Takeshi Kitano

b. January 18, 1947, Tokyo, Japan

by Bob Davis

Bob Davis teaches film production at California State University, Fullerton and is a contributing writer to
American Cinematographer.

Takeshi Kitano was the youngest of four children born to a Tokyo working-class couple.
Though his father, Kikujiro, painted houses, the little Takeshi suspected (or perhaps the
later media star mythologized) the often drunk old man he and his siblings feared was a
failed yakuza. Nonetheless, with his mother's prodding, the scrawny kid excelled in math
and art at a top state high school, then studied engineering in college but dropped out
before completing the program.

In 1973, after stints as an elevator boy and emcee in Asakusa's France-za comedy-slash-
strip club, Kitano, together with Kiyoshi Kaneko, formed a standup duo called The Two
Beats. Irreverent and bawdy—'Beat Takeshi' shocked an NHK TV audience by lovingly
describing an encounter with a literal piece of shit—the pair achieved a degree of national
recognition. In the early '80s The Two Beats had small roles (cop 1, cop 2) in perfunctory
comedies until Nagisa Oshima cast Takeshi as the brutal Sergeant Hara in his surreal
1983 POW camp drama, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.

Takeshi Kitano—as distinct from alter ego Beat Takeshi, comedian, television
personality, character actor—was reborn in 1989 when veteran gangster-film director
Kinji Fukasaku withdrew during pre-production from Violent Cop in which Beat Takeshi
was to star. The producers convinced Kitano to take over, and though he had no
filmmaking experience and so was constantly at odds with his professional crew, the
first-time director rewrote the script and imposed an unusually subtle tone, both visually
and aurally, on his debut film.

While Takeshi Kitano made nine more films, Beat Takeshi regularly hosted two handfuls
of absurdist, vulgar, silly, reactionary prime-time network shows each week and,
according to an NHK poll, was Japan's favorite television celebrity every year from
1990–1995. The current Koko ga hen dayo, Nihinjin! (Japanese, You're Strange!), an
exercise in national self-identity, features a parade of average folks (telephone operators,
investment bankers, stewardesses, students) who comment on Japaneseness in the context
of international and local issues ranging from the USS Greeneville's sinking of the Ehime
Maru to ganguro, a teen girls' micro-mini-skirt, platform shoe, chocolate-faced fashion
fad. And Takeshi's Castle, a game show in which milk industry workers challenge
midwives, or real-estate agents challenge high school baseball coaches, to humiliating
tests of coordination and daring, has even been dubbed and syndicated in North America
as TNN's Most Extreme Elimination Challenge.

While Takeshi Kitano won the Leon d'oro at the 1997 Venice Biennale, Beat Takeshi
starred as a one-eyed gay hitman in Takashi Ishii 's Gonin (1995) and then, ironically, as
a fourth-grade-teacher-turned-sadistic-game-show-host called "Kitano" in the late
Fukasaku's last film, Battle Royale (2000). While academics compare Takeshi Kitano to
Scorsese, Bresson, and Ozu, Beat Takeshi describes himself as David Letterman plus
Woody Allen plus Howard Stern. (1)

“Amateur”

Three of his first four films (Violent Cop, Boiling Point, and Sonatine, to use the titles
under which they were released in the USA) established Kitano's international career.
They share an unusual combination of contrasting genre elements—the laconic loner
tough guy (cop or criminal) and slapstick humor, comedy plus massacre—and an austere
aesthetic.

In Kitano's view, the difference between genres is often only a matter of perspective: "An
event can be regarded as violence by the participant, but for the spectator it can be
comedy." (2) Boiling Point's (1990) trigger-happy Uehara gets laughs by repeatedly, over
the course of nine minutes and four locations, whacking his girlfriend on the back of the
head…because she followed his instructions! And when his partner can't severe his pinky
with the dull kitchen knife the gangster provides him, Uehara employs more extreme
measures to 'help' his friend: zealously taking over the job himself, hacking at the
reluctant finger, hammering the knife through the bone with a block of wood.

Kitano's, like Chaplin's, is a comedy of repetitions, exaggerations and, especially,

contrasts. Kitano feels both the absurdity and the humanity of his subjects. (3) Violent
Cop's Detective Azuma is, like Dirty
Harry, a cop on the edge, dispensing
justice idiosyncratically but, more than
Eastwood's character, Azuma seems to
understand that this whole cops-and-
criminals thing is just a game, that the
two sides are interchangeable. (4)
Masaki, Boiling Point's lethargic and
slightly dim-witted gas station
attendant, a bumbling underdog, takes
on the mob almost single-handedly.
And in Sonatine (1993), Kitano both
mocks yakuza conventions—
sunglasses and tattoos on the one hand, Violent Cop
business suits and 'hostesses' on the
other—and romanticizes his yakuza hero, the stoic and nostalgic, paternal and
mischievous, philosophic and impulsive Murakawa.

Stylistically, too, the early Kitano movies achieve their impacts through contrasts.
According to Japanese critics, these films, "the products of a cinematic 'amateur' (Kitano
had no formal directorial training), violate many of the existing 'rules' about form and
storytelling." (5) But they violate those rules consistently. Already in Violent Cop, Kitano
directs with the confidence of an amateur with years of experience as a comedian and
with a simple aesthetic strategy.

Kitano's early style, like his deadpan acting, is based on negation. He steers clear of many
narrative and cinematic conventions, often refuses to show a scene's most dramatic beats,
and peels away decades of Western influence with respect to composition, movement,
space, pace, and sound design.

Stillness dominates Kitano's style. Characters are planted in static compositions. Violent
Cop opens on a seeming freeze-frame of a smiling toothless vagrant; Boiling Point on a
long, dark, static face, Masaki in an outhouse. Detective Azuma rings a doorbell, and
waits...and waits...and waits. And even during a shootout in an Okinawan bar, Sonatine's
gunmen stand, nailed to the floor, weapons extended stiff-armed in a locked frame. (6)
(7)

This stillness is underlined by two more formal elements: small subject image sizes and
protracted shot duration. A wide shot in which a dozen people remain motionless—like
the utterly inert, group 'portrait' of Murakawa's team in the aftermath of the Anan clan's
bombing their headquarters, a shot so distant and static it becomes extremely difficult to
determine even who is speaking—draws particular attention to its avoidance of classical,
'realistic' filmic customs. And the longer it lasts—the shot just described clocks in at
healthy seventeen seconds—the more 'aggressive' the rejection. (8)

Kitano's subtle soundtracks emphasize quiet, the aural equivalent of stillness. The writer
minimizes dialogue, and the post-production supervisor makes little effort to 'fill out' the
mix with irrelevant ambient or off-screen sounds. When his superior fires Azuma toward
Violent Cop's end, there's a 14 second static medium long shot of the detective, perfectly
still, and silent. A ten second medium close-up of the police chief, also silent, follows.
Kitano uses music sparingly and, principally, structurally. No dramatic cues or expressive
leitmotifs here. Whether electronic Satie or a Joe Hisaishi original score, Kitano's music
—minimal, repetitive, unpresumptuous—functions to bridge set-pieces, accompany
characters' down-times, montages of wandering through shopping districts or of relaxing
lakeside. (9)

Spatially, Kitano's early films, like the bulk of silent comedies, are abnormally flat. (10)
His camera finds his characters' full frontal faces, their profiles, and the backs of their
heads. Compositions, too, seem more architectural than organic. A line of four faces in
Boiling Point, for example, may be bunched down in the lower third of the frame—an
artistically conservative film instructor might fault Kitano for "too much headroom"—
and the left and right frame edges often slice through marginal characters, a phenomenon
the typical film would try to avoid by adjusting the image size, moving the camera closer
to the image's central character so as to 'frame out' the insignificant one. (11)

This basic, austere, architectural style (still,

wide, protracted, quiet), aside from unifying
the look and sound of each film, has two main
values. First, in and of itself, Kitano's default
style absorbs the willing viewer in the creation
of these films' emotional content. (12) Since
the director himself provides only minimal
clues to a character's inner life—no
'meaningful' close-ups of quivering faces, no
push-ins at times of crisis, no soaring melodies
Sonatine signaling the triumph of the human spirit—the
audience members may work to load into
Kitano's characters emotions from their own personal (and personally significant)
storehouses of sentiments. Each movie becomes, then, one long Kuleshov experiment. Or
a Bresson action-comedy. (13) For me, the thrill of watching a Kitano film like Sonatine,
perhaps the best example, derives from the tension between my near complete sympathy
for one or two of the principal characters—partly, or even largely, because I am able to
invest the blank characters with my own feelings—and my sense that those laconic,
mysterious characters, like me, will forever remain indecipherable, wholly other.

Second, Kitano's early films' default style provides a convenient set-up, a visual and aural
'straight man', for moments of comedy and of violence, for both punches and punch lines.
Most commentators have noted that Kitano's films are "punctuated by moments of
startling violence" or that "violence explodes onto the screen" but the mechanism for this,
how it is achieved, is not considered. Technically, these eruptions, these explosions,
derive through moments of simple contrast with the films' default style. Movement,
bigger image sizes, quick cuts, and loud sounds disrupt the otherwise low-energy
filmmaking at points where Kitano wants laughs or winces.

The shootout in Sonatine's bar is typical. Though still static and wide, it's relatively
quick-cut—nine shots in fourteen seconds, compared to the previous two minutes' only
twelve shots—and noisy. Incessant deafening gunfire drowns out, contrasts with, the
distant waft of muzak which precedes and, drolly, follows it.

And in Violent Cop's impromptu wrestling match between one of Azuma's partners and a
fugitive low-level drug dealer, the violent climax—the cop's head is bashed open with an
aluminum baseball bat—'explodes onto the screen' in at least two ways. Kitano has shot
the fight in slow-motion so that there is minimal displacement of the image, minimal
movement despite the scene's 'action'. The scene reads not so much 'violent' as
'dreamlike', a cosmic ballet set to a sorrowful tune reminiscent of a Nina Rota ballad.
There are no other sounds. But when the bad guy swings the bat, Kitano's camera shifts
gears, reverts to 24fps. There's a quick burst of movement as the bat whacks against the
cop's skull. The new camera speed underscores the extreme violence. At the same time,
Kitano hard cuts a synch effect. Suddenly, the very realistic sound of 'bat on flesh'
dominates the mix. Violence by contrast.

Already in these first films, the 'amateur' Kitano shows a command of visual and aural
rhythm, which sets him apart from his more professional but more conventional
colleagues. When at his most confident, as in Sonatine, Kitano can juxtapose contrasting
tones—Ravelian daydream and ruthless slaughter—so that each gains from the other. The
violence jolts by contrast with the reverie's relaxed pace. And the melancholy of
Murakawa's nostalgia for youth as he mentors his apprentices—neophyte killers who play
with dolls, frolic on the beach, and spurt roman candles at each other—is deepened by
our fear that the violence that will inevitably erupt around them may mean this will be his
last stand. (14)

“Auteur”

During the second half of his career so

far, Kitano became a fixture on the
international festival circuit. Kids
Return, Kikujiro and Dolls played at
Cannes, Hana-bi and Brother at
Venice. A 2000 Village Voice critics'
poll named Hana-bi one of the
decade's top ten films. And after the
same film won Venice's top prize, the
comedian-turned-auteur, eschewing
understatement, informed the press: "I
Kids Return
am the Master!"

Kitano's mastery is signalled by a shift in both his films' formal strategies and by their
more overt (and sometimes even unmitigatedly clichéd) character motivations. The newly
anointed auteur's sixth film, Kids Return (1996), not surprisingly, is most like his earlier
work in its aesthetic and emotional reticence. Like Violent Cop, Boiling Point and
Sonatine, Kids Return considers the oyabun-kobun (mentor-apprentice) relationship, but
this time Kitano focuses on the apprentices. One of the two high school drop-out
protagonists joins the yakuza; the other, a boxing gym. The filmmaker interweaves the
two tales of inevitable self-degradation, and the boys end up where they began, biking in
circles on the asphalt outside the school that has abandoned them. (15)

But if Kids Return feels more personal, more purposely poignant than Kitano's previous
work, that feeling derives in large part from the film's more relaxed, more traditionally
'relational' aesthetics. Kids Return's production design is more cluttered, more lived, than
any of Kitano's earlier films: potted plants, still-lifes, matchboxes, lamps, phones, and
even extras fill the backgrounds and foregrounds of shots. Still, wide, flat, quiet moments
here share screen time with mobile medium-close-ups, staged in depth. Shot-reverse-shot
sequences connect characters more conventionally. The principal performers seem less
stiff, arms sometimes dangling, shoulders slouched. Kitano unlocks his camera, its
operator reframing to compensate for an actor's minor repositioning. There are even a
couple of unmotivated, expressive dollies. (16)

Then, with a budget of US$2.3 million, Kitano, according to most critics, reached the
apex of his filmmaking powers with his seventh film, Hana-bi (1997). (17) The rough
edges have vanished. Kitano seamlessly cobbles together an elegiac mood-piece that
mixes his trademark elliptical editing (18) with flashes of mindscreens. (19) The result is
beautiful and moving. But it also marks the first significant step down a path that leads
away from the inscrutable, absurdist tone of his first films. With Hana-bi, Kitano's work
begins to slough off its hardcore tough-guy skin—and the ascetic style associated with it
—and find an international arthouse audience.

Hana-bi shares so many plot features with Kitano's first film it could almost be called a
remake. Like Violent Cop, Hana-bi concerns a police officer of questionable ethical
standards who is indirectly responsible for a partner's death and who must care for an
ailing family member while underworld figures hunt him. And though Hana-bi, to be
sure, is understated—Kitano, who stars as Nishi, barely has a line of dialogue in the first
half of the film; and his clearly loving relationship with his dying wife is played out
vicariously, through card games and silent haggling over desserts, not sexually—the film
is, compared to Violent Cop, openly sentimental. Nishi provides financially for his
deceased partner's family and introduces his semi-paralyzed friend to art's therapeutic
powers. He leads his wife on an odyssey through some of Japan's most spiritually iconic
sites: a raked sand-garden, a Buddhist temple, a country inn, Mount Fuji. And in the final
scene, before he shoots her, he even pats her hand!

Hana-bi's aesthetics support Kitano's new, more elegiac content. (20) Image sizes have
increased: faces and their stories fill more of the frame than ever. Camera positions are
less frequently frontal, analytical, architectural. Shots are composed in depth, actors
occupying the middle ground between, for example, a melancholic rain-spattered window
and a newly executed felt-tip-pen painting. Movement, much of it highly dynamic and z-
axis oriented, challenges stillness for supremacy in Hana-bi. Classically 'beautiful'
images—like the reflection of clouds and phone lines on Horibe's van's windshield.
Unmotivated, expressive pans. Tilts to the clouds. Dissolves!
Still, Kids Return and Hana-bi, despite their increasing 'warmth', share with Violent Cop,
Boiling Point and Sonatine the appetizing recipe of a meditative drama of a well-
intentioned loner blended with large doses of humor and hostility. Kitano's next three
films proffered their tones increasingly straight. Kikujiro (1999) focused on comedy;
Brother (2000) on violence; and Dolls (2002) on inner tragedy. None, partly because of
their lack of tonal complexity, partly because their comedy, violence, and tragedy failed
to engage, moved me.

Dolls is certainly Kitano's most

puzzling work. Self-consciously
gorgeous—the director suggests
"you could frame virtually any
shot" (21)—but utterly
unaffecting, schematic, hollow,
technically juvenile. The film
opens in a bunraku puppet theater
where six stone-faced black-clad
puppeteers manipulate two dolls
that perform an eighteenth century
Chikamatsu play. Dolls tells—or
the bunraku dolls tell (22)—three
stories of blind love played out
over the course of four seasons. In
one, Matsumoto flees his arranged
Dolls
wedding when he learns his true
love, Sawako, has attempted
suicide. He kidnaps Sawako from a mental hospital—her brain is apparently mush; she
doesn't speak, but sometimes mumbles unintelligibly at ceramic figurines of angels—and
the pair trudge through Japan (in posh, supersaturated Yohji Yamamoto outfits!) bound
together by thirty feet of thick, deep red rope. In another similar narrative thread, an aged
yakuza boss visits the woman he jilted forty-something years earlier. She's been waiting
for him on the same park bench at which they used to meet on weekends, fixing him each
week his favorite bento box. And finally, Nukui, aging groupie to pop-star Haruna, puts
out his eyes so he can meet his idol who, disfigured in an auto accident, refuses to show
her face in public.

In Sonatine, Murakawa's inner turmoil affects largely because he refuses to explicitly

externalize it. In Dolls, the characters are so conventional, so clichéd—the penitent
working off his sins; the wizened old man who realizes, finally, his mistake; the
idolatrous devotee—so external, so anti-Kitano-as-we-have-come-to-know-him, there's
nothing left for an audience to feel. The film's characters have done all the emotional
work for it.

Technically, too, Dolls is atypical of Kitano's work so far. The film feels hermetic, like an
extended student project, at best a (failed) experiment in nonstop camera movement. A
combination dolly-pan tracks across a nightstand and some sleeping bodies—very '70s
TV. In the mental hospital's corridor the camera gratuitously dollies counter to the
characters' movement. And, for some reason, a wide shot of a parked car warrants a slow,
extended, arcing dolly.

Worse, camera movement takes on an all-too-obvious thematic function. A semi-circular

track around the Chikamatsu puppets in Dolls' prelude is repeated exactly around
Matsumoto and Sawako, identifying the two couples ... for whatever that's worth. There's
a 'meaningful' push-in to close-up of the nostalgic old mob boss. Then during his golden
tinted memories the camera traces a semi-circle around him and his boyhood sweetheart
too. None of this is terribly funny. (23)

Kitano's next project, his first period piece, looks like it could provide a return to form.
Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, is rife with opportunity for violence, comedy, and a touch
of angst. In the mean time, there's always this week's episode of Most Extreme
Elimination Challenge!

© Bob Davis, June 2003

Endnotes:

1. Nicholas D. Kristof, "Where Conformity Rules, Misfits Thrive", The New York
Times, 18 May, 1997, section 2, 43. For more on Beat Takeshi, see Mark
Schilling, Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture, New York, Weatherhill, 1997,
pp. 253–257.

2. Gavin Smith, "Takeshi Talks", Film Comment, March–April 1998, p. 32

3. This ambivalence distinguishes Kitano from Itami, another contemporary director
whose comedies—Tampopo (1985), A Taxing Woman (1987), The Anti-Extortion
Woman (1992)—often mock underworld figures. For, unlike Itami, Kitano usually
serves up his slapstick with a big helping of Mishima, whose obsessions with
brotherhood and death, individuality and authority, pre-figure Kitano's.
4. This becomes especially clear at film's coda, when the rookie cop Azuma has
been mentoring goes on the syndicate's payroll. The crime-boss' henchman has
the thematic last word: "Everybody's crazy."
5. Aaron Gerow, "Recognizing 'Others' in a New Japanese Cinema", The Japan
Foundation Newsletter, 29.2, January 2002, p. 2. Kitano himself seems to have
been fully aware of his atypical approach to shooting Violent Cop: "There was a
crew who had been in the industry for a long time and who had studied the usual
methods, which were based on the Western influence—moving the camera,
getting different camera angles... So I had to fight with my staff to get the shots [I
wanted]. After the movie came out, people said I didn't know how to make films."
(Chris Dafoe, http://membres.lycos.fr/martinlang/interv2.htm)
6. A special case of 'stillness', though by no means a dominant aspect of Kitano's
style, perhaps should be mentioned here. Occasionally Kitano will leave a shot's
'tails' (the end of a take) in his film even after the actors have deserted the frame.
In Sonatine, for example, Murakawa forces his nemesis, Takahashi, out a hotel
fire escape. Kitano's editor (Kitano himself), rather than cut to the bludgeoning
Murakawa is no doubt giving his captive, holds on the closed door behind which
his actors have vanished. This kind of stress given to the environment through
which humans pass harks back to the famous 'empty shots' in Ozu, whose camera
lingers in a hallway after his characters have passed through it or on early
morning shopfronts before the market is peopled or on a clothesline, its
clothespins now drooping from the wire, evidence of prior human activity.
7. When Kitano's camera does move in these early films, it most often moves
parallel to the actor whose movement motivates it. The result of this kind of
parallel, motivated movement is that, though the background migrates through the
frame during the course of the shot, the subject remains fixed in one portion of it,
thus effectively static.
8. According to Barry Salt, Film Style & Technology: History & Analysis, London,
Starwood, 1992 edition, p. 144f. and passim, excessively short or abnormally long
average shot lengths (ASLs) often correlate to the work of an auteur. David
 Bordwell, "Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film",
Film Quarterly, 55.3, p. 16f. suggests that ASL for the typical Hollywood film of
any genre in the 1990s is between three and six seconds. The ASLs for Boiling
Point, A Scene at the Sea, and Sonatine are 13.5, 14.5, and 12.
9. Violent Cop has only three music cues, which are used a total of twelve times. By
comparison, the average standard-length Hollywood film uses its dozens of cues
between 60 and 150 times. Boiling Point, which some, like Tommy Udo in Brian
Jacobs (ed.), 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, London, Tadao Press, 1999, p. 22, take to be
Kitano's most uncompromising film, has no non-diegetic music whatsoever.
10. For a good, practical introduction to the vocabulary of visual design—words like
'flat' and 'deep' and 'depth of field' have horrific histories in film studies—see
Bruce Block, The Visual Story, Boston, Focal Press, 2001. Flat space images are
those whose principal lines tend to reinforce the frame lines; deep space relies on
convergence of lines.
11. Two more aspects of Kitano's 'amateur' film style may be worth briefly noting.
First, the director often shuns the shot-reverse-shot convention, even at moments
when it would seem inevitable. For example, the 'introduction' of Uehara (Boiling
Point) consists of two wide shots of a mob boss addressing someone just off
camera, dressing down that someone. Kitano withholds the reserve shot of the
addressee, Uehara, for an eternal forty-five seconds. And, second, like Ozu,
Kitano sometimes allows false eyeline cues which, for the average Western
viewer, can render spatial relations momentarily ambiguous. In Boiling Point a
sequence of three shots presents (a) a full face medium close-up of Masaki
looking just slightly off camera left, (b) a full face medium close-up of a low-
level yakuza looking just slightly off camera right, a seeming reverse of (a) that
suggests the two characters are facing each other, then (c) a wide shot which
shows the two standing at a 90 degree angle to one another, Masaki's face to the
yakuza's profile.
12. In this I perhaps take slight issue with Gerow's analysis of what he calls the
"detached style" ("Recognizing 'Others'...”, p. 6) of much of contemporary
Japanese cinema, including Kitano's. Gerow rightly notes that Kitano rejects both
the close-ups that "in most films are used to provide access to character
psychology or emotion" and the quick-cutting that directs "spectator vision...to
clarify or explain what characters are doing", but the result of these negations is
not necessarily that characters become "so external we rarely know what they are
thinking."
13. Lev Kuleshov, Soviet theorist and sometime filmmaker, conducted editing
experiments that suggested audience members import 'meaning' (narrative or
emotional) into any sequence of shots, if at all possible. A neutral shot of a man's
face followed by a shot of a bowl of soup may denote 'hunger', etc. Robert
Bresson, French filmmaker and sometime theorist, believed that if he could
radically suppress all intentions, drain all expression out of his actors, his
audience would be able somehow to see inside his characters.
14. Kitano put it this way: "... what I wanted to show was what goes through a man's
mind when he knows that he's about to die. It seems to me that life and death have
very little meaning in themselves, but the way you approach death may give a
retrospective meaning to your life. The point of setting it on the beach like that is
that the context makes all Murakawa's personal problems seem so minor and
unimportant. That wouldn't have happened if he had stayed in the city. It was
essential to give him that space. And the beach scenes form the core of the film;
the violence…comes before and after." (Tony Rayns, "The Harder Way", Sight &
Sound, June 1996, p. 27.)
15. Violent Cop and Boiling Point, too, have similarly cyclical structures. In the
former, a memorable shot of the rookie cop Azuma's been mentoring crossing the
 bridge over which Azuma himself had walked at the start of the film suggests the
apprentice may repeat the sins of his mentor. And in the latter, the apparently
dim-witted Masaki ends up where he started: in the outhouse.
16. And Kitano, the artist, begins to experiment with classical color coding. Shinji,
the quieter of the two boys, wears a tranquil blue—even under his school uniform
—and Masaru, a loose cannon, red. Anomalies in this color scheme, then,
reinforce thematics. Shinji wears red at two points in the film: when he succumbs
to the pressure from his aging wannabe mentor to binge-and-purge, Shinji wears a
red sweatshirt; and when he loses a match because he's forsaken his training
regime, he wears red boxing trunks.
17. Tommy Udo, in Brian Jacobs (ed), 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, London, Tadao Press,
1999, p. 33, calls it a "masterpiece", ranking it with The Godfather, Les Enfants
du paradis (a perennial Japanese favorite) and The Seventh Seal. For Dave Kehr
(Film Comment, March–April 1998, p. 31), the film captured a "sublime
transcendence not much felt since the golden age of Mizoguchi, Ozu, and
Naruse." And Jane Campion, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Charlotte Rampling, and
Francesco Rosi, members of the Venice jury, apparently liked it too.
18. In each of his films, Kitano sometimes elides the action, presenting a set-up and
an aftermath, but no dramatic moment. In Boiling Point, Kitano shows a cocky
young punk mount a motorbike and zoom off, then the boy's perplexed and
bloodied mug as he sits on the street next to his mangled bike, but not the crash
itself. In Dolls, Kitano suggests the deoculation of a pop-star's pathetic groupie by
showing first a close-up of a razor and then a shot of the groupie's feet trailing a
cane.
19. Bruce Kawin, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and the First-Person Film,
Princeton, Princeton University, 1978, calls shots in which the filmmaker shows
what's happening inside a character's head, what the character 'sees' or imagines,
'mindscreens'. It's worth noting here, perhaps, that most of what critics think of in
Hana-bi as 'non-linear' sophistication is in fact simply either old-fashioned
parallel action—Horibe is shot while Nishi is visiting his wife in the hospital—or
Nishi's mindscreen, his memory-flashes of past events.
20. According to Darrell Davis, "Reigniting Japanese Tradition with Hana-Bi”,
Cinema Journal, 40.4, Summer 2001, p. 69, Hana-bi "should be discussed in light
of its 'badness' [by which he means, I think: its evocation of Japanese
iconography] not its aesthetics... Kitano does not censor himself or water down
his style to suit the international market." The question, however, is not one of
cause (whether Kitano "censored himself") but one of fact ("is the style indeed
watered down?") and effect ("do we feel it?").
21. Tony Rayns, "Puppet Love", Sight & Sound, June 2003, p. 20. More from Kitano:
"I've used colour more or less realistically in the past, but this time I went for
stylisation. But I didn't plan it in detail, only roughly. I'd never been that big on
red or green—blue and blue-grey were more my taste—and during the shoot my
sudden openness to a broader colour spectrum panicked some of the veteran
members of my crew." Cf. note 5. Apparently, Kitano has come full circle in his
relations with his crew!
22. Kitano seems concerned to deflect criticism about the film's emptiness in
suggesting that the bunraku puppets are the film's storytellers and that the humans
are their puppets. For example: "Anyhow, like everything else in the film, the
notion of a fan blinding himself to spare the feelings of his idol is a caricature. It's
the relationship between a celebrity and a fan as seen by a Chikamatsu doll."
(Rayns, 2003, p. 19) But my realization that this is so, sadly, does not suddenly
make the film interesting or enjoyable. Rather, the concept itself seems to me very
high school. (Which is not to say it couldn't have been the basis for a good film,
just…)
 23. Other anomalies include zooms (a cheesy zoom-in, for example, on the three
cherubim Sawako chats up), some long lens shots (as she mumbles at a flower
arrangement, for example) and "magical inserts" (a blow toy and the moon). And
Joe Hisaishi's sentimental score for once burdens the film ... because, this time, it
doesn't contrast with the film's tone, but simply compounds its heaviness. All in
all, like taking a bath in syrup.

Filmography
Violent Cop (Sono otoko, kyobo ni tsuki, literally Warning! This Man is Wild) (1989) also
actor and (uncredited) writer

Boiling Point (3-4x jagatsu, literally A 3 to 4 Loss in Extra Innings) (1990) also writer and
actor

A Scene at the Sea (Ano natsu, ichiban shizukana umi, literally That Summer, a Quiet
Ocean) (1992) also writer and editor

Sonatine (Sonachine) (1993) also writer, actor, and editor

Getting Any? (Minna yatteruka!) (1994) also writer, actor, and editor

Kids Return (Kidzu ritan) (1996) also writer and editor

Hana-Bi (Fireworks) (1997) also writer, actor, and editor

Kikujiro (Kikujiro no natsu, literally Kikujiro's Summer) (1999) also writer, actor, and editor

Brother (2000) also writer, actor, and editor

Dolls (2002) also writer and editor

Zatoichi (2003) also writer and actor

Bibliography
Darrell Davis, "Reigniting Japanese Tradition with Hana-Bi”, Cinema Journal, 40.4, Summer
2001, pp. 55–80

Michele Fadda and Rinaldo Censi (eds), Kitano Beat Takeshi, Parma, Stefano Sorbini, 1998

Aaron Gerow, "A Scene at the Threshold: Liminality in the Films of Kitano Takeshi", Asian
Cinema, 10.2, Summer 1999, pp. 107–115

Aaron Gerow, Kitano, London, BFI, forthcoming

Brian Jacobs (ed.), 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, London, Tadao Press, 1999 [biographical notes, film
reviews, artworks]

Takeshi Kitano, Rencontres du septième art, Paris, Arléa, 2003 [interviews and essays]

Nicholas D. Kristof, "Where Conformity Rules, Misfits Thrive", The New York Times, 18 May,
1997, section 2, 43

Tony Rayns, "The Harder Way", Sight & Sound, June 1996, pp. 24–27

Tony Rayns, "Puppet Love", Sight & Sound, June 2003, pp. 18–20

Mark Schilling, Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture, New York, Weatherhill, 1997

Gavin Smith, "Takeshi Talks", Film Comment, March–April 1998, p. 32

Kikujiro
(Takeshi Kitano,
1999)
by Geoff Gardner
Geoff Gardner was once a founder of the company that evolved into Ronin Films and was once
the director of the Melbourne Film Festival (retired hurt, 1982). These days he offers some
program suggestions to the Brisbane International Film Festival.

In Takeshi Kitano's films, the director often plays the world-weary yakuza character
central to the action. Or, he might play a cop so violent that even hardened yakuza cringe.
He bills himself twice. As an actor he takes his credit as Beat Takeshi, the name he used
and still uses in his television comedy program. His film personae combine monosyllabic
toughness with short, extremely cruel acts of violence.

For his eighth film as a director, Kitano is once again the yakuza, here named Kikujiro,
the title of the film. You know he has a yakuza past when he shows us the elaborate
tattoo covering his back. But he is also a rather ineffectual oaf, clearly past his prime,
reduced to being at the beck and call of his wife and thus now having a little trouble
asserting his authority. He meekly obeys when he is told by this blowsy female partner to
take a small child on a visit to his mother in a distant town. She doles out the expenses he
will need for the trip and arguing gets him no more. What's left of his rebellion is reduced
to blowing his expenses in a series of ill judged bets at a cycling track, accompanied by
some comic anti-social behaviour. Kikujiro is eventually forced to try and make the
journey by any free means he can.

The yakuza's temptation is to try threats and bluster, combined with some ham-fisted
pretence. Most of the journey is accomplished when the child himself manages to cadge
lifts. The temptation for Kitano would no doubt have been to revert to his former violent
self. But in Kikujiro we are presented with the sight of male decline and a change from
violent reaction into the unexpected comedy of the road. It's filled with some splendidly
hilarious set pieces and has more than a few star turns by the Kitano ensemble. His model
he said was The Wizard Of Oz and clearly there is a fairytale element to the narrative.
There is an angel bell, heard tinkling in the opening, and odd characters ranging from
straight-laced hotel clerks to a couple of strangely polite bikies, the only characters
seemingly prepared to carry out whatever command Kikujiro barks at them.

It would be divulging too much to give any details of the family reunions that do and
don't take place in the film. Its most affecting moment comes not when the boy sees his
mother but when Kikujiro himself searches out his own mother - the gentle parallel of
mutual loss is touching. But don't get the idea that this is a film of any maudlin sentiment.
Quite the opposite: Kitano and his cameraman Yangijima Katsumi frame their scenes in
quite static and composed shot sequences, many of which leave out the key piece of
action thus creating even funnier jokes out of any number of bits and pieces of Kitano
comic shtick. (If you have been lucky enough to see Kitano's only out and out comedy,
the very dirty Getting Any? [1994], you will be unsurprised by the occasional ribaldry
and bad manners on display here.)
There is finally no great denouement to the story. Apart from the early scene when the
child Masao is enticed away by a paedophile, there is no danger and no thrills. The
narrative rambles along through a series of chapters, all laid out in advance with the key
words featuring in a picture postcard opening. We wait for the moment to see just what is
to occur that has produced the sometimes bizarre, sometimes banal images that
eventually form a series of childhood memories. Clearly Kitano was enjoying the film
sequence by sequence, inventing and improvising out on the road just as the characters
Kikujiro and Masao must, without worrying too much about big finishes. If anything
Kikujiro has a big middle and a gentle descent back to the normalcy of a school day. No
search parties are sent out for the errant travellers. The rest of the world may as well not
exist.

Until now only Hana-Bi (1997) has had a commercial release in Australia. Kikujiro joins
it, as part of the Silk Screen series. Its release in Australia coincides with the first
screenings of his latest film, Brother (2000), which is set in America and clearly intended
to find an even greater audience for the director outside Japan. Meanwhile Kikujiro
should expand Kitano's audience in Australia. The often bewildering even swaggering
thuggery of his early films, especially the thrillers Boiling Point (1990) and Violent Cop
(1989), which he mixed in with more enigmatic work like A Scene at the Sea (1992), has
apparently gone. He seems to have drawn a further, quietly comic veil over that part of
his work and career. The veil was started with the quiet melancholy of Hana-Bi. It is
continued with more joy and plenty of self-deprecation in Kikujiro. See it and see the
work of the one Japanese director working today whose films are managing to cross
continental divides.

© Geoff Gardner, October 2000

Kikujiro:
Tapestries
by Andrew Saunders
Andrew Saunders is a cinema graduate, who has been putting off writing a thesis about the
relationship between the formal elements of film, cognition, and temporal experience. Instead, he
spends most of his time playing and writing about 3D Shooter computer games.

Before talking about Takeshi Kitano's latest local release, Kikujiro (1999), I should admit
that I've always been less enthusiastic about his popular breakthrough film, Hana-Bi
(1997), than I felt I should be. While it was good to see Takeshi getting some well-
deserved recognition in the Western cinema circuit, Hana-Bi seemed to be a step down
from the apogee of his filmmaking trajectory reached in Sonatine (1993) and A Scene at
the Sea (1991). The purity of form and content (combined with his spontaneously
inventive style) that made these earlier films such outstandingly powerful experiences
became more elaborate and deliberately self-reflexive in Hana-Bi. Like Joe Hisaishi's
music, the style of the film became less minimalist, more strategically sentimental, where
the concept of purity itself was turned into a reflexive impulse. An effect of style rather
than something attained through a deliberately prolonged narrative strategy.
It is for this reason therefore that I approached Kikujiro with a certain degree of
apprehension. The crossover of genres - from violent cop-gangster epic to cutesy road
movie - is not necessarily a problem for me (although it has made the film more difficult
to sell internationally). However, I was most concerned that this 'impure' stylistic bent
would continue. And indeed, within the first few seconds of the film's 120-min running
time, Takeshi announced loudly and clearly that it would. The image was again one of
Takeshi's paintings (of an angel, an important motif for the rest of the film), accompanied
by Hisaishi's saturated harmonies - and could well have been a shot from Hana-Bi. One
gets from this image a similar 'patchwork' promise of extended sadness, of mixed dreams
realized in fragments with an earthy vigorous humor. All good things, no doubt, and
certainly making great cinema. But perhaps not quite what I was hoping for.

In Kikujiro, Takeshi has deliberately tackled the formula of those 'cutesy' kids films that
Japan churns out - little kid goes on journey and bumps into assorted "colorful
characters" before coming to a "heartwarming" finale. And he has turned it into
something idiosyncratic: his own. To begin with, the cute elements are downplayed. Yet
he hasn't shyed away from them either - the first image of the boy, Masao, is of him
joyfully running with angel wings attached. But Takeshi mixes this up with a harshness
of space, of the indifferent and thuggish culture around Masao: whether it is the local
gang exhorting lunch money, the indifference of the many adult characters, or the dark
and creepy corners of society that a child alone will find. As a result, Masao doesn't have
time to be cute. Hardly a precocious word is spoken by him, and if anything he has
'cuteness' foisted upon him, such as when Takeshi buys him a colorful bike racing suit
that verges on the grotesque (and contributing to some disturbing consequences later).
Essentially, for much of the film's deliberately meandering narrative Masao is subjected
to a series of travails and humiliations with only the briefest moments of relief.

In stark contrast to Masao's silence, then, his quite denigration into a form of despair, is
the character Kikujiro played by Takeshi himself - the loudmouth troublemaking
irresponsible lout who, in a perverse turn of logic, is entrusted to escort Masao to his
unseen Mother. As usual, Takeshi has fashioned himself as the iconoclast, somebody
who regularly steps outside the rules and gets away with it (most of the time) through a
combination of guile, threatening behavior, or simple moxie. Except that here he is not
nearly as complex and sympathetic a character as in Sonatine or Hana-Bi. In fact, of all
of Takeshi's previous incarnations, Kikujiro is most reminiscent of the ousted gangster
from Boiling Point (1990), Uehara, where the willfulness and unpredictability (past moral
considerations) make us fear what he might be capable of at any time. Thus, his treatment
of Masao, while not nearly as malevolent, is in its indifference bordering on the
despicable; and is only redeemed through small gestures, oblique moments, which are
often only 'glimpsed at' with certain other malevolent clouds overhanging.

The irony remains that Kikujiro, despite all this, is still the primary source of humor in a
film that is very funny. If there are precocious lines to be had, he'll often get them. The
jokes come thick and fast, and with Takeshi's usual inventive slapstick style. More often
than not they are reliant on people being hurt or embarrassed. This includes Takeshi
himself, such as when he nearly drowns in a hotel swimming pool, and in successive
sequences appears ridiculous trying to practice a breaststroke style. Takeshi's playful
control of the medium comes to the fore here. In scenes that are deliberately reminiscent
of Sonatine's beach sequence, we find a bunch of guys getting together and just 'playing'
while Kikujiro (sometimes thuggishly) orchestrates the whole thing in what is essentially
a production within a production. Jokes and games begin obscurely, and then
successively escalate in scale, while personalities are injected into the mix, mostly as
stereotypes (part of the humor), but with little flashes of humanity to be glimpsed in the
askance. If the two bikers, Fatso and Baldy, are successively and relentlessly stripped of
their dignity through Kikujiro's pugilistic orchestrations, then by the time of their
departure they have earned our respect in new and deeper ways. In some unfathomable
fashion, Takeshi has moved them beyond their 'stereotypes', giving them a genuine sense
of humanity, while essentially utilizing their services as 'charactures'.

I must admit that by this time my initial resistance to Takeshi's new 'patchwork' style had
begun to wear down quite a bit. The film really began to open up to me. There is a game
that Masao and Kikujiro's gang play towards the end of the film, in which people are only
allowed to move while an other is counting down with their back turned before turning
around again. Like that game, this film tells its story in isolated and idiosyncratic 'still
frames' that don't always make so much sense on their own, but eventually contribute to
something interesting, full and extraordinary. So, even though you might know what is
coming, it still has the capacity to sneak up on you, to sweep you up (or, if it's funnier, to
allow you to catch it off its feet). Of course, all of Takeshi's films are told like this (as all
film is in some way or another), but with Hana-Bi and now Kikujiro he has moved the
use of these related still frames (along with the deceptive inferred movement between
them) beyond the self-contained narrative. At a deserted bus stop, Takeshi briefly revives
a slapstick routine with his old comedy duo partner ("I don't think this bus stop's been
used for twenty years."). When Kikujiro attempts to swindle Masao out of his lunch
money, his wife admonishes him for acting like a gangster. Finally, Takeshi has, in
interviews, affirmed basing the character of Kikujiro on his father: an interesting fact
considering the eerie similarities to the outsider, wayward gangster in Boiling Point.
Although not nearly as psychopathic, he is certainly dealt with in a similarly ambiguous
way: not a complex character (such as in Sonatine and Hana-Bi), but somebody
unpredictable and havoc-wreaking (although perhaps, through the reflexive humor,
ultimately redeemable). Thus, the 'patchwork' of stylistic habits is, in Kikujiro,
transformed into something like a tapestry: the self-reflexive use of themes, styles,
locations, actors and so on, begin to interweave into a greater whole. It's Takeshi's greater
whole, of course. His life and his art are interwoven through a series of signs, symbols,
references and stylistic conventions (playful habits): a life glimpsed through the inferred
movement between still images.

In the light of this, I think it is interesting to note that the film's most redemptive and
touching moments only come after Masao has reached a definitive point of despair. It is
only after he has lost his innocence, his tenacious grip over the notion of a perfect ending,
that his angels really do show up. And what these angels bring to him, instead of a
storybook ending, simply turns out to be an appreciation of life's drift. The oppressive
and humiliating form of existence that Masao endured in his travels with the irresponsible
Kikujiro then magically transforms into a real adventure, a true summer holiday. The
colors of life open up, and he learns how to see humor in the world, and its folly. Thus,
with a loss of innocence, a greater and perhaps more enduring level of appreciation for
life is achieved. There is a deep sadness to this, no doubt, but also, perhaps, great beauty.

© Andrew Saunders, November 2000

A Scene at the
Sea:
Reflections
by Andrew Saunders

A Scene at the Sea (Ano Natsu,

Ichiban Shizukana Umi) (Takeshi
Kitano, 1991)

Andrew Saunders is a cinema graduate, who has been putting off writing a thesis about the
relationship between the formal elements of film, cognition, and temporal experience. Instead, he
spends most of his time playing and writing about 3D Shooter computer games.

I would like here to write about A Scene at the Sea, but I can only do so in a sketchy way.
For I've seen the film only once, and that was a few years ago. I don't have enough
recollection of it to take it apart, to tinker with its structure, as I am inclined. So instead
all I am left with are some fleeting memories: broken surfboard; still and wide-open sea;
the elongated sad visage of the deaf and nameless teenage protagonist; and finally, the
small steps of his quiet, self-effacing girlfriend.

I remember quite clearly the saddened high that the film gave me. Tempered elation. But
of course, anybody familiar with Takeshi's films will no doubt already understand this.
The beauty of sadness, culminating too. A profile against a very earthy beach: overcast
sky, small waves, limited expanse of grayish sand. And the boy, turning away.

This elation, however, was not just evoked by how the film ended, but in fact how it got
me there: the relaxed pacing that it used and its dodging style of narrative. The Boy's job
as a garbage man is an issue. That's how he finds the broken board in the first place, and
it's also where his deafness is a problem with co-workers. Conflict is built up - he
becomes a surfy, which interferes with the job - but then suddenly deflated. Likewise,
there are issues of prejudice and class, particularly within Japan's surf culture, that are
developed, and then quietly displaced. The surf shop owner who ripped the Boy off
becomes a quiet supporter. While the trendy 'surf-culture' collective begins to accept him,
after originally laughing at him (mind you, unlike the Boy, they only turn up when the
sun starts shining). He earns their respect in spite of, rather than because of, any kind of
victory at the big set piece: a surf competition where he doesn't hear the PA cue and
misses out. There is an element of kindness in this harshness: a lift is given, a few words
of kindly advice.

This is all executed in an almost silent space that matches the mute patterns of the two
key protagonists: set pieces of long walks, occasional flashes of humor, and people doing
things with quiet humility. And in turn quietly humiliated as they struggle against the
tides of life.

It seemed to me that Takeshi was not so much interested in the traditional conflict-
resolution style of narrative, but rather something else: documenting the simplest
struggles of life, albeit in an idiosyncratic way. For when the mute boy began to be
accepted he also, in turn, began to change. He becomes cold and distant to the long
supportive girlfriend, and she in turn must earn respect from him. The summer dwindles;
the days get shorter and colder. The affluent and indolent surf-culture hibernates for the
winter, abandoning the beaches once again to the persistent hero, and his equally
persistent girlfriend (shuffling, as always, a little way behind him). Once again, his
elongated features turn away from us and towards a cold gray space, leaving her to arrive
later on in the scene (as she always had), with legs folded neatly, looking out at the
sea.waiting patiently by some discarded crumbled belongings. And her profile at last
coming into focus.

© Andrew Saunders, October 2000