Zatoichi; the ultimate Kitano film?

“If I make a film starring Kitano, it will be Zatoichi. (Akira Kurosawa, quoted in Sugimura, 2003: 96).”(Karatsu)

An ambassador? No, I’m more like a spy (laughs). (Kitano in conversation with Midnight Eye)

Kitano’s Zatoichi (2003) can be regarded as one of his greatest successes; taking a beloved Japanese propertly, the equivalent of James Bond, and finally having box office success in Japan with this, his tenth film. He has managed to blend his unique sensibilities with a commercial property that is loaded with external parties expectations while preserving many of his filmic eccentricities and bringing comedy to the fore. Kitano managed to please nearly everybody; was a critical darling with the west also. Is Kitano finally finding a home in cinematic Japan rather than just being a strange ambassador to foreign tastes?

Zatoichi is a remake/reinvention of Japanese film and television icon, Zatoichi, a blind swordsman and masseuse character in one of Japan’s longest TV shows; it ran for 100 episodes, and 26 feature length films. All were played by the same actor Shintaro Katsu, who eventually grew into the director-writer role on the franchise. Kitano takes the established rules of the franchise and brings life to it on an international level.

A serious scene is taken down a peg when it is revealed that Zatoichi is wearing make-up.

He takes a genre movie, the historical drama, or jidaigeki, and inserts anachronistic dance sequences, his brand of humour, and gushing fountains of blood to create something new and old. The question is, how much of his trademark touch has he had to give up for the film to succeed? The reception at home that the film had would have you believe that Kitano must’ve ceded to commercial demands on nearly every front. Is Zatoichi a real Kitano film? Has he surrendered to much of his style to suit mainstream audiences? Quite the contrary has happened. He has instead reinforced his style with a film that acts as a commentary between the original property and the films of Akira Kurosawa through the destabilizing use of his original calling, comedy. The original Zatoichi film,  takes from Kurosawa’s jidaigeki, though Kenji Misumi foregrounds audience empathy using simple kitsch iconography, damaging their ability to critically interpret the film “ These misused qualities make the audience respond to the film in an uncritical way. Such a relationship between the audience and the film leaves the audience emotionally saturated.” (Karatsu) Misumi’s film fetishises Zatoichi in a variety of ways, to convey some timeless traits that are re used again again, such as closeups of his ears while overhearing nefarious plots.

The original.

“Misumi commercially foregrounded Katsu’s personality. Misumi’s cinematic image disassembles Katsu in order to reconstruct it for the spectator. Presenting Ichi in this way proved to be more enduring than Kurosawa’s creation, Yojimbo, by evolving into a fetishised meta-icon.”(Karatsu) Kurosawa’s films are for more realist in composition that Misumi’s creation of emotion, and use comedy to destabilize the affective nature of  the audience relationship to film, and to allow the audience to critically assess the Zatoichi property. “Misumi assembles some kinetic and visceral elements of Kurosawa’s cinematic actions and violence, but he does so to reassure audiences and eradicate difficulty. Kitano’s remake is both parody and homage to the reassuring aesthetics of the original Zatoichi.” (Karatsu) Both Kurosawa and Kitano use humor to destabilize the main characters and their relationships to their identities. His Zatoichi physically falls on his face after defeating the villains, while “. Kikuchiyo’s (The Seven Samurai) restless actions and monkey-like exaggerated giggles and laughter, serve as a contrast to the group-oriented samurai” (Karatsu)

However, Kitano takes these elements of comedy and stretches even further, combining them with anachronistic musical choices. Kitano’s Zatoichi film has strong links to percussive music performances. The villagers can be seen farming in time with non diegetic music on two occasions, and their final sheer spectacle performance featuring all of the good characters, is intercut with Zatoichi on his own, slaughtering the rest of the gang. We cannot fully enjoy either as a result of the other. Kitano has always practised strong critical distanciation in all of his work, using awkward editing, stiff framing, and deadpan actors. Now, he explores this through the more natural means of comedy and music in his work. In truth, Kitano has really changed little or his earlier formula; Zatoichi is far less whimsical or sentimental than Dolls or Kikujiro, it holds far more in common with his earlier yakuzaeiga; the taciturn loner , crime, gangwars and extreme violence all feature.

The final sequence challenges our relationship to the film.

The original director, Kenji Misumi took heavily from Kurosawa’s great films to try and emulate the jidaigeki feel of his work, however he does not problematize audience, and uses kitschi iconography to force the audience’s empathy with Katsu’s Zatoichi.

Karatsu notes how “Kurosawa’s jidaigeki comedies restrain their kitsch elements by means of laughter.” However, Kitano takes these elements of comedy, and does not use them in a realist manner. As such, Kitano’s Zatoichi reduces the world of the film to symbolic. Kitano never allows the audience get too close to his Zatoichi through a variety of techniques.

“In contrast to Kurosawa’s realistic and authentic jidaigeki comedies, the constant reminder that we are indeed watching artifice punctuates Kitano’s Zatoichi.” (Karatsu) It is also is the most knowingly artificial of the three  and he de-fetishises the franchise as a result. Kitano has struck the perfect balance between preservation and rejuvenation.His Zatoichi is more focused, less directly sentimental. Every time before that Kitano has explicitly courted Japan with his cinema, he has been rejected. Why is Zatoichi different? Apparently, Kitano needs a foil over his work before Japan will take it seriously; a separator between actual Kitano films and otherwise. Zatoichi enters into a critical discussion with Kurosawa’s jidaigeki’s and the original Zatoichi  franchise while also retaining Kitano’s style and feel.

Work Cited:

Karatsu, Rie. “Nihon Cine Art: Between Comedy and Kitsch: Kitano’s Zatoichi and Kurosawa’s Traditions of “Jidaigeki” Comedies.” Nihon Cine Art: Between Comedy and Kitsch: Kitano’s Zatoichi and Kurosawa’s Traditions of “Jidaigeki” Comedies. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2013.

Mes, Tom. “Midnight Eye- Takeshi Kitano.” Midnight Eye – Visions of Japanese Cinema – Interviews, Features, Film Reviews, Book Reviews, Calendar of Events, Links and More… N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2013.

The Uncanny Valley of Kitano’s Films

“There sheer idiosyncrasy of the film bespeaks the singularity of the position Kitano has carved for himself as a director…He makes the best he’s able to of each project that comes his way, greeting successes with self-deprecatory modesty and shrugging off failures while gearing up for the next one.” (Rayns)

Tony Rayns wrote the above as part of a film review for Dolls (2002), Kitano’s strangest film yet. Rayns perfectly describes the attitude that Kitano has towards building anything like a coherent legacy. Each project Kitano directs is extremely different; the structural and editorial hallmarks are there, but the thematic and subject matter diversity, having moved on from crime movies, gives him total freedom as a director. Kitano does one thing for a period of time, and then doubles back and does the other. Perhaps we can view Dolls (2002) as an attempt, fitting of his erratic work habits, to claim back the Japanese audience after his attempts at wooing film festivals so overtly with Hana-bi and Kikujiro.

Kitano resists the use of (most) of his character tropes in Dolls. We certainly have never had a company man, popstar or blind rabid pop fan be the main characters in his films before. Typically the characters stem from binary sets; yakuza or cop, though we still have the yakuza in the ranks here.

The film is his most visually rich yet, with the main character’s clothes designed by a fashion designer- and as such, are totally out of step with anything resembling practicality. There is an emphasis on colour and composition that Kitano has only hinted at in his earlier work. A key part of the visual makeup of the film is his use of Japanese culture. Each of his films utilizes Japanese culture tovarying amounts. Hana-bi(1997) has been criticized by Darrell William Davis as a cynical cultural tourism, designed to appeal to foreigners with it’s flavour of the month orientalism. Writing about the imagery in Hana-bi he said : “In spite of their ostensible innocence, as if discovered by orphans or foreigners,these objects are “cheapshots,”exploitations of stock images. (Davis 73)

But Kikujiro (1999) , which Kitano claimed the most receptive of his films to western audiences, contained far more Japanese iconography than Hana-bi, with it’s lampooning of various tropes and TV shows that Kitano himself runs. Davis’ assessment for Hana-bi can be seen as sound, but what does it say about his other films? It is clear that Kitano has an extremely complex relation to issues of national identity from his earlier work. So where does Dolls fit into this, his most dense, in this  regard, film yet? Kitano based the concept and the artificiality of the film on the work of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who crafted theatre shows with doll actors that needed three operators per doll. After an opening demonstration of the powerful bond that the two dolls share, the dolls become the audience and puppeteer of reality, and three vignettes play out as the the Japanese theatre bunraku aesthetic takes over these lives. A couple are symbolically rendered unto the literal dolls, and wander silently together, meeting the other characters in various ways.

In true Kitano fashion, each of the plots are doomed, though they are now more tragic than ever as he infuses sentimentality into each one. Kitano blends life with traditional Japanese theatre in a visually artificial way. How do film and culture interact? Kitano is almost making it too explicit. “Studies of national cinema- and english-language Japanese cinema studies are exemplary-have not paid enough attention to this complexity, assuming Japanese culture was “there” to be “taken” by cameramen and performers.” (Davis 61) At least Kitano challenges this somewhat. He ramps up the amount of Japanese “culture” massively in Dolls, and mixes it with his own aesthetic in a way that challenges this idea of Japanese culture as inherent in everything that Japanese people do. The film is so artificial and at times, forced and gaudy, that one would be hard pressed to watch it and say, That is Japan.

Though the magical reality of the living dolls sits uneasily with the other more grounded stories; that are equal parts daytime soap and newspaper fodder. As such, Kitano makes no pretence at all that the film makes any claims about Japan.“Far from representing a nation or a region, a filmmaker like Kitano wants to be known as an auteur who breaks out of the constraints of national cinema. But how? Kitano shrewdly inserts himself into an unorthodox, atypical nationality that suits the transcultural forms international festivals celebrate. (57 Davis) Kitano instead in interviews appeals to personal anecdotes as a means to justify his fascination with one aspect of Japanese culture and in Dolls allows it to grow into a hybrid with his own style.

Kitano understands this need of films of the stereotypes of other Japanese media to allow itself to be contextualized. It can be said of Kitano to some extent that he liberally drizzles direct Japanese iconography into his films that western audiences would not understand- despite to this point being his biggest audience- to contribute to the cultural tourism effect that he takes advantage of as a director. In Hana-bi, his greatest success, the references are relatively subtle compared to the arch use of Japanese iconography in Dolls. He blends Japanese tradition with contemporary Japanese fiction tropes to purport that the ideas of love hasn’t changed all that much from generation to generation. The tension between various aspects of the film is strange, and it at times feels like it bursting at the seams. Kitano now blends the worlds of film and theatre together, he applies his touch to a new genre for him, that of romance, and increases his visual fidelity.  Each of the three romances is doomed, and would be rendered as generic if only based on the plot content.  However, Kitano’s minimalist mise-en-scene, and touches such as the long take can be seen as rather akin to theatre for a short spell, though that is a form that Kitano is not that far removed from.  Dolls is Kitano’s most artificial film to date, magical realist film, one that still is undeniably one of his films, with all of its’ hybridity and with strong ties to theatre.

Works Cited:

“Dolls – An Interview With Takeshi Kitano.” Dolls – An Interview With Takeshi Kitano. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2013.

Rayns, Tony. “BFI – Puppet Love.” BFI. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2013.

Davis, Darrell William. “Reigniting Japanese Tradition with Hana-Bi.” Cinema Journal 40.4 (2001): 55-80. Print.

Kikujiro; the new paternal

“But the more you show tragedy, the more you have to go in another direction after, like the swing of the pendulum. And here, I wanted to show something tender and funny with the same force that I had shown violence and sorrow.” (Kitano in discussion with NY Times)

Completed after Kitano’s greatest critical success abroad, Kikujiro (1999) is a puzzling film for western audiences becoming familiar with Kitano. An outright comedy, and a return to his TV roots just after his most successful film, Hanabi(1997). It sits in a strange place in his filmic canon. Neither ribald enough to match Getting Any(1995), or noble enough to sit alongside Hanabi, Kikujiro has to fend for itself on both sides of the world. A retired, ex-yakuza, Kikujiro, is tasked by his wife with taking a small boy, Masaru, to find his mother. However, Kikujiro, by virtue of his slovenly character transforms the simple situation into an absurdist road movie, as he spends his travel money on gambling and has to take them across Japan as cheaply as possible.
However, the film defies categorization in a manner fitting Kitano’s life mission statement; that nobody should be able to predict his next move. For those familiar with his refusal to be pigeon holed, it is an apt film.

Kitano takes iconic props from his earlier work, and plays them for laughs.

Instead of a minimalist loner’s journey, we instead get a comic romp. Structurally, the film centres on a series of escapades that the two have, as filtered through Masaru’s journal in a send up of the classic “What did I do last Summer?” school assignment. and the characters they meet that help them in various ways, as they make it to Masaru’s mother’s house and back. Again, the plot is simple, but it is the layers of intertextual reference made to Kitano’s life, other films and TV work that define and complicate the patina presented to us. This film complicates Kitano, and his relationship to both of his audiences in several ways. Most notably through the figure of Kikujiro himself. Kikujiro, Kitano explains to numerous interviewers, is his father’s name, and is based on him and numerous other men Kitano knew growing up in a less than genteel part of Japan. “Born in Tokyo, he spent his childhood in the poor neighborhood of Asakusa… “When I was growing up, I hardly knew him. He gambled and drank, was either absent or violent. I was the youngest of four, and he terrified me. But when I became a father myself, I reflected on this solitary and sad man and tried to invent a relationship with him.” (Dupont Kitano NY Times)

Kikujiro amongst other things, cannot swim.

Kikujiro is a yakuza to some extent, a trait shared between many of Kitano’s previous characters, and he likes to wear sunglasses like Nishi from Hanabi. Confusing audiences further, Kitano problematizes the difference between the taciturn tough guy persona of his Kitano films, and the buffoon figure of Kitano’s TV alter ego, Beat Takeshi, by blending them into Kikujiro. Kikujiro is a loud-mouth, berating Japan, and Japanese stereotypes whenever he meets them, and as a failed yakuza, is rather pathetic in some ways, and is totally different to the domineering Kitano personality of his previous films. Kikujiro only sometimes gets what he wants.
There are numerous references to Kitano’s alter ego Beat Takeshi, and his work in the film, not least the extended scenes of play where Kikujiro and his new friends, the bikers, and the traveller try to cheer up Masaru.

However, the bikers are actually gudan, a part of Beat’s loyal followers on TV shows such as Takeshi’s Castle, the popular game show, and as such, they are strangely compliant with Kikujiro’s bullying and demands. Underlying ripples of behaviour such as these, and the games that the group play are all extremely referential to Beat Takeshi’s cult of personality in Japan. This is reinforced through Kikujiro’s behaviour. Kikujiro himself is neither the silent tough guy or the buffoon  But a flawed character, having more in common with a clown than other Kitano characters of the past, and even flirts with tap dancing, something Kitano himself practised.
There is a nuance and parallel comparison going on in the film between Kitano, Kikujiro, family and the child Masaru, one that Japanese audiences might have been more receptive to, Kitano’s autobiographies often being turned into soap opera dramas, but apparently they miss the nuance. In one interview, Kitano baits the two audiences he has against each other.

Moments of quiet introspection punctuate the film aside the comedy.

“When a Japanese audience Watches this film, Kikujiro, they see the TV comedian Takeshi and that’s all. They stop short of going into the emotions. They don’t try to read the inner feelings. On the other hand, the Cannes audience is unfamiliar with me as a comedian. They see me as just one of the characters. They make an effort to read inside the character. As far as Kikujiro goes, the reaction in France was far better.” (Kitano on Sbs film)
How much of Kikujiro himself is fictitious or real? It is difficult to know. Kikujiro is framed through a child’s scrap book of memories, and as such, Kitano could in fact be in the place of Masaru in the film. Kitano describes how he feels Cannes’ audiences can appreciate his filmic work far more than Japanese audiences, and yet in Kikujiro, he references Beat Takeshi’s brand of humour in numerous ways. We are in a strange dilemma then, as Kitano loads the film with references to his extremely Japanese comedic life, that a western audience could not get. Kitano makes reference and gentle fun at other aspects of his life, TV career and filmography through the character Kikujiro and through the characters he meets.
Tommy Udo writes of how it is “the director’s most autobiographical movie to date, Kikujiro could be seen as a key to all of his work. Kitano’s own father, a largely absent drunk also named Kikujiro, was once forced to spend a summer with his son, much like the character Kikujiro with the parentless boy Masao here. However, it would be unwise to read too much autobiography into a work by such a notoriously unreliable and media-savvy narrator, especially one that feels lighter and less personal in tone than Hana-Bi.”
Kitano is the master of two personas, and of two audiences.

                                           Works Cited

“Interview with Takeshi Kitano.” Interview. SBS. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.sbs.com.au/films/video/11698243984/interview-with-takeshi-kitano&gt;.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Is Ozu Slow?” Senses of Cinema RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2013.

Udo, Tommy. “Kikujiro.” Rev. of Kikujiro. BFI Sight and Sound n.d.: n. pag. BFI. Web.

Hana-bi; a refinement of technique

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. (Bob Davis)

In this retrospective, Hana-bi(1997) is probably Kitano’s most significant so far in his career. Winner of the 1997 Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the Grand Prix of the Belgian Syndicate of Cinema Critics, Hana-bi put Kitano firmly in the world festival and critical circles as a director worth watching. From a technical standpoint, it is his most accomplished work yet. The distanciation of Violent Cop(1989) has been transmuted into sympathy and emotion, the visual fidelity toyed with in Kids Return(1996) and Sonatine(1993) has gone from plain to painterly. The editing flows in a way most people have never seen before. His aesthetic is entirely his own, or so it seems. There are strong links between his film work, and that of celebrated modernist Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu, links that are more apparent in this, Kitano’s most successful work yet. We have Kitano operating on a level of technical, fragmented brilliance in Hana-bi that the 6 films prior all build towards.

Gentle comedy sits aside teeth gritting violence in Hana-bi

The plot has essentially two main thrusts, the stories of Nishi and Horibe, two retired policemen trying to find meaning in their lives. Nishi’s wife is dying, and he is mired in debts to the yakuza, while suffering guilt over the deaths of men under his command and the paralysis of his partner Horibe whose wife and child leave him after a stakeout gone awry. The plot is, as Kitano standard, nothing special, however it’s presentation is what has it’s beguiling effect. “Whilst the narrative of Hana-bi is essentially classical, it is delivered in a spatially fractured, dislocated fashion. Kitano reveals elements of his story like puzzle pieces, disclosing information in dislocated flashbacks, forcing us to reorient ourselves within the narrative, as we do after the elision of key scenes in Ozu’s films.” (Freeman)

Hana-bi, is both new and old, a hybrid of filmic styles and techniques, borrowed from Ozu and otherwise. The modernist narrative touches of Ozu are used, combined with some some extremely hard edits to both lull and stun the audience. When Kitano’s character, Nishi, light’s a cigarette in the meditative hospital, the film cuts to a gun going off and Horibe falling over, blood on his stomach. The two scenes are repeatedly intercut after this, action and inaction blended into a hybrid style. flashback is interwoven into the plot backwards, we see bodies on the floor from which bullets explode outwards of, and other glimpses of the flashback prove to confuse us as to past events until we finally get the right order of things. Only Kitano can so gracefully move from moments of serenity to violence, a technique long practised at this stage.

An example of the atypical editing present in Hana-bi. The long take of Kitano lighting his cigarette explodes. Silence punctuated by violence.

Ozu is a modernist who built his scenes around unconventional, fragmented editing. He is famously known for his narrative ellipsis, for example in Late Spring(1949), Ozu does not show us Norikio meeting her husband Satake. Instead by leaving these key scenes out, one has to fill in the details and interpret what is going on actively. We are not shown Horibe’s family leaving him, or why Nishi took out a yakuza loan, Kitano removes the excesses so that we can focus on the essentials of the moment.

A key aspect of Hana-bi’s style is it’s stillness, taken from such directors as Ozu. Late Spring(1949) contains a scene in which two fathers converse, and their appearances are akin to the rocks in the rock garden they sit at, they move so little. The camera and stiff editing allow us to make the allusion ourselves.
Hana-bi takes his stillness and combines it with the action and violence of a more contemporary plot. “Kitano’s film reflects much of the Ozu tradition, yet blends his use of narrative space with contemporary approaches to action and movement.” (Freeman)  In the opening sequence, our establishing shot comes late, behind the action. We get a shot of the sky, two men staring blankly, and then what we can assume to be a reaction shot from Kitano, a cut of rubbish on a car, we then get an extreme long shot that tells us little, and then a quick cut that reveals that Kitano is standing closer to the two men than we think, the sound of a punch, and then a rag washing the car. The filmic process has been stripped down to impulses, actions are things we have to construct ourselves. Nishi barely says a word in every scene he is in, contained within the shot silently. “Nishi’s face, obscured by dark glasses and frozen in an impassive expression, typifies the void of Ozu.” (Freeman)

The opening sequence as described above:

This stillness extends into the main characters, who have in effect stopped living. They pause and dwell in silence, not expressing what they think. When your actors become still images, some transmutable power is expressed, and Bob Davis describes how the audience puts their own contexts onto the imagery, “Each movie becomes, then, one long Kuleshov experiment. Nishi’s stillness is similar to photography, a medium far more open to interpretation than film. “His(Kitano)hypnotic inertia creates a subjectivity alienated from the audience, generating an unsettling ‘otherness’ on screen. The sense of distance this produces allows non-fictional elements to enter our experience of the image, opening Kitano’s presence on screen to an affect normally associated with still pictures.” (Edwards)  Horibe is an extremely sympathetic character, a man having lost everything, who tries painting to fill the emptiness of his days. In a powerful scene, he contemplates flowers, which then cut to the painting presumably in his head. The imagery is lush, and Kitano suggests the state of inspiration effortlessly.

While the violence and thematic content of Hana-bi is modern, the style takes from Ozu and Freeman notes that “Kitano’s power lies in his ability to unite these two worlds, these opposing forces that rely so heavily upon each other. (Freeman) Hana-bi, marks a diverging point in Kitano’s films despite having all of his original hallmarks.

Works Cited

“Cinespot : A Great Auteur – Yasujiro Ozu.” Cinespot : A Great Auteur – Yasujiro Ozu. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2013.

Davis, Bob. “Takeshi Kitano.” Senses of Cinema RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2013.

Edwards, Dan. “Never Yielding Entirely into Art: Performance and Self-Obsession in Takeshi Kitanoâ  s Hana-Bi.” Senses of Cinema RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2013.

Freeman, Mark. “Kitanoâ  s Hana-bi and the Spatial Traditions of Yasujiro Ozu.” Senses of Cinema RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2013.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Is Ozu Slow?” Senses of Cinema RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2013.

Wrigley, Nick. “Yasujiro Ozu.” Senses of Cinema RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2013.

An examination of childhood

At the end when the two friends meet up again for the first time in two or three years, Masaru asks Shinji if he thinks that they’re washed up. I asked myself the same question when I had the motorcycle accident in August 1994. (Kitano in conversation with Rayns)

Kids Return(1996) sits awkwardly at first amongst the rest of Kitano’s output up to this point in his career. He does not feature in the film personally, and it contains little of his now traditional iconography. As such, it is often overlooked when it comes to any film criticism; there are little to no articles written about this film despite the crucial role I feel it plays in the development and maturation of his style. It is a film that is far more personal for Kitano than many in the west may realize, being created just after a tumultuous event in his life. In between Getting Any? (1994) and Kids Return, Kitano was in a horrific motorcycle accident that he referred to as an “unconscious suicide attempt” (Kitano quoted in Lee Server, Asian Pop Cinema)

Kitano himself confesses that Getting Any? was an expression of a self destructive impulse, with which he shattered his auteurist identity in the west and made fun of his own Beat Takeshi humour. Getting Any? appears to be an expression of his internal turmoil that culminated in his accident. Kids Return is a film made almost as personal proof that Kitano could still enjoy the act of creativity after the accident, and to take a re constructionist approach to his cinema. He strips his tropes down, and centres the film not around adults, but around a small group of high-school boys who are trying to find meaning in their lives outside of education. Masaru and Shinji meet at the start of the film three years after they last met, having tried and failed to make something out of themselves. They reminisce together on their high school years, their triumphs and failures. Gone are the deadpan long takes, the unconventional editing and structures, a heavy presence of crime film tropes, and everything else Kitano is known for, is replaced with is a clear purity shared with A Scene at the Sea(1991).

Here, Kitano takes liberally from his own childhood; the two boys are not suited to the class room and to traditional jobs. They dabble in stand up comedy, and attempt amatuer boxing before the best friends are divided by their choices; Masaru joins the yakuza while Shinji remains a boxer. Not a single role works out for them. As such, the film also explores dismissive patriarchal relationships between the boys and their teachers in the gym, work and at school. Each time, the misguided delinquents are let down or misguided as such by an older father figure. Ultimately both boys make errors of judgement and their chosen avenues close on them, they separate until meeting at the start of the film. They do not die, only make mistakes and learn, in much the way that Kitano himself did. “The earlier films are about finding the right way to die. These characters have to live; they’re the way they are because of the state I was in after the accident.” (Kitano talking with Rayns)

The aesthetic of this film is part of an overall trend in Kitano’s later films for aesthetic purity. Colours are implemented more consistently than any other of his films up to this point, Violent Cop (1989) is positively crude by comparison. Masaru is identified with red while Shinji with blue, a direct way of communicating their personalities, and how complementary the two characters are. The shots and formal structure of this film make it by far the most typical mainstream film in appearance that Kitano has made at this point. Though, despite this accessible exterior, the internal mechanics of the film are probing truths about Kitano himself and about live in Japan for youths that make mistakes. Kitano himself finds the film to be an explicit relation to his situation post the accident.

“At the end when the two friends meet up again for the first time in two or three years, Masaru asks Shinji if he thinks that they’re washed up. I asked myself the same question when I had the motorcycle accident in August 1994. 60-70 per cent of me thought that I was through, that I couldn’t go on. But the rest of me thought that I’d hardly begun. I don’t know if Shinji and Masaru will go on to achieve anything or not, but it’s certain their past mistakes and failures will make it very hard for them, especially in Japanese society.” (Kitano in conversation with Rayns)
Kitano’s characters ask themselves if life is over that quickly, and with the final lines of the film, it seems that Kitano has the answer.

Do you think we’re already finished?
No way. We haven’t even started.

Works Cited

Lee Server, Asian Pop Cinema, op. cit., p. 82 

Rayns, Tony “The Harder Way.” Welcome to Kitano Takeshi . Com. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

The two Kitanos, and Getting Any

“When people tell me I’m an artist, I say what? It’s impossible for me to take the idea seriously. So I just wanted to have fun here. Psychologically, I’m still a 12-year-old boy.” (Kitano, Rose)

One is inclined to view Kitano’s body of films as a process of maturation; as one follows his films in order, we can find his thematic concerns such as mono no aware and his use of violence becoming more nuanced and intelligent. His first 4 films culminate in Sonatine(1993) and two films later, he produces what is perceived as his masterpiece, Hana-Bi(1997), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. However, between them, lies Getting Any(1995), an extremely polarizing work. Getting Any was a financial and critical flop, abroad and at home. A film full of crude sex jokes and scatological humour, it seems at odds with the output that Kitano is known for in Europe- these meticulously paced films. This is because Kitano has an alter ego unbeknownst to European audiences; Beat Takeshi.

Beat Takeshi was a satirist, captivating the teenagers of Japan with his black humour while not caring what the rest of ‘decent’ Japan thought. “Takeshi escaped from the convention of graduating from university to become what he called “a member of society”. He turned his back on life as a ‘sensible adult’ and chose instead to keep on acting like a child.” writes Tomihiro Machiyama, a man who grew up an avid fan of Kitano’s late night radio shows, where he discussed shock humour with his teenage audience and other puerile topics
He worked as part of the Two Beats comedy group before his radio show, both attacking and supporting the traditional manzai comedy duo structure by making it appeal to a younger audience and using very little of the rigid structure that the traditional manzai utilized. “The best-known Two Beats joke is a parody of a public transport safety slogan which goes, “Cross when the traffic lights are at red, like everyone else and you will be safe.” Initially, that was attacked for encouraging children to break road safety rules. Eventually. however, people came to see it as poignant criticism of the collective psychology particular to the Japanese -i.e. ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’.” (Machiyama) We can see from that example, that Beat’s humour is directly aimed at Japanese audiences, and since Getting Any is a Beat Takeshi film, the humour, and cultural references for the most part are incredibly difficult to discern for a western audience.
Describing the plot in Getting Any is rather pointless. It starts with a simple minded man wanting to buy a car for sexual exploits. Eventually  all his exploits and plots fails to claim the fairer sex.

Kitano dresses Dankan up like one of Japan’s most notorious figures, the poisoning bank robber.

His exploits reference other Japanese films and important cultural events. To join the yakuza, Dankan, our main character, kills a character called Joe Shishido- named after a famous yakuza genre actor, who rather suave in comparison to this Joe. It makes references to the  Teikoku Bank robbery, dressing Dankan up like the man who killed 12 people, as he tries to rob a bank. He Tries become an actor, and ends up playing Zatoichi, the popular blind samurai character, on a film set, where he causes chaos by accidentally throwing ladles of faeces around the set. The final third apes Godzilla vs. Mothra, Ghostbusters, The Fly, and Ultraman in it’s campy aesthetic and costumes.
The plot is perfunctory, it is only the barest of bones with which Beat Takeshi uses to satirise the giants in Japanese culture. The film is rather, an assault on our decency and senses of moral order, as Dankan robs banks, steals cars, joins the yakuza and becomes a giant fly as a result of his attempts to have sex.

Getting Any is outrageous, though is it funny? The humour and gags are stiff, references exist only for their own sake, and the universe that Dankan inhabits goes from being a recognizable Japan for foreigners, and becomes a trip inside the collective Japanese mind.  Getting Any can be viewed as both a venting of Kitano’s childish side, and an expression of his refusal to be pigeon-holed, a trend that sees him balancing both sides of his career. “According to his producer, Masayuki Mori, who has known him for 30 years, Kitano’s career is like a pendulum. “The more serious he gets in his films, the stronger he swings back to the other side, and the more absurd and stupid his TV shows get. He really needs to do both to be him.” (Rose)
Why did Takeshi Kitano turn to Beat, just as he was on the cusp of solidifying all the film craft progress he had expressed? this question can be answered by looking at trends in Kitano’s life.

Yakuza tropes are parodied quite heavily in Getting Any, as Kitano pokes fun at his newer body of work.

Kitano is a man that resists structures; “Another explanation would be, that Kitano, as he always does when he is pushed, pushes back: If they want to laugh at me on screen, then I?ll give them something to laugh at. In a recent interview, Kitano said, “I wanted to make fun of my own jokes, and send them up. So I made up new routines which were more outrageous than the silliest ones I usually invent. I wanted to make myself ludicrous to the point where viewers would say, ‘This guy’s had it’. I enjoyed my self-mockery so much I totally lost myself in it.” (Sylow) Kitano himself described Getting Any as creative suicide, a cleansing of his artistic concerns. Getting Any is both a return to the Beat Takeshi humour and a deconstruction of the structures others impose on Kitano, serious or comedic.  “until recently Japanese audiences have largely ignored Kitano’s movies, which only found an audience when they were praised by European critics. He saves his arthouse auteur persona for when he’s overseas.”(Rose) For the European market, we know of Takeshi Kitano as the near mute, stoneface, a man of filmic integrity, the purveyor of long takes and brutal violence. However, in Japan, his first foray into the public eye was through comedy, and it is to comedy he returns in Getting Any, though with a withering eye towards his own ‘Beat’ persona. Kitano’s total body of work is representative of both sides of Japanese aesthetics. One side is serene and noble, the other peeps into ladies bathrooms. After years of being raucous and offensive as Beat Takeshi, did he then take to directing serious films. It seems that to reach the highest heights of ‘maturity’, Kitano feels the need to express his childishness to the fullest.  Rather than continue in this vein of failing to achieve acclaim in his native country, and finding it in Europe, Getting Any is an aggressive attack on both sides of his double life.

Works Cited

Machiyama, Tomohiro. “A Comedian Star Is Born.” Welcome to Kitano Takeshi . Com. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

Rose, Steve. “Takeshi Kitano: One Original Gangster.” The Guardian. N.p., n.d. Web.

Sylow, Henrik. “Biography.” Welcome to Kitano Takeshi . Com. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

Kitano and genre

Sonatine(1993) can be seen as the event horizon of Kitano’s previous efforts to combine various aspects of his style into a more coherent whole. Returning to the criminal world of Boiling Point (1990) and the melancholy of A Scene at the Sea(1991), Kitano takes the tropes of the Japanese yakuza film and applies his sensibilities and artistic concerns to a genre that Paul Schrader saw as “probably the most restricted genre yet devised”, composed of “litanies of private argot, subtle body language, obscure codes, elaborate rites, iconographic costumes and tattoos”. (Varese 3) Kitano manages to create something new out of the genre of the Japanese gangster movie, or yakuza-eiga.

Sonatine’s location proved to be extremely effective at differentiating the film from other yakuza-eiga.

Is Sonatine so powerful only because of this culture shock to western audiences? Or was it different enough from other Japanese crime films to be of note? There are clear and strong demarcations that writers have noted between the american gangster films and the yakuza-eiga.  We can find a concern with social commentary, and a strong link to noire in american crime cinema, which is contrasted with the yakuza-eiga, and their concerns with identity as part of a group and the personal obligations to codes and honour. Indeed Paul Schrader argued that “The Japanese gangster film aims for a higher purpose than its western counterparts: it seeks to codify a positive workable morality. In American terms it is more like a western than a gangster film. Like the western the  yakuza-eiga, chooses timelessness over relevance, myth over realism; it seeks not social commentary but moral truth. Although the average yakuza film is technically inferior to an American or European gangster film, it has achieved a nobility denied it’s counterparts- a nobility normally reserved for westerns.” (Shrader 10)

Sonatine’s extended sequences of the gangster at play, challenge this nobility.

In the character of Murakawa, Kitano finds some semblance of nobility, and then abandons it at the seaside. Murakawa is a veteran yakuza, who tires of the yakuza themes of duty(giri) and humanity (ninjo) that Paul Schrader identifies of as being key components of Toei’s extremely formulaic yakuza-eiga output. Murakawa wants to leave the yakuza,  unfortunately he and a small team are asked to mediated between two warring factions out in rural Okinawa, and spend most of the film reliving their youths on the beach as it is the only safe place for them to be. Gangster life is suspended as they dance, throw frisbees and sumo wrestle on the beach until real life eventually comes calling. We find the atmosphere of distanciation first articulated in Violent Cop becoming something more meditative, as his framing and long takes which now concern themselves with the character of Murakawa, a yakuza who challenges norms.

The Toei film company had the most success with the yakuza-eiga and they eventually supplanted period dramas as Japan’s premier audience pull. Production started in the 60s with low budgets and their form became less ritualized and become more in line with cinema verite. “The enormous success of The Godfather in Japan caused the Toei brass to finance more ‘documentary’ style yakuza films.” (Schrader 10). Sonatine has neither the ritualistic fetish-ification of the 60s yakuza-eiga or the documentary leanings of the 70s examples of the genre. The 70s are viewed as the yakuza-eiga golden age, and that  “After this brief window of opportunity, the studios reasserted their control on the style and content of yakuza movies, thereby (metaphorically) killing this genre. (Varesen 17)” Sonatine exists during a time when crime movies were only again coming back from the dead as a genre in Japan.

Paul Schrader argues that this difference between American and Japanese productions stems from the historical links that the yakuza-eiga has to the samurai film .American and Japanese crime films are thus very different beasts. Yakuza films at all had died out by the time that Kitano started working, and as such, he has a large history and contextual framework with which enter into discussion with. Kitano and his relations to Japanese gangster films.

However, Sontaine’s idyll is shattered by the bookending plot structure  These men are being hunted. They forget this and pay the price.

Paul Schrader describes how formulaic these yakuza-eiga films are, “A typical Toei yakuza film- there’s no use mentioning specific titles since most of Toei’s three hundred or so yakuza films have the same plot structure…” In his write up, he tells that these films were generated in manners similar to the Hollywood systems  with scripts written by committee, and films on production lines. Such is the formal structure imposed, that Schrader outlines 20 set pieces that one can expect at least 2 of to appear in  any 60s yakuza-eiga film. These include visits to prison and all manner of violent confrontations. However, Sonatine’s plot is a set dressing to the effect of the film. The generic tropes of the yakuza-eiga only feature for the first 15 minutes or so. With the domineering gang head, the Oyabun, having put a noose around Murakawa’s neck with his plotting and against who Murakawa ultimately kills in the final climax. Though for the majority of the film, Sonatine is a crime film drained of narrative impulse. By the time that Murakawa reaches the beach, he is eager to forget his criminal ties and to frolic. However, the overarching plot eventually takes hold and he must finish everything and cut off every tie to the yakuza films of the past by killing every culpable member he can at the shootout. The age of the gangster film is long gone by the 90s and this lack of other traditional, heavily ritualized yakuza film allows Kitano certain freedoms with the narrative and form. Kitano’s films are shot as cheaply quickly as possible, as with his Toei-B movie ancestors, His cultivated style now plays fully into his favour, with extremely striking shot compositions that take full advantage of the sun, sand and sky. It took men outside of Toei, either independent, or with Office Kitano, to give stylistic evolution back to the yakuza-eiga.“Engaging portrayals of the yakuza in the 1990s were produced outside the Japanese studio system by directors such as Kitano Takeshi, Miike Takashi and Sakamoto Junji. The movies of this new generation of filmmakers deal in extreme violence, deadpan wit, and deeply felt human dilemmas. They also portray the yakuza in a less than flattering light, although they do not totally eschew their genre roots: they do shy away from presenting the yakuza as downright buffoons. (Varese 17)” Kitano suggests that what lies under the yakuza veneer is a desire to be a child again, to forget the death wish this lifestyle has placed on their heads.

Works Cited

Schrader, Pail. “Yakuza-Eiga- A Primer.” Film Comment Jan-Feb (1974): 8-17. Web.

Varese, Federico. “The Secret History of Japanese Cinema: The Yakuza Movies.” Global Crime 7.1 (2006): 105-24. University of Oxford. Web.

Premature Death and the Tides

“It is thus absolutely  necessary to die,  because while living  we  lack meaning…  Death performs a lightning- quick  montage  on  our  lives; that is,  it  chooses  our truly significant moments  (no longer  changeable  by other possible  contrary or incoherent  moments)  and places them  in sequence… It  is thanks to death that our  lives  become  expressive. Montage thus  accomplishes for  the  material  of  film (constituted  of fragments, the  longest  or the shortest, of as many long takes as there are subjectivities) what  death  accomplishes for life.”
(Pasolini 6)

A Scene by the Sea (1991), seems at first, to be a film very far removed from typical Kitano conventions. It features no violence and no yakuza. However, it still manages to be uniquely a Kitano film. What is unique tohis films apart from the more obviously iconic ingredients? Kitano keeps up the experimenting spirit of his prior film Boiling Point in several ways; this film is a development of the more subtle aspects of his work- such as how how little dialogue he needed to maintain a scene. Kitano during his first three films, seems to be always probing towards the films he wanted to make.

From a technical aspect, A Scene by the Sea offers a unique challenge as part of these three. The incredibly sparse dialogue, long takes, simple characters, and incidental plot all combine thanks to Kitano’s alchemic thematic considerations to become more as a grand sum.
A Scene by the Sea concerns itself with Shigeru, a deaf garbage collector who finds a broken surfboard one morning at work, repairs it, and with the support of his also deaf girlfriend Takako begins to surf. Very quickly it becomes a consuming passion of his life and other parts of his life start to suffer while he develops his talents.

Repeatedly, Kitano characters die at the end of his films, on the cusp of happiness, or success in their goals. A Scene by the Sea is no different. Shigeru’s board is found by Takako one stormy morning after his talents have developed meteorically and he has taken home a trophy for his talents. Such a sudden ending for our main character leaves a sour taste in the mouth. This trend of tragic death in Kitano’s work linked to the asian philosophy of mono no aware, itself stemming from Buddhist thought. Mono no aware is far removed from western audiences know and what they expect from cinema. It translates to “The pathos of things”. To fully celebrate one’s life or any subject, one must understand the essential transience of this universe and everything in it. For the Japanese mind, the world is in flux and everything dies. Rather than simply lament at this, the world and everything in it is more beautiful for it. In Japan, Cherry Blossom viewings are a major national pastime. They last a week. They blossom and they fall. The beauty in being able to watch something is contextualized by the immanent death of the subject. The Sea, which after Boiling Point, begins to feature greatly in many Kitano films, has been responsible for external influences on Japan, bringing foreigners, new cultures and industry on its waves, and in that respect a large supplier of fuel for modern mono no aware.

We can find mono no aware and the notion of kire, to cut, in  A Scene by the Sea. The emotions evoked by Shigeru’s death coupled with his transient successes are cruel, but for mono no aware, necessary. Kire is connected to Japanese flower arranging; the flowers are only truly considered alive when they have been cut. Ikebana means “making flowers live”. This allows the viewer to see Shigeru’s life, and his achievements with greater clarity. Death contextualizes life. There is no triumphant long life to be had for Shigeru;  to be cut in his prime allows us to ascribe meaning to his life, in much the same way that Pasolini claims editing gives meaning to filmed footage. Kitano emphasises both concepts by showing us footage of Shigeru and Takako’s life that was not in the film, and various shots of the cast laughing at the camera after his death. This breaking of the verisimilitude of the film, by acknowledging that there is a camera there, shows us of Kitano’s awareness of the meaning that editing imposes onto footage as he becomes an ikebana artist, having edited the film himself.

Mono no aware and kire, can be seen as a plague to Kitano’s characters, or as a thematic enabler. Kitano’s characters being aesthetic ciphers than psychologically realistic beings. Shigeru might not have explicitly died on camera, like Azuma in Violent Cop or Murakawa in Sonatine. However his death is just as emblematic of Kitano’s aesthetic concerns.Through the process of arranging his character’s death, Kitano gives us a chance to look again at the character, instantly re-contextualized. Mono no aware, the dwelling celebratory eye, a particular, slightly painful and loving emotion, aware of coming change and the loss of the stable norm. What more fitting symbol for this than the sea?

Works Cited:

Pasolini, Pier Paulo. “Observations on the Long Take.” October 13 (1980): n. pag. JSTOR. Web.

Parkes, Graham, “Japanese Aesthetics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=japanese-aesthetics/&gt;.

The long take and Boiling Point

The great enemy  of documentary (and oddly, rather a  taboo  topic  of  discussion  among  film- makers themselves)  is  the “dead spot” in  which nothing seems to be happening. Film producers are terrified of such moments, for they are terrified of audience impatience. (Mac Dougal 38)

This fear of the ‘dead spot’ also applies to narrative cinema, and in his second film, the great farce, Boiling Point (1990), Kitano embraces this fear. Characters stare at each other and stare at the camera, in shots up to twenty seconds in length, as time balloons past simply feeling slow and becomes glacial for modern audiences.

The question is indeed, why is Boiling Point the way it is. In this film, we can still see Kitano still finding his filmic style. His characterization falls flat, but the eye for style, for the absurd, and his pacing all call towards his later masterpieces such as Sonatine and Hanabi. Boiling Point concerns itself with the bumbling Masahiko, whose life has no direction. He idiotically lashes out against a bullying yakuza member and the yakuza start pressuring his garage work place. His baseball coach, Iguchi, an ex yakuza, intervenes and gets hospitalized. Masahiko and his equally maladroit friend then travel to Okinawa where they ‘befriend’ a gangster Uehara, Kitano himself, who helps them get the guns they want.Compared to other films from the late 80s/ early 90s, Boiling Point is a study in simultaneous restraint and excess. We can place Kitano and his style as at odds with the modern Hollywood trends towards briefer shots with more intercutting, and relate him to an older Hollywood where shots were longer and less claustrophobic. Bordwell distinguishes between the two periods of Hollywood in terms of the post 60’s intensified continuity, writing how the sheer number of shots and edits doubled or more. “At the close  of the 1980s, many films boasted 1500 shots  or more. There soon  followed movies  containing 2000-3000  shots…  By  century’s  end,  the  3000-4000 shot movie had arrived… Many average shot lengths became  astonishingly low. (Bordwell 17)

During this period of decreasing ASL, Boiling Point strolls in the opposite direction.For a film about a pending violent confrontation, Boiling Point does not try to remind you of this. Instead, Kitano emphasises the pace of the small city/ rural life in Japan under the sweltering heat, where anger festers under a long slow boil until it’s explosive ending. Boiling Point’space is extremely deliberate. As our introduction to Masahiko, he stares at the camera for 20 seconds, as his introduction to the film. After opening the toilet door, He walks towards the camera for 25 seconds before the third edit, which is a reverse shot of the the second shot which also last 25 seconds. This habit is one that holds for the entire film.Other shots push a minute, others 2 or 3.Directors, editors and TV producers have helped enforce this trend of the faster and faster shots, and we as an audience have supported it. Kitano bucks this trend and probes what emotion he can elicit despite this difficulty of an audience that is trained in a wholly different school of cinema and have issues of empathising with the long take as a result. “Editors tend to cut at every line and insert more reaction shots than we  would  find in the period  1930- 1960. “(Borwell 17) Kitano balances out the long takes by often punctuating them with brutal violence, or dark comedy.

The shot where Iguchi intimidates a yakuza by making him repeat the same sentence over and over until he brutally kills him, lasts for a full minute, however it is magnetizing rather than boring due to the subject matter and potential for violence. Kitano almost raises the question himself, of whether or not his cinema needs violence, when during the two and a half minute long take where Uehara and his new friends relax in the bar. The camera drunkenly staggers from subject to subject as two yakuza wander in and attack Uehara. The kareoke in the corner of the room does not stop, highlighting how surreal the whole comic scene is.

“The mannerism of today’s cinema would seem to ask its spectators to take a high  degree  of narrational overtness  for  granted, …  The triumph of  in- tensified continuity  reminds us that as styles  change, so do viewing  skills.” (Bordwell 25)

In Boiling Point Kitano manages to wrestle our attention in spite of himself with moments of dark comedy. As a result of what he calls modern cinema’s ‘intensified continuity’, Bordwell states how “intensified  continuity  has  endowed  films with quite overt narration (25) , The audience is directed to only what the director wants them to see, and have become more passive then past film goers as a result. Boiling Point avoids this overt narration, not directing your eye towards the obvious. A clear example is when Uehara and his subordinate attack the yakuza they have a vendetta with, the editing is fragmented, as awkward pauses between the first accidental spray of bullets and the next pad the scene. In Boiling Point, intensified continuity is attacked, via the unconventional editing. There is a jump cut of Uehara’s subordinate sitting at the yakuza desk, to one of Uehara raping the tea attendant parallel to the desk. The camera never tells us how to feel about Uehara, we can only react to his actions.

However, the final long take of the film, the last shot indeed problematizes a reading of Boiling Point as simple violence bait. Kitano appears to be reaching for some thematic depth that he does not quite reach. The final shot of the film is a reference back to the 3rd 30 second shot in the opening, as Masahiko jogs rather than walks back to his teams side after awaking from his daydream in the toilet. However this shot lasts for over three minutes, and the credits begin to roll over it. The long take that challenges narrative closure triumphs over traditional audience direction. We stare a little longer and harder at this one.

Works Cited

Bordwell, David. “Intensified Continuity Visual Style in Contemporary American Film.” Film Quarterly 55.3 (2002): 16-28. JSTOR. Web.

MacDougall, David. “When Less Is Less: The Long Take in Documentary.” Film Quarterly 42.2 (1992/1993): 36-46. Print.

Pasolini, Pier Paulo. “Observations on the Long Take.” October 13 (1980): n. pag. JSTOR. Web.

Violent Cop and Violence. (…)

Warning: This is a (vaguely) academic write up, Absolute Spoilers follow, Do yourself a favour and watch the film:

“The overwhelming historical presence of violence in folklore, mythical legends, nursery rhymes, lullabies, literature, theatre and film suggests that violence which is experienced receptively through a dramatized medium has some kind of allure.” (Shaw 131)

Violent Cop is an extremely intense film. Death follows Takeshi Kitano’s policeman Azuma as he delivers his own brand of justice befitting the title. Despite the horrific content, it never loses sight of its thematic content, with Kitano filming the violence with a dispassionate eye. Why is Violent Cop the way it is? Kitano’s directorial debut, and one he stars in, contains both innocence and maturity.

Kitano intentionally or otherwise, attacks the allure of violence in a dramatic context. Azuma’s powertrip is in the beginning almost sympathetic, as he berates and beats a youth who harassed a homeless man, but quickly we see that he has a tendency to go too far. A large part of how we react to the film, is how the violence is depicted. Kitano does not glorify violence, instead showing it to us in a realist fashion. “Violent Cop projects its internal calm through a use of static camera and long and extreme -long- shots that engender an aesthetic of mild distanciation: a stylistic trait which has become a Kitano hallmark.” (Totaro 132)

The film repeatedly makes use of long takes, as Azuma crosses the street, walks up steps or does anything. This grounds us not in the western cinema of emotion, but rather the eastern. As such, western audiences might be challenged by some of the vintage shot composition on display. “If the Western audience perceived emotion through intimacy with a face, the Japanese perceived it through forms set in their environment, seen through long shots, long takes and their pathetic fallacy.” (Richie 12)

Rachel Shaw’s experiment for the University of Leicester shows us that we find violence in films bearable and enjoyable if we can justify it through the plot.  “Previously we saw how important the plot was to understanding violent scenes in films; this account reveals an equivalent need for contextualization in real life.” (142)

However, much of our protagonists actions are not tied to the overarching plot. That becomes more pertinent in the latter half of the film. Violence in this film exists for and of itself. Tangential violent encounters are dragged out beyond traditional plot structures. The violence flows in episodes, without consequence. Azuma did not have to kick the abusive partner in the face while he was down,  nor did he have to run over the violent criminal. His character is not ever given proper context, he just is.

The aesthetic of the film is always extremely calm and measured, with long takes, and a lack of emotive close ups. There is a strangely leisurely, detached feeling as Azuma and the rookie chase after the man who just smashed open another cop’s head in. Some slow motion is used, and we wince as the baseball bat comes down on a policeman’s head. Another distancer for us Western audiences is that we not used to the vengeful Ronin trope that is layered under the cliches of the yakuza crime film here. “One of the overriding themes of Kitano’s directorial debut is the blurring of the worlds of law and crime, cop and criminal.” (Totaro 133)  The violence cannot be justified by the plot but it stems from a Japanese narrative trope. Azuma becomes embroiled in a vicious cycle of violence with the Mob boss’ best hitman. However, the characters bear far more in common with Samurai, and the dualized leads both become shamed ronin, having lost their idealized position and care not for death as they hunt and pursue each other. The worlds of beauty, peace and of hatred are also blurred, as Azuma’s single solace in caring for his sister is ultimately taken from him. Violence also crosses boundaries, when one of Azuma’s bullets is deflected and hits an innocent girl. Neither Azuma or his rival care.
Identity is portrayed as fluid. The iconic long shot of Azuma walking across the bridge towards the camera is recreated at the end of the film by his rookie partner. This implies that he will follow in Azuma’s steps, but rather he becomes more like the corrupt cop Iwaka who was working with the drug ring the entire time. Morality is fluid, appearance is also, and loyalties more so;  the sweet nervous rookie will become a cold man. The lawmaker can be a tyrant.
We can see that Violent Cop would have been a very different film if it were made by any other culture or by any other man. It is laden with cliches from a character perspective, but it is the tight reign of control that Kitano holds, and the treatments of these cliches under his meditative eye that reveals some primal truth in them.

Works Cited

Richie, Donald. Japanese Cinema: An Introduction. Hong Kong: Oxford UP, 1990. Print.

Shaw, Rachel Louise. “Making Sense of Violence: A Study of Narrative Meaning.” Qualitative Research in Psychology 1.2 (2004): 131-51. Web.

Totaro, Donato. “Sono Otoko, Kyobi Ni Tsuki Violent Cop.” The Cinema of Japan & Korea. London: Wallflower, 2004. N. pag. Print.