2. MATERIALES Y MÉTODOS
3.5. Propuesta de mejora
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During the early '90s, as far as foreign audiences were concerned, the Golden Age of Japanese cinema was well and truly over, dead and buried in a mythic past represented by names such as Ozu, Naruse, and Mizoguchi. Budgets had cer
tainly got bigger during the bubble years of the '80s, and the films accordingly glossier, but the industry had become more and more hermetic, with internationally renowned directors such as Nagisa Oshima, and even that living legend Akira Kurosawa, forced to look abroad for funding.
Aside from a handful of films that included Jiizo Itami's feel-good food comedy Tampopo ( 1 98 5 ) , Katsuhiro Otomo's ground-breaking animation Akira ( 1 988), and the freak cult suc
cess of Shinya Tsukamoto's independently pro
duced Tetsuo ( 1 989), not much made it far from Japanese shores, the major companies focusing purely on the domestic market without seem
ingly giving a passing thought to foreign au
diences. In fact, looking at a number of staple genres from the period-nurse dramas, salary
man comedies, and an endless parade of cute live-action children's films with animals at their center-you have to wonder what kind of audi
ence they had in mind at all.
With the bubble slowly but surely deflat
ing throughout the '90s, even the major studio product had lost its sheen, leaving precious little else beneath it. It's easy to forget it but, to
dis-158
tant observers at least, it looked like Japanese cinema barely had it in it to limp through to the next millennium. That the industry managed to survive at all in the Western perception is en
tirely due to one man-Takeshi Kitano. For the best part of the '90s, he was the dominating rep
resentative of Japanese cinema abroad, cutting an imposing figure as he appeared on movie posters, his gnarled visage set in an inexpressive mask, clad in shades and a black suit, smoking pistol in hand, as if cast from the same mold as one of the suave contract criminals of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs ( 1 992 ).
Even this widespread approbation from Westerners was fairly late in corning. Though a number of Kitano's movies had previously aired at international festivals and received theatrical or video releases outside of the United States, it was only in the wake of the surprise Golden Lion award for Fireworks at the 1 997 Venice In
ternational Film Festival that Kitano can truly be said to have "arrived," guns blazing, on the international scene. Less savvy critics and fans thought they'd discovered the next John Woo
albeit one whose presence manifested itself in front of the camera as well as behind it-and the bloodier end of Kitano's back catalogue was once more unleashed onto the West in a hail of bullets and blood squibs: Sonatine was reissued on a limited theatrical run by Tarantino's
Roll-ing Thunder Pictures (a subsidiary of Miramax) in the United States in 1 998, with Violent Cop and Boiling Point following in 1 999, almost ten years after their first domestic releases.
Back at home, the Japanese were confused.
Heralded in the West as a cinematic auteur who cited Jean-Luc Godard as an influence and who had elevated the yakuza genre to the realms of High Art, was this really the same fast-talking Beat Takeshi who had played buffoon to Beat Kiyoshi's straight man as part of The Two Beats comedy double act during the '70s and early '80s? Was this the same comic persona who had dominated Japanese TV airwaves during the '80s, terrorizing the general public and subject
ing them to all sorts of ignominies in shows such as Tensai Takeshi no Genki ga Deru Terebi [trans:
Genius Takeshi's TV that makes you lively] ; the smirking mastermind behind a plethora of dan
gerous high-profile public pranks, who broke into people's houses disguised in ninja cos
tumes or as a giant daikon radish? Was this the comic lynch pin of the '80s sketch show Oreta
chi Hyokinzoku [trans: Us jokers] ; Takechanman the halfwit superhero who pitted his wits on a weekly basis against his evil opponent, the Black Devil? Was this the same taboo-breaking com
pere with the penchant for cross-dressing and the trademark obscene downward thrust of the hands inspired by the '70s Russian gym
nast Nadia Comaneci, who dared to laugh at the old and fat, who exposed himself in public like a naughty schoolboy, and who peppered his peak-time performances with a colorful spray of vulgarities? Was this the same volatile hothead
1993
Takeshi Kitano · 159
who burst into the offices of the tabloid maga
zine Friday with his Gundan, the loyal fan club of TV associates, drinking buddies, and hang
ers-on, in the wake of a scandal involving pub
lished pictures of an alleged mistress?
Still to this day Kitano is amongst the most familiar faces on Japanese TV; and very much a part of the media establishment. His endearing public persona as the tearaway brat that never quite grew up, like Crayon Shin-chan with To
urette's syndrome, has ensured that he is con
stantly in demand, with barely a week going by when he doesn't appear on screen in some capac
ity. Along with Hayao Miyazaki of Ghibli stu
dios, he is the one other name in this book that can be said to be a household one. He is without peer or parallel elsewhere in the world, a multi
purpose entertainer, whose talent is seemingly limitless. Alongside the endless TV appearanc
es, columns in newspapers and magazines, his fifty or so books, acting in other people's films, his paintings, and fronting the Office Kitano production company, it's amazing the man even has time to eat, yet alone make films.
And herein lies the irony of Kitano's status as industry savior. Back at home, his movies are not the high-profile blockbusters that his international reputation might lead you to believe, his filmmak
ing work being something he does on the side. In
the eyes of local audiences, his films are seen as too violent and nihilistic for general consump
tion. This is undoubtedly one of the factors for his thematic about-tum into melodrama with Dolls, which he stated at the time of its release as aimed at a more mainstream, female-oriented market.
1999
Actually, even Kitano's reputation in the West during the latter half of the '90s was some
what misleading, his tough-guy image sustained by further yakuza roles in Takashi Ishii's sleek
duction Tokyo Eyes ( 1 998). Those films that didn't fall comfortably into this canon representing the teleological cinematic evolution that culminat
ed in Fireworks-for example, the lucidly simple A Scene at the Sea, or the refreshingly idiotic Getting Any?-were never widely distributed outside ofJapan. Whilst this may be because he didn't actually star in these two particular films, his stony-faced demeanor being the most iden
tifiable hook for international audiences, these films are nevertheless still clearly recognizable as the work of one man, a factor which fully jus
tifies the auteur tag. Kitano doesn't just bring a new slant to tired material. He makes films that clearly look like no one else's, bringing a radi
cally new approach to both plot and visuals.
It is undoubtedly his long and unconven
tional route to the director's chair that makes Kitano's work so idiosyncratic. Kitano's path to stardom has been well documented, notably by himself, in his books and in the frequent autobio
graphical aspects to his work. His novel, Takeshi
kun Hai, aimed at teenagers but with an appeal that stretched far beyond, was published in 1 984, and detailed his early years. Born on January 1 8, 1 947, Takeshi -kun was raised in the Adachi Ward of Tokyo, still lying in ruins after the war, in a cramped one-room house shared with his moth
er, three siblings, and lorded over by his father, Kikujiro, a stern drinking man whose influence was heavily ingrained in the later film that took his name. Kikujiro was a painter and decorator, and the house doubled as a workshop where he used to mix his paints in the front room, the out
side walls shifting colors like a chameleon on an almost daily basis as he tried out the new hues.
Kids Return, which Kitano co-wrote with journalist Akira Tamura, and also made into a film, is a tale of two high school dropouts, close friends whose paths later diverge when they turn respectively to boxing and becoming a runner for the yakuza. Though it was not based directly on Kitano's own life, it takes place in a world fa
miliar to the one in which the director grew up, and contains numerous semi-autobiographical elements, such as the fact that as a teenager Ki
tano was also drawn to the world of boxing.
In the latter part of the '60s, Kitano dropped out of Meiji University, where he was enrolled in a mechanical engineering course. His univer
sity years had been spent leading a bohemian lifestyle, hanging around the student haunts of Shinjuku and Ikebukuro, then a hotbed for stu
dent protests and home of a vibrant alternative culture scene. His dream, however, had always been to become a comedian and, after quit
ting university, he eventually found work at the France Theater in Asakusa, a kind of burlesque variety venue where he acted as both emcee and warm-up act, introducing the older starring co
medians and the strippers that the male white
collar audiences had really come to see. This period of his life is detailed in his book Asakusa Kid, later adapted into a TV movie for the Sky Perfect cable channel by Makoto Shinozaki in 2 002 .
Kitano plugged away with his stage perfor
mance for the better part of the decade. During this time, he made the acquaintance of a certain Kiyoshi Kaneko, and the two decided to join humorous story and the other responded with a string of quick-witted interjections. But Kitano's stream of consciousness and obscenities were too quick for Kiyoshi, and by the time their act had reached a broader audience on the back of the huge boom in popularity of manzai during
the latter half of the '70s, it was clear who the collaboration barely stretched into the next de
cade. Whilst the early '80s saw Kitano hosting a late-night radio show, where his crude sense of humor and quick-thinking charm won a swarm of fans amongst college kids across the land, Beat Kiyoshi soon faded from the public eye.
Kitano later honored their early friendship with a small cameo in Kikujiro, as a man waiting at a bus stop with a chronic wind problem. Mean
while, Kitano had become hot property on Tv, and his shows dominated the airwaves the best part of the next decade.
In 1 989, Kitano made his filmmaking debut with Violent Cop, a hard-boiled Dirty Harry
esque thriller in which he was slated to play the leading role. But by a coincidence, he might never have become a director at all. His chance came by accident when Kinji Fukasaku, the original director, stepped down from the project due to ill health. The end result of also putting the movie's star behind the camera might have ended up as little more than a publicity gimmick for Kazuyoshi Okuyama, the film's producer and then head of Shochiku studios production unit, but the fledgling director took to his new vocation like a duck to water.
What could the public have thought of Kita
no in this new actor-director guise? Interesting
ly, Kitano's turn as cold, smoldering detective Azuma, a hard-drinking, gambling renegade who constantly borrows money from his co
workers, raging out of control within the rigid organization of the police force, wasn't the first time he had appeared in a serious acting role so far removed from his TV comedic persona.
He'd already impressed foreign audiences with his part as Hara, the brutal sergeant in a pris
oner-of-war camp who befriends Tom Conti in Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
Takeshi Kitano • 161
(Senjo no Meri Kurisumasu, 1 98 3 ). He had also railed against his popular TV persona in a series of TV dramas during the '80s. In Okubo Kiyoshi no Hanzai [trans: The crime of Kiyoshi Okubo] , he played a brutal serial rapist who strangled his victims in a story based on a real-life case, whilst in Iesu no Hakobune [trans: The ark of Jesus] he who moves back from Osaka to a remote coastal village to start a new life with his family, his ar
rival from the city coinciding with that of the beautiful bar hostess Keiko, whose new bar is soon acting as a magnet for all the local fisher
men, much to the chagrin of their wives. Almost completely stealing the show from under the nose of Takakura, the real star of the piece, Ki
tano plays Keiko's roguish lover, Yajima, another ex-mobster who has fallen on bad times due to a vicious drug habit, and who severely rocks the boat in this close-knit fishing community when he reveals Shuji's underworld past.
So it is fair to say that by the end of the '80s, the public was in the process of getting used to seeing Kitano as a serious actor. But how did he fare behind the camera? Violent Cop, as its U.S.
re-titling suggests (the Japanese title translates as "That Man Is Brutal"), is fairly generic ma
terial, with little in the script to inspire claims of genius. But similar to Azuma's methods of policing, Kitano's approach was maverick and dazzlingly original, and it got the job done with breathtaking efficiency.
Though in this particular film, editing duties fell to Nobutake Kamiya (it was not until A Scene at the Sea that Kitano took over the role), Kitano reveals an implicit understanding of montage to link cause and effect, resulting in a style that
is concise and uncluttered, oblique yet robust.
Ushering in "the detached style" that came to typify Japanese cinema during the '90s, his debut unfolds in a series of long takes, made up of long to mid-shots and a minimum of close-ups, and an editing rhythm that is laid back and com
posed, a style that almost seems to consciously hark back to the good old days of Yasujiro Ozu.
Most noteworthy is his cunning way of refram
ing key scenes, and the unorthodox unfolding of otherwise generic plot details. The daylight escape of one criminal from an apartment build
ing is shot as a slow motion ballet of flailing fists accompanied by a soft piano, a sequence that comes to an abrupt end with the sudden crack of a baseball bat connecting with a skull.
Though originally intended as a one-off, the critical plaudits that greeted his debut brought the director back for a second film the follow
ing year, and the first to be scripted by Kitano himself. If, by virtue of style alone, Violent Cop is a vital opening point in the Kitano canon, then its follow-up, Boiling Point would intro
duce a number of motifs that would come to be more readily identifiable in his later work. In it, two players on a minor baseball team, Masaki and Kazuo, get mixed up with the local yakuza, prompting them on a quest down to Okinawa to buy a gun to exact their revenge for their wounded coach. Here they run into Uehara, played by Kitano, a mobster bully with homo
sexual tendencies thrown out of his local gang for trying to embezzle money, and ordered by his boss to return the following day with both the missing cash and his own severed pinkie.
Boiling Point is a less cohesive work than its predecessor, unclear in its focus and lacking a strong central character. Kitano's hoodlum yaku
za turns up at about midpoint in the film, and for the most part the film seems like a wild goose chase, as we follow the two ineffectual baseball rookies through a plot that occasionally seems little more than an extended series of skits. It is also lighter in tone, the banter between the vari
ous characters more or less played for laughs, regular collaborator of Kitano's stretching back to their TV comedy days together in the '80s when he was one of the leading members of the Takeshi Gundan (Takeshi Army), he later played the accident prone, sex-hungry dimwit at the center of Getting Any? His presence here, one of a pair of bumbling idiots who skirt around under the noses of a local yakuza gang against the sub-tropical backdrop of Okinawa, the ar
chipelago that forms the most southerly point of Japan, was later echoed in Shinji Aoyama's Two Punks ( 1 996). This setting, and Kitano's Hawaiian-shirt-wearing anti-hero would also crop up in Sonatine a few years later. Dankan was also at the heart of the first film produced by Office Kitano (the company formed by the star director to make his next film, A Scene at the Sea) not directed by Kitano himself. Hiroshi Shimizu's Ikinai ( 1 998) was a quirky black com
edy in which a busload of tourists forge their way across the islands on a one-way trip that will end in mass suicide.
Whilst perhaps one of the least accessible entry points into Kitano's oeuvre, in many ways Boiling Point represents a vital stepping stone for the director, and an experimental dry run for much of his later work. The action takes place beneath sunny, clear blue skies, with the film opening in the midst of a baseball game. This extended scene is focused more on the relation
ships among the characters, both the spectators and the players, than the outcome of the match itself, as they either squabble, pat each other on the back, or indulge in idle chit-chat. This way of bringing the key players of the drama together in one location, fleshing out characters, and es
tablishing intra-group dynamics would prove a recurrent set piece in a number of Kitano's films, for example in Brother's basketball sequence, by which Omar Epps and Susumu Terajima
man-age to establish a cross-linguistic rapport. The childish beach games in Sonatine that the yakuza use to pass the time as they await orders are also reminiscent of the comedy game shows Kitano used to host in the '80s, and are later echoed in Kikujiro, when the two main characters camp out with a couple of affable bikers, during which one of them seems to be permanently naked.
With the cruel black comedy of Boiling Point and the dour solemnity of Violent Cop, Kitano quickly and rather solidly established a reputa
tion for violence. It's not an entirely fair assess
ment of the director's work, because if one looks at his work across the board, he has always inter
ment of the director's work, because if one looks at his work across the board, he has always inter