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Takeshi
Kitano by Bob Davis Bob Davis teaches film production at California State University, Fullerton and is a contributing writer to American Cinematographer. |
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| 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.
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, 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)
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”
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.
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:
Filmography Violent
Cop (Sono
otoko, kyobo ni tsuki,
literally Warning! This Man is Wild) (1989) also
actor and (uncredited) writer 
Bibliography Darrell
Davis, "Reigniting Japanese Tradition with Hana-Bi”,
Cinema Journal, 40.4, Summer 2001, pp. 55–80
Articles in Senses of Cinema A
Scene at the Sea:
Reflections
by Andrew
Saunders
Web Resources Brother
pressbook
Kinema
Club Japan
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