Above: Poster signed “coo” for Nikudan [The Human Bullet] (Kihachi Okamoto, Japan, 1968).

For the past two months, and concluding this weekend, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has been screening the films of Japan’s Art Theater Guild. Programmed in conjunction with the gallery exhibition Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde, the series Art Theater Guild and Japanese Underground Cinema 1960-1986 was “the most comprehensive U.S. retrospective ever devoted to...the independent film company that radically transformed Japanese cinema by producing and distributing experimental, transgressive, and genre-shattering films from the early 1960s until the mid-1980s.”

Posters for the Atg were harder to find than I expected, at least in good high-quality scans, so I have concentrated on a handful of masterful designs from the late 60s, all of which use a combination of photo montage and illustration (a couple of which I have featured in this column before.)

According...