Richie on Gerow

[Mark Nornes]

I met Richie on the way to Yamagata, and we both agreed the best book  
on Japanese film in recent memory is Aaron Gerow's Kitano Takeshi  
(catchy title, Aaron!).

The bulk of the book consists of close textual analyses of films up  
to, but not including the recent disaster. I'd like to know Aaron's  
take on that one; he hinted that he has a recuperative one.  The  
analyses are all really great. But the best part of the book is the  
first one, the frame on framing. I learned a lot about Kitano and  
about recent Japanese film criticism.

If I have one criticism, it is that Aaron hides behind all the other  
critics. This is the "evenhandedness" that Richie writes about. The  
sentences where he edges toward taking some kind of position are  
tempered by the plural form ("Our interpretation..."; "Our  
question...."). This is hardly a big deal, but "one does" wish he  
were a little more direct when writing about Kitano's slippery  
politics. I'm left as confused as before on that count.

In any case, this is certainly one of the best issues is the BFI  
series, an impressive and fun read to be sure. Anyone else read it  
out there?

Markus


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
TAKESHI KITANO
Sophistication from improvisation

By DONALD RICHIE
Kitano Takeshi. London: British Film Institute, 2007, 272 pp., with  
photos. £16.99 (paper)

This is a brilliant book on a mercurial subject. Takeshi Kitano is an  
actor and film director, ubiquitous on television as well, who has  
become a media event. His persona has splintered and he stands Janus- 
faced over Japanese entertainment. He has two names (Beat Takeshi and  
Takeshi Kitano), is both a clown and a sage, a radical renegade and a  
conservative artist, a raggle-taggle TV comic and a maker of admired  
art-films. Protean, shape-shifting, he seems to defy description.

Accomplishing this, finding the pattern in the welter, is the task  
that Aaron Gerow, film critic for The Daily Yomiuri and assistant  
professor of Japanese cinema at Yale University, has taken upon  
himself, and most elegantly accomplished.



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Gerow hypothesizes a necessary duality. There are not only two names  
for the same person, there are also two Takeshis. "One is the auteur  
in the traditional sense who produces a recognizable, possibly  
evolving text over his career; the other is a trickster who  
repeatedly undermines expectations and defines himself by changing  
style and thematics from film to film."

Gerow sources this in Kitano's earliest manifestation, the stupid  
(boke) half of a popular manzai (stand-up comedy) team "The Two  
Beats." This vaudeville act (a Western equivalent might be the Three  
Stooges) poses the straight-man (tsukkomi) against his idiot but  
crafty partner. In the case of "The Two Beats," however, the boke is  
also radical, subversive, even offensive, all out to break social  
taboos with his "poisonous tongue" (dokuzetsu). This early duality  
has proved a profitable vehicle for the rest of Kitano's career.  
Gerow gives a full, careful listing of all its manifestations,  
particularly in the film work.

Of this Kitano has said: "I shoot films for my own use because I'm my  
own best audience." He is also a cinematic autodidact. He now teaches  
film at a respected academy, but he himself has had no formal film  
education at all. Thus, though critics of his work sometimes evoke  
big names (Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson), in fact Kitano has not seen  
much. Rather than copy, he invented his own style. And it is one very  
different from (and not necessarily worse than) the academic norm.

There is, for example, not much in the way of a script. "I've never  
written a word myself," Kitano has said. His work is almost entirely  
oral, transcribed remarks that are worked into novels, stories,  
scripts. If most films are really the result of community effort,  
this would certainly be true of all Kitano films.

At the same time, the nature of their creation does nothing to lessen  
the auteur-impact allowed this body of work. The reason, to quote one  
critic, is that "Kitano as media figure is not just an auteur writ  
large . . . but a cultural production, a little industry in his own  
right."

During shooting of his dictated script, Kitano will often change his  
mind, drop scenes that turn out not to play well, enlarge those that  
do. "Sonatine" originally called for a character in just one scene,  
but Kitano so liked the performance that he kept the actor on and the  
character became integral to the finished film itself.

This method of filming is similar to that of a jazz jam session, each  
member contributing, Kitano orchestrating, as seen in "Jam Session,"  
a documentary by Makoto Shinozaki about Kitano's working methods.  
Improvisation is everything, the lines change every day, sets are lit  
from all sides to accommodate sudden camera changes, and the director  
rarely gives specific instruction to his actors.

This attitude toward film resembles Kitano's attitude toward  
television. "Just as he manages multiple TV appearances by  
improvising," writes Gerow, "so he shoots his films on the spur of  
the moment. It is part of his genius, but it is a genius shaped by  
the television industry."

What one sees and often admires in a Kitano film is just this freedom  
of style where certain techniques are not used for time-honored  
associations, where simplicity can surprise, where ellipses and  
framing oddities are there adding to (rather than subtracting from)  
the film experience. Someone once called Kitano the Grandma Moses of  
Japanese cinema, and if we remove any pejorative intent, he was  
right. There is the same kind of directness, of freshness, even of  
innocence.

At the same time there is a polished sophistication about the  
product. If this is the work of an idiot savant, it is one who knows  
what he is doing.

This is my opinion, however, not Gerow's. He is remarkably evenhanded  
in his investigation of all the films (except the last, "Hurrah for  
the Director," which had not yet been released). At the same time he  
fully displays the gamut of comment and criticism with which the  
local press always greets a new Kitano film.

Here (and this is one of the strengths of his book) Gerow gives the  
reader insight into the expressed opinions of the Japanese critical  
establishment. Being one of the few film scholars who can actually  
read and write Japanese, he opens up territory that will be new to  
the English reader and that gives authority to the author himself.

Here too Gerow is evenhanded and even the silliest comment gets a  
respectful hearing. This may lend a certain solemnity to the book  
(particularly given the gleefully subversive frivolity of his  
subject), but the fairness is evident and the scholarship is most  
impressive.
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