The films of Takeshi Kitano
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The films of Takeshi Kitano mimic American genre films in some respects but do so in a unique way, and his later films have developed more levels of meaning and layers of plot and character development that extend the nature of the genre in new directions. Kitano generally favors the crime drama, usually in stories about the Japanese crime groups known as the Yakuza and the police. Kitano himself plays the hero, who is usually a troubled policeman or gangster with a complex and dual involvement in family matters and violent crime at the same time. Kitano thus deals in contrasts, and his directorial style emphasizes and balances the competing interests of the main character as well as the ambiguities of modern society. This is evident in early films like Boiling Point (1990) and Violent Cop (1989), but Kitano makes such contrasts even more central in later works such as Sonatine (1993) and Fireworks (1997).The heroes of these films derive from the American hardboiled tradition and the American film noir style of the 1940s. They are generally taciturn and deadpan, suddenly exploding in violence when provoked. The film noir was a social, psychological, and aesthetic response to a certain sense of societal angst that developed first in the uncertainties of World War II, a period of world tensions manifested in the psychological ambiguities of film noir, and then continued in the new uncertainties of the Cold War period, especially in the years immediately after World War I
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ed, but the whole sequence is presented in a way that shows that he probably did not expect to survive and so may not be surprised when he is killed by someone he cannot even see. In addition, with his sister dead, Azume has nothing to live for any longer. Nishi in Fireworks faces prison, but his real reason for suicide is quite different -- he ends his wife's waning life and then has no reason to continue to live anyway. Life for these characters is something to be tolerated rather than enjoyed, and the importance of suicide as an alternative is emphasized in Fireworks by Hirobe's painting of suicide. At the same time, though, Kitano shows more of a dedication to life in this film as Hirobe's inclination to commit suicide is reduced by his new-found ability to paint and so to express his ideas of life and death.
Another element in Fireworks that ties the film to the film noir tradition is the way Kitano reshapes time, telling the story out of normal order, with elements of past and present seeming to exist side by side, emphasizing how the present is shaped by and tied to the past. Kitano has toyed with time in other films, such as Boiling Point, a film that even hints that perhaps the whole film was imagined by a young man
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Approximate Word count = 2286
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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