ATG (Art Theatre Guild)

A different entrance opened up outside the factory. Founded in 1961, ATG began as a company distributing foreign art films. From 1967 it started splitting production costs with independent producers to make Japanese films, and this arrangement came to be known as the "10-million-yen film." Projects a major studio would never approve could get made on this budget. Constraint became another kind of freedom. Filmmakers who had lost their place at Shochiku flowed into this space. In 1960, Nagisa Oshima's Night and Fog in Japan was pulled from theaters mid-run without his consent, and in 1961 he left Shochiku. Many of the filmmakers who came to be called, by analogy with the wave in France, the "Shochiku New Wave," kept making films here. The press coined the name — the same pattern that recurs throughout this map, where a name arrives from outside, was happening in Japan too.