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.