Independence from the major studios and the postwar search for a new film production system
During the Allied Occupation that followed Japan’s defeat in World War II, labor unions were established in all the major film studios at the encouragement of the General Headquarters (GHQ). Of all the companies affected, it was Toho in which the fiercest labor disputes erupted. The so-called Toho Labor Dispute reached its zenith in 1948, a year in which union representatives faced down police and American tanks – “everything but the battleships,” as one unionist put it – and came to an end with the dismissal of the remaining union executives. With this as catalyst, independent production companies began to spring up one after another in what soon took on the appearance of a new “movement.”
The independent film movement was marked by its tendency to engage with the real-life social issues of the day, as seen in the example of YAMAMOTO Satsuo’s Street of Violence (Pen itsuwarazu: boryoku no machi, 1950), a work that not only exposed the systemic collusion between police, local gangster bosses, and prosecutors, but was actually filmed in the location in which the events it was based on had taken place. Such films displayed a bold willingness to tackle themes that were difficult to broach within the existing studio structure, such as poverty, labor exploitation, discrimination, the lingering effects of the atomic bomb, and miscarriages of justice. This tendency toward the radical had much to do with the fact that many of those involved in the films’ production, not to mention the formation of the production companies themselves, were either members or sympathizers of the Japanese Communist Party who had been ousted from the major studios as part of the fallout of the Toho Labor Dispute – victims of a Red Purge that had gripped Japan similar to Hollywood.
While the independent production movement had as its aim the realization of a democratic mode of filmmaking, its efforts were impeded by an existing distribution system in which the production, circulation, and exhibition of films were all integrated under the same umbrella. Unable to secure enough cinemas willing to screen the films made by its adherents, the movement was thus handicapped by its extremely fragile economic foundations, leading to a decline in its activities in the latter half of the 1950s. Many of the movement’s directors returned once more to work at major studios, though the Kindai Eiga Kyokai (“Modern Film Association”), an independent production company and supporter of the movement, managed to continue producing the films of its linchpin SHINDO Kaneto independently thanks to the finances he earned as a prolific scriptwriter on major studio projects.
Meanwhile, against the backdrop of Japan’s postwar economic recovery of the 1950s there developed a thriving market for educational and corporate PR films, leading to the emergence in quick succession of several film companies specializing in such fare. Chief among them was Iwanami Productions, whose ranks produced a number of directors who would leave their mark on the history of Japanese documentary, including HANI Susumu, TSUCHIMOTO Noriaki, and HANEDA Sumiko. Working within the field of documentary in its broader sense, the young talent who joined such companies re-examined theoretically what it meant to “document” reality via the camera and explored avant-garde and experimental techniques in pursuit of new expressive possibilities within the medium. These endeavors proved a huge inspiration, both intellectually and creatively, on the group of artists who comprised Japan’s New Wave that was just then beginning to emerge. One such filmmaker was OSHIMA Nagisa. When his film Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no yoru to kiri, 1960), a critical examination into the ethical principles motivating the postwar student movement, was abruptly pulled by Shochiku only days after its release, he parted ways with the studio and founded his own independent production company, Sozosha, together with like-minded peers. From this new base of operations, he expanded his sphere of activities to incorporate not just film but television also, continuing to produce work that never compromised on his controversial edge. YOSHIDA Yoshishige and SHINODA Masahiro – the two other leading figures along with Oshima of what was often referred to as the “Shochiku New Wave” – would also leave the studio in later years to set up their own production companies.
In the late sixties and early seventies, as the financial hardship facing major studios on account of sharply declining audiences became increasingly apparent, prominent directors once at the forefront of major studio output – figures such as IMAMURA Shohei, NAKAHIRA Ko, OKAMOTO Kihachi, and MASUMURA Yasuzo – followed in Yoshida and Shinoda’s footsteps by venturing into independent production. Supporting them and others in this endeavor by providing the financial capital necessary to produce and distribute such films was the Japan Art Theater Guild (ATG). Originally founded in 1961 as an entertainment and distribution company, ATG presided over an independent chain of ten theaters nationwide, from which it introduced Japanese audiences to contemporary European films and American films that had gone unreleased during the war. Once established as a hub of art-house cinema screenings, the company soon branched out into the work of producing films, sharing production costs with independent production companies in a framework that gave rise to important works including Death by Hanging (Koshikei, 1968), Oshima’s penetrating look at the moral questions surrounding the death penalty, and Okamoto’s Human Bullet (Nikudan, 1968), a satirical skewering of the absurdities of war. In subsequent years, a current of independent filmmaking with ATG handling distribution duties took root, with projects emerging not only from the world of film but theater and television also.
By the early 1970s, the studio system was in freefall, and major companies like Toho and Shochiku were now focusing the bulk of their efforts on distribution instead. It was a period in which even an established auteur like Kurosawa was unable to make films domestically; after disbanding Sozosha, Oshima likewise worked with overseas production companies from his erotically explicit In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no corrida, 1976) onward. Meanwhile, publishing company Kadokawa Shoten entered the film production arena, finding a way to successfully integrate the world of novels (which served as material for adaptation), films, and theme songs into a single commercial package, all while relying on existing major distributors and bolstered by massive television advertising campaigns. Indeed, given that Kadokawa Shoten, too, was originally “independent” – insofar as it existed beyond the sphere of the “Big Five” studios – independence from the major studios had by this point arguably lost much of its practical significance. A new era was dawning within the world of Japanese film, one in which referring to a production company as “independent” was now obsolete.
Translated by Adam Sutherland
