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.