the opportunity to try out new ideas. Shochiku in particular had several talented assistant directors who debuted in this way: Nagisa Oshima made A Town of Love and Hope (Ai To Kibo No Machi) in 1959, one year later Masahiro Shinoda's One Way Ticket for Love (Koi No Katamichi Kippu) and Yoshishige (later Kiju) Yoshida's Good-for-Nothing (Roku De Nashi) set a new course. They were called "Shochiku Nouvelle Vague" after the French Nouvelle Vague. The difference between them was that the Japanese Nouvelle Vague was essentially a product of the studios (Shohei Imamura, who is generally, at least in the West, associated with the Japanese Nouvelle Vague, worked for Nikkatsu), whereas the French Nouvelle Vague like many other innovative movements in Europe established itself outside the studio system.
Oshima, Yoshida and Shinoda soon hit a snag where the studio was concerned. They simply were not allowed the freedom they needed to develop their ideas. As early as 1960, Oshima left Shochiku, when the studio pulled back his fourth film Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon No Yoru To Kiri) after only four days in the cinemas. Yoshida left the studio in 1964 after his film Escape from Japan (Nihon Dasshutsu) had been severely cut by Shochiku (before that, one of his projects had been cancelled and he'd had to go back to work as assistant director for a while). Finally, in 1965, Shinoda left Shochiku after 12 films. For the directors of the Shochiku Nouvelle Vague and others who later followed their example, escaping from the assembly line production system of the studios was an important step in order to demonstrate their independence and individuality.
Despite the friction between the directors and the studio (they did not always settle amicably, especially in the case of Oshima), the break was not complete. Even after they had parted company, many of their films were still distributed by Shochiku. Only after finding a new distributor and later a new producer in the Art Theatre Guild could the Nouvelle Vague directors completely disengage themselves from Shochiku. What becomes obvious here is the fact (typically Japanese and still valid today) that even independent productions continue to a certain extent (if it's not the production, at least, in this case, it's the distribution) to depend on the big studios.
In some respects this is also true for the Art Theatre Guild, which in the mid-1960s became the artistic home of the directors of the Japanese Nouvelle Vague. Ultimately, even the Art Theatre Guild was dependent on Toho, its main financer and one of its initiators. ATG did not really compete with Toho and the other studios, they rather complemented each other. Experiments made possible by ATG were unthinkable within the structure of the studio system, especially in times of dwindling attendance and decreasing revenue. The studios preferred to let others worry about the unprofitable auteur films and concentrate instead on the rather more lucrative genre cinema. To a certain extent, however, the studios supported independent productions such as ATG's because their experiments were considered an important source of innovation. From 1968 onwards, ATG was the major experimental laboratory of Japanese film. Soon they began to act as talent scouts as well, so the studios had new talents to fall back on whenever they needed it.
Until the 1950s there had been no real conflict between artistic claim and commercial value (almost all of Ozu's films, for instance, were big hits at the box office), but during the 1960s commercial considerations became increasingly important. This was partly the result of a change in the audience, which became more and more varied and eventually split up into little groups of people with specified interests and predilections which could not be satisfied by one single film.
In the 1960s, television replaced the cinema as the favourite form of entertainment. Because of this and the rapidly developing leisure industry cinema attendance declined drastically. This had its effect not only on the studios but mainly on exhibitors, who were bound to the studios by exclusive contracts. Smaller theatres in particular were no longer able or even willing in view of decreasing profits to pay for expensive studio productions. They started looking for cheaper alternatives and found them in low-budget films of independent companies, which mushroomed in the early 1960s. As these films provided a topic which was still taboo in the studios, i.e. sex, they quickly found their audience and brought handsome profits to cinema owners as well as small production companies at the expense of the studios. The number of these so-called "eroductions" increased from just 15 in 1962 to 98 in 1965 and 207 in 1966. In 1968, there were 265 eroductions, for the first time outstripping studio production.
By the late 1960s, these independent eroductions were called pink eiga, a term that is still used today. Like studio productions they were made primarily for commercial reasons, but they were not restricted as far as content and plot were concerned. Therefore, many directors used them as far as the low budgets permitted to make extremely individual and analytical movies. Koji Wakamatsu, Masao Adachi and other radicals turned their pink eiga into political propaganda, others such as Atsushi Yamatoya used them for formal experiments. The manager of the Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka, Kinshiro Kuzui, is to be thanked for the fact that the films of these directors were made available to a large audience and that they were taken seriously by the critics.
In the 1970s, the big studios started to encroach upon the lucrative sexploitation market. Nikkatsu changed its entire production to Roman Porno in 1971, but pink eiga did not lose their importance. On the contrary, as most studios (except Nikkatsu) stopped employing new assistant directors in order to save money, aspiring directors found their chances for a career severely limited. They had to look for alternatives and found them in directing pink eiga as they provided a way of getting into the movie business. Yojiro Takita, Masayuki Suo, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and other successful directors started out like this. Even directors who are not usually associated with pink eiga, like for instance Kohei Oguri, Kazuo Hara or Nobuhiro Suwa, worked at the beginning of their careers as assistant directors in this genre that is so essential to Japanese film.
Many of them had made 8mm-films as early as high school or university. Student and amateur films became an important aspect of the cinematic landscape of the 1970s. These activities did not start in the 1970s, but go back to the late 1950s. The film club of Nihon University played a decisive role in this. Motoharu Jonouchi, Masao Adachi and Katsumi Hirano later became important representatives of Japanese experimental film. If the term "independent" fits any aspect of movie industry of the 1960s at all it has to be experimental films. Here ATG played a doubly decisive role. On the one hand, apart from Hiroshi Teshigahara's Sogetsu Art Center, ATG's Shinjuku Bunka Cinema and its underground theater Sasori-za had become the most important venue where experimental film was concerned. On the other hand, ATG gave several experimental directors the chance to make feature films, among them Toshio Matsumoto, Nobuhiko Obayashi and Yoichi Takabayashi (the stars of the amateur 8mm-scene), and Shuji Terayama, the famous playwright and leading figure of the Japanese avant-garde theatre. ATG enabled them to direct groundbreaking films, some of them masterpieces of Japanese avant-garde cinema.
Matsumoto had originally directed documentaries, the third important pillar (after pink eiga and experimental and student films) of Japanese independent cinema in the 1960s. The film department of the publishing house Iwanami (established in 1950) played a decisive role, especially with regard to PR films and documentaries. Susumu Hani, Kazuo Kuroki, Noriaki Tsuchimoto, Shinsuke Ogawa and Yoichi Higashi all started out with Iwanami. Ogawa and Tsuchimoto continued to make documentaries and became internationally distinguished directors in their field. Others later moved on to feature films and directed several important movies in the 1970s.
In the 1960s and 1970s the Art Theatre Guild held all the strings as far as Japanese independent cinema was concerned. They united the directors of the Nouvelle Vague who had left the studios, the documentarists of Iwanami Productions, directors of sexploitation movies as well as important representatives of amateur and experimental film. But what exactly was the Art Theatre Guild? In order to answer this question it is necessary to return once more to the "Golden Era" of Japanese cinema.