New Kitano film

[Mark Schilling]

From: Mark Schilling <schill at gol.com>
To: <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Re; Takeshi Kitano location report
Date: Saturday, September 28, 1998


For all of you Kitano fans out there, this location report I wrote for the
Japan edition of Premiere on his latest film might be of some interest.

Mark Schilling

 
	"The kid's going to drop if we don't get that shot," Takeshi Kitano said
to no one in particular. Assistant director Hiroshi Shimizu,  who had spent
the better part of an hour setting up take after take of nine-year-old
Yusuke Sekiguchi running across a bridge, laughed nervously. Kitano was
joking --  his pint-sized, round-faced, broadly grinning star was clearly
having the time of his young life -- but he was also anxious to wrap the
28-day shoot of his eighth film, called appropriately enough, Volume Eight.

	After working quickly through the morning on location by the Sumida River,
in the heart of Tokyo's shitamachi, Kitano was now having trouble with a
shot that should have been simplicity itself: Sekiguchi takes off running
and a camera mounted on a crane rises as it follows his progress across the
bridge. Shot from behind, the boy's legs churn and the two white wings
attached to his sky-blue knapsack flap about in the still late summer air. 
	First, however, the sun came out from behind a cloud, necessitating a
20-minute-wait, until one in the afternoon. Kitano, who had been cracking
jokes with his staff and visiting "Hana-Bi" star Ren Osugi, became quiet
and meditative, sipping cold wheat tea, chain smoking Frontier cigarettes
and staring into his monitor. When the light was finally right, another
difficulty arose; to match a previous shot, they needed to get a passing
barge into the frame. When one finally sailed under the bridge, the
captain, seeing the camera, had waved at the crew -- another shot ruined.
It could have been a scene from a Kitano comedy routine. Kitano, the first
to see a joke in any situation, had no choice but to laugh. 
	The film itself, however, is a not a comedy or quite like any other film
Kitano has ever directed. Last March, he had told me that he was planning
to make a film about, not another violent cop or suicidal gangster, but the
relationship between a child and its mother. "That's a classic story," he
had said. "Various people have told it and each one has his own way of
telling it. So now I'm thinking how I can tell it differently. 
      "It's like a piano contest where everyone plays the same number, but
one performance is somehow better than the others." 
	The story he finally wrote for Volume Eight tells of a young boy
(Sekiguchi) who is living with his grandmother in Tokyo following his
parent's divorce. During his summer vacation, he goes to visit his mother
in Shizuoka Prefecture. On his travels he acquires two unusual companions
-- a hippie in a van (Nezumi Imamura) and a yakuza (Takeshi Kitano) whose
wife happens to know his grandmother. 
	Yes, Volume Eight is a road movie featuring Kitano as yet another a
gangster. But it contains none of the trademark Kitano violence that
exploded on the screen so memorably in such films as "Sonatine," "Kid's
Return" and his 1997 Cannes Golden Palm winner, "Hana-Bi." Instead, his
yakuza spends much of his screen schlepping about the Shizuoka countryside
with a cute scene-stealing kid, which somehow seems as incongruous as W.C.
Fields' adventures with Baby LeRoy.  
	And yes, as has long been his practice, Kitano dreamed up much of the
dialogue for Volume Eight on the spot. But compared with his other films,
which are almost Zen-like in their rejection of the spoken word, Volume
Eight is a talky film, with the yakuza, boy and other characters spouting
reams of dialogue (though they spoke few lines the day I and other media
types visited the set -- perhaps by design). 
	And yes, Kitano is once again expanding the boundaries of what can be done
with a camera, but instead of the visual austerity of his earlier films (he
told me once that his first, the 1989 "Sono Otoko Kyobo ni Tsuki," was like
a "series of souvenir photographs"), he is, in Volume Eight, experimenting
with tracking shots, cranes shots and even close-ups -- once a Kitano
taboo. 
	"He wants to challenge himself," says Shimizu, after finally nailing the
bridge shot to Kitano's satisfaction. Having worked with Kitano on every
film since the 1993 "Sonatine," he believes that Volume Eight represents a
radical departure for the director. "He really doesn't like children that
much, but he's working with one." he explains. "Up till now, he's tended to
restrain the emotion in his films, but now he's trying to bring it out.
That's the reason for the different shots of the boy running across the
bridge today -- he wants the audience to experience the boy's feelings more
directly." 
	Will Kitano win his piano contest? We will have to wait until next spring,
when the film is set for release in Japan, to find out. "It's more of a
sentimental film than any of his others," said a publicist. "Sentimental
like Tora-san?" I asked. "You could say that, but please don't write it,"
the publicist pleaded. No, somehow I can't make the comparison with a
straight face. Japan's Tarantino morphing into Japan's Chaplin? No way. 
	And yet I did see a parting scene on the set that some how reminded me of
Charlie's walk into the sunset in "Modern Times." No spoilers here, but
Volume Eight promises to begin a new chapter in the career of Japan's most
interesting -- and unpredictable -- director.  

----------
> From: Abe' Mark Nornes <amnornes at umich.edu>
> To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
> Subject: Namikiza Closes
> Date: Wednesday, September 23, 1998 1:36 AM
> 
> >From the Japan Times Website:
> 
> Namikiza theater shows its last film
> 
> The Namikiza theater in Tokyo's Ginza district closed its doors on nearly
> 45 years of film history Tuesday.
> 
> Die-hard cinema fans packed the theater, which has shown classic films
for
> years, to view its final
> showing. Following the closure of Ikebukuro's Bungeiza theater, yet
another
> famous film house has
> disappeared.
> 
> The program for the theater's last day of showing was "Bangiku" ("Late
> Chrysanthemum''), released
> in 1954, and "Okasan" ("Mother''), released in 1952, both by director
Mikio
> Naruse.
> 
> Customers lined up from the early morning hoping to get one of the
cinema's
> nearly 80 seats. The
> first in line, a 43-year-old woman from Urawa, Saitama Prefecture, said
> that she used to frequent the
> theater as a student and that she wishes it would continue to screen
films.
> 
> Muramatsu, a 70-year-old resident of Tokyo's Bunkyo Ward, voiced similar
> sentiments. "Of course
> there is a sense of nostalgia, but this is an era when old things just
> disappear. There is nothing you
> can do about it. Still, nothing beats watching movies in a theater," he
said.
> 
> Namikiza opened in 1953, during the heyday of the film industry in
postwar
> Japan. The theater
> gained a reputation for emphasizing the quality of a film in deciding
what
> to play, rather than
> indiscriminately playing hits to increase revenues. For the past 15 or 16
> years, the theater has shown
> double features of films by such directors as Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro
Ozu,
> Kenji Mizoguchi and
> Mikio Naruse. "The problem is the number of classic films is limited and
> planning what to show gets
> tedious," said the president of the cinema, Hiroshi Yoshi, who decided to
> close the movie house last
> July. Reportedly the landlord also played a role in the decision.
> 
> Yoshi said he wanted to close the theater without much fanfare and that
no
> particular events were
> scheduled.