Kitano Takeshi, Aaron Gerow, (2007)

London: BFI, 264 pp., ISBN: 9781844571666 (pbk), £14.99, ISBN: 9781844571659 (hbk), £50.00

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The BFI’s ‘World Directors Series’ is a little like the world cinema section of a video store. It seems appealing at first, a genuine attempt to gain understanding and shed light on the little-known areas of the cinematic globe, and perhaps it is. But what is not immediately evident are the processes of elimination and popularization that swirl underneath. Hence, what the BFI have created, and Aaron Gerow has contributed to with his book Kitano Takeshi is a dichotomous mix of highbrow intellectualism and populism. This is an all too familiar operation of Western film criticism, which, despite its best efforts to disrupt the orientalizing glare of “mainstream” media upon the faraway regions, ends up taking one step forward and two steps back. Gerow’s lengthy analysis of filmmaker, TV personality and all-out Japanese superstar Kitano does little to buck the trend.

Like those who have gone before him – Dina Iordanova (Emir Kusturica, 2002), Stephen Teo (Wong Kar-wai, 2005) – Gerow has entered a realm which is often difficult to negotiate. With auteur theory having become a generally unfashionable line of inquiry, even in the art cinema world, books dedicated to the study of a single director don’t do themselves any favours, and neither does Gerow, especially by entitling the first half of his book ‘Kitano Takeshi: The Auteur’. The problem Gerow encounters is not so much with the idea of the auteur in itself; this can be considered and disputed within a text just as any other frame of reference can. But the idea, however problematic, haunts Gerow’s discourse, regardless of how he attempts to disparage it, and his methodology is both the cause and the consequence of this.

Though it is a large obstacle, auteur theory is not the only problem both for world cinema in general and Gerow’s book in particular. Gerow is quick to establish the buzzwords of the day. Globalization, Late Capitalism, Postmodernity; these are a few of the terms that have been bandied around the cultural theory arena for the past few decades, and as such they have entered the popular theoretical consciousness without much consideration of the sizable flaws they all entail. Gerow is not one to give this much thought either. And so, like Teo before him, Gerow promptly launches Kitano into a de facto global postmodern sphere without giving much thought to what such a sphere might mean. One must always be careful when superimposing a postmodern sentiment upon anything given the vast amount of criticism the theory has undergone in recent years. But with his head already buried in amongst an extensive biography of Kitano, Gerow has little time to address the problem of basing a discourse on somewhat unstable foundations.

Instead, Gerow focuses his energies on providing a near exhaustive supply of sources to paint a detailed picture of what other people have said of Kitano, his films, and his often indefinable identity. Here, Gerow stumbles across another problem in his task, neatly put by Horike Yoshitsugu: ‘The moment one utters a word to describe him [Kitano], he is no longer in the place that word describes. That is, there is no place where he exists himself as Kitano Takeshi; he rather seeks his identity in always becoming something other’ (9). Kitano’s often mysterious depiction of his own personality, as well as the split between his televisisual and directorial persona (Kitano Takeshi) and actor (Beat Takeshi), makes it very difficult to pin down exactly what Kitano means. On top of this epistemological problem is also the fact that Kitano is well known for fabricating stories about himself to the media, a fact Gerow acknowledges. This makes obtaining reliable sources about the man himself even more of a challenge.

 

All of this does not stop Gerow from going into great depth about Kitano, and in his second section, Kitano’s cinema, Gerow does manage to gain some insightful ground in presenting a multi-faceted analysis of the films behind the persona. Mixing historical biography of the films’ production with hefty slices of much quoted Kitano criticism, Gerow does his best to cover all the bases and package them into useful nutshell phrases. Discussing Kitano’s move to the director’s chair in place of Fukusaku Kinji for Violent Cop (1989), Gerow wraps up by stating that Kitano’s influence on the script and tone of the film resulted in turning the film ‘from a film about violence into…a film embodying violence in its very form’ (71).

While not without credit by any means, Gerow’s style of canvass criticism seems to fall just short of something innovative. Given that Gerow often uses other critics to disguise what could be his own opinion, one is left asking, does any of this really matter? Much of the actual criticism is simply a back and forth between perspectives of other academics arguing over tiny details, such as the use of memorative photographs for the denouement of A Scene at the Sea (1992) (92). This kind of nullifying analysis leads to a dual cycle of speculation and premature definition. David Bordwell, who is quoted in the book, is a prime example of this dualism. His entirely speculative definition of art-cinema (107) acts as an allegory for the discipline of World Cinema itself. Bordwell limits his scope down to three deterministic schema, ‘objective realism, expressive or subjective realism and narrative commentary’. The reality of attempting to map these across the diversity of what World Cinema actually is is a pointless task, and one that wholly misunderstands what cinema, any cinema, is about. But to perform such an operation on a small scale can, for a few moments, give the illusion of answers being given to cinematic questions.

Bordwell, Gerow, and critics similar to them are part of a larger problem within the discipline of World Cinema. As already mentioned, the terms associated with World Cinema are extremely problematic. Talking globally in such a discipline creates a pretence of wider understanding, whereas beneath the glossy talk, it skews the map. Perhaps Gerow is right to be cautious with his opinions then. Nevertheless, the problems with his study – and the World Directors series of which it is a part – remain. Kitano exists in the West because his films are marketable in the West. And though auteurism may be an outdated mode of criticism, it can still sell films. This is the ultimate hypocrisy of World Cinema, and it is one that film critics need to address. Otherwise the claims of diversity and global access become voided by what is in fact a very narrow spotlight. However interesting the subject under the light may be, that interest makes people forget about the underlying issue. The spotlight can illuminate a figure until there is nothing left but light. Meanwhile the rest of the populous, and the rest of their culture get left in the dark.

 

Contributor details

Luke Moffat is a graduate of Film Studies and English from the University of the West of England.