Smash Cut

Back in 1961, a film distributor dubbing itself the Art Theater Guild started up in Japan to bring edgy European cinema to the country’s masses. I guess the organization — which came to be known as the ATG — got bitten by the movie-making bug and found influence in the esoteric foreign fare it released, because in 1967 the Guild started to independently produce its own feature films.

The movies made by ATG were innovative, experimental and quite often taboo-busting, dealing with a myriad of controversial subjects including incest, homosexuality, and anarchy. Some of Japan’s most highly-regarded directors, such as the always provocative Nagisa Oshima and the avant-garde Shuji Terayama, had their first tastes of international recognition through the work they made for Art Theater Guild. And yet, the distributor/production company is still relatively unknown, even in its native Japan.

The daring folks at New York’s Japan Society are hoping to rectify that oversight, starting today, February 18, with their series “Shinjuku Ecstasy,” which is named for the ATG’s main theater, the Shinjuku Bunka, which allowed countercultural artists of all stripes to gather, create and exhibit their ground-breaking work.

The series runs until March 1, and you can go here to check out the schedule and buy tickets. Some of the highlights include the groundbreaking 1969 queer cinema feature Funeral Parade of Roses (pictured at the top), and 1971’s rebelliously-titled Throw Away Your Books, Let’s Go Into the Street, which probably deserves your time and money just for its name alone! You can toss some molotovs and let flashbacks melt your brain while you watch the psychedelic English-subtitled trailer for the latter here.

No, not the guy on the left, Robert Downey, Jr., he of Hollywood blockbuster Iron Man fame, but his dad, the gent on the right, Robert Downey, Sr., who happens to be one of the most important, acerbic, independent writer-directors to have created films in America.

The elder Downey has helmed around 18 films, and acted in almost as many, including Paul Thomas Anderson’s L.A. epics Boogie Nights and Magnolia. However, he’s perhaps best known for creating 1969’s Putney Swope, a take-no-prisoners, darkly satirical charge of cinematic C-4 that explodes in the faces of the U.S.A.’s status quo, race relations and corporate power structure.

Hailed by none other than Martin Scorsese as “an essential part of that moment when a truly independent American cinema was born,” some early, non-Putney work by Downey, Sr., will be screened for a week at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, beginning next Friday, on Sept. 12. The films include the rude 1966 social comedy Chafed Elbows; the surreal, plotless collage Moment to Moment (1975); and 1964’s incendiary presidential send-up Babo 73. All of these movies are purposefully in-your-face and crude, but made with an energy and barbed point-of-view that can only exist outside of the mainstream.

These prints that Anthology will be screening are brand new restorations made by its own archival team for this series. It was, understandably, a painstaking task to make these movies viewable again, because the only existing elements tended to be battered screening prints — and those prints, mind you, were often made from film that was shot on spring-wound 16mm cameras with trims and ends of Air Force surplus stock, spliced together with Scotch tape. That’s true-blue indie spirit! You can read the entire fascinating story behind the restoration of these pics via The New York Times here.

If you’re in New York and want to see some or all of these classics — and I highly recommend that you do — you can check the screening schedule here.