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Browse 91 movies from Art Theatre Guild
Tadao decides to comes back from Tokyo to live in his home town, in the countryside. He stays at his parents place and finds a job, repairing transistor and television. He catches up with his friend Tetsuji, the only that haven’t left yet. But one night, Tetsuji decides to leave for Tokyo with a bar hostess.
Dec 1978
A Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but somehow survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next.
Feb 1968
Two yakuza, one of whom frequently reflects on an uncomfortable past taking advantage of Korean women, meet a stowaway on Japanese soil from across the Genkai Sea.
May 1976
A couple of abalone divers has to confront brutal investors setting foot in their coastline.
Apr 1984
In Tokyo's Shinjuku district, the lives of a young man prone to theft, a young woman he meets at a bookstore, and a kabuki actor intersect.
Feb 1969
Suicide has long been used as a form of social protest in Japan. In this film, set in 1703, samurai culture is being transformed by the emergence of a new merchant class. Elements of the social contract are beginning to unravel, and some unscrupulous people took undue advantage of these changes before the social order was re-created. In this story, a rich merchant gives his clerk an I.O.U. instead of wages. When the impoverished clerk presents the paper to the merchant at the agreed upon time asking for payment, the man flies into a rage and pretends he never wrote it and claims the clerk is trying to defraud him. Then he sets his henchmen on the clerk to administer a beating.
Apr 1978
A freestyle biopic of Ikki Kita, the ultranationalist intellectual whose ideas inspired the failed military coup in 1936.
Jul 1973
Story of the last three days in the life of Sakamoto Ryoma (1836-1867), the imperial loyalist who tried to unite the Choshu and Satsuma clans and prepared the way for the Meiji Restoration (1868).
Aug 1974
A young Japanese man finds himself in the company of a strange, effeminate gay man and a girl with a seedy sexual history and who even now is pregnant again. They share a predisposition for drug use and spend time together in an old house. He refuses the advances of the gay man, who then commits suicide. When a gang administers a beating to him, his father re-enters the scene and takes him home, along with the girl. However, the girl has decided to have her baby, and she goes to live with its father.
Jan 1978
This biopic is centered on New Year's Day of 1894, when Kitamura is recovering from a suicide attempt. Japan is then under the spell of fervent patriotism because the government wants to build up public support for a war with China. Kitamura's literary friends and militant comrades come to visit. They wonder why Kitamura wants to kill himself. Kitamura at first refuses to receive them, then he sits down with them and looks back on his days as a civil rights militant, his stormy love life and his ardent but destructive desire to live literature to the full.
Dec 1977
Two college buddies try to understand a young woman's suicide through her Super-8 films and clips from their summer trips together.
Oct 1972
A surreal period film following a university professor and his eerie nomad friend as they go through loose romantic triangles and face death in peculiar ways.
Apr 1980
Bakyo is a talented but unsuccessful rakugo artist. The very successful Rokyu wants to take Bakyo under his wings, but Bakyo refuses, claiming that Rokyu's rakugo is compromised by the elements of kabuki. But Bakyo changes his mind and determines to learn (or steal) Rokyu's craft and makes it his own.
Aug 1975
Correlated with Susan Sontag's theorization of kitsch as well as employing the queer lingo of "camp," this film's relentless equal opportunity pop-art montage shattered the foundations of conventional cinema, making it a true document of the Shinjuku underground scene. Director Okabe himself appears recreating his favorite roles from Bonnie and Clyde to Spaghetti Westerns, as well as incorporating quotations by inserting stills of Godard, Kennedy’s assassination and the Vietnam War.
Sep 1968
An ardent culture-vulture youth, previously charged for the murder of a woman when he was young, plans to hold hostage a local bank.
Jun 1982
Out of the blue, a bourgeois family on the Sea of Japan finds an unconscious woman on the beach and decides to let her board.
Sep 1980
The story takes place during the end of the Pacific War and the aftermath period and it focuses on Mizoguchi, who is the son of a Buddhist Priest. When his father dies, he’s sent to the Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto. Mizoguchi is physically unattractive and becomes, in some way, jealous of the beautiful Temple that he loves so much.
Jul 1976
Oshima’s magisterial epic, centering on the ambivalent surviving heir of the Sakurada clan, uses ritual and the microcosm of the traditional family to trace the rise and fall of militaristic Japan across several decades.
May 1971
A student travels back to Kobe for the summer. Once there, he meets his friend Rat, hangs on the usual place, listening to the Beach Boys and meets a mysterious twin girl.
Dec 1981
A surreal, isolated village sees its inhabitants gradually leave behind their mutual traditions and superstitions as they leave for the city. Among them are two cousins who love each other and who get into a quarrel with other villagers.
Sep 1984