Japanese films have been winning admirers among cineastes and scholars alike since the success of films such as Rashomon and Ugetsu monogatari at European film festivals in the early 1950s. The decades since have been accompanied by a steady stream of video releases, college campus screenings, and traveling retrospectives that have cultivated this audience further. During that time, both popular and fan-related discourses surrounding foreign films and academic understandings of how to constitute a national cinema have frequently developed in parallel with the reception of Japanese films in America. One need only look at the shelves dedicated to Japanese cinema at a university library to see the coexistence of these two discourses, which range from passionate catalogues of “cult” films and their stars to historical analyses of the relationship between cinema and modernity in Japan.
Following this pattern, Aaron Gerow's new monograph on Kitano Takeshi, published under the World Directors imprint of the British Film Institute, traces the star-director's own negotiation between his public face as a television and comedy celebrity (“Beat Takeshi”) and that of a cinematic auteur (“Kitano Takeshi”). Kitano's manipulation of his own image informs much of Gerow's analysis of what makes the filmmaker's work so admired among audiences of both popular and art cinema. Citing Kitano's ability to appear as both “intellectual and buffoon” through his multiplicity of identities in popular media, Gerow develops a mode of argument that “stands between scholarly analysis and popular criticism” (p. 13). As such, both scholars and passionate fans of Japanese cinema should find value in this work, which provides a series of strong analyses of Kitano's films alongside a historical understanding of the critical discourse surrounding the auteur's chameleon-like, ever-shifting persona.
The majority of Gerow's study is made up of close readings of the individual films (which are presented in chronological order of their production), but he introduces his project by looking at Kitano's professional experience in comedy and television before entering the world of filmmaking with 1989's Violent Cop. This introduction is less a straightforward biography of Kitano than it is a way of establishing some of the concepts that will guide Gerow's argument, such as the way in which critical dialogue surrounding Kitano's films in Japan was often organized around perceptions of how he was moving away from (or returning to) his past as a comedian. Similarly, Kitano's history as a manzai comedian provides a useful interpretative rubric through the format's partnership of tsukkomi (a kind of comedic straight man) and boke (a clown figure), which Gerow uses as a way of analyzing how Kitano's films are often organized around framing devices that authorize reactions of the spectator in relation to images of violence or humor and produce a “space of friends” by engaging the audience in the performance through conventions developed in television (p. 25). We are not given a single argument that can account for everything in Kitano's films, which is wise because, as Gerow suggests in the concluding section, Kitano's representations of himself and his filmography are often contradictory and organized around a duality of positions (pp. 220, 227). In this sense, Gerow's study is different from that of Casio Abe's Beat Takeshi vs. Takeshi Kitano (New York: Kaya Press, 2005) in that Gerow is more interested in how the artist inhabits the space between his two alter-egos rather than observing the division itself.
Gerow's sustained engagement with Japanese film and cultural criticism of Kitano's works is impressive. Gerow spent many years writing film reviews in Japan, and his familiarity with that community serves him well in tracing how arguments about Kitano's status as an auteur transformed as the filmmaker/trickster tried to resist being locked down by any one unifying interpretation. It is not uncommon for American researchers of Japanese cinema to engage with Japanese-language materials for purely historical background and then return to American and European archives for theoretical models, but Gerow's comprehensive engagement with the local critical community is warranted by Kitano's own engagement with the critical community through interviews and “official” responses in the promotional materials of his production company, Office Kitano. Furthermore, the fact that so many of the Japanese filmmakers who found success in the years following Kitano's debut were students of film theory and philosophy (many under the tutelage of Hasumi Shigehiko) and then critics themselves begs a comprehensive engagement with that community.
Within this larger engagement with the way in which Kitano's status as an auteur was received in Japan (and later, abroad), Gerow approaches each film with a different set of critical tools. For example, the chapter on Hana-bi (1997–98) deals with Kitano's use of images related to the nation and critical discourse surrounding the film's success at the Venice Film Festival, while the chapters on A Scene at the Sea (1991) and Sonatine (1993) are concerned more with the use of character-produced gazes as a way of constructing cinematic space and spectatorship. The chapters that engage heavily with formal film analysis might only appeal to scholars of cinema (as opposed to scholars of Japanese history or popular culture, who will likely be drawn more to the analysis of critical debates), but they are convincingly argued and placed within critical conversations about Kitano's attempts to challenge how films can produce meaning and observe the introduction of new techniques (such as zooms or slow motion) and the changing way he uses sound and color in his films. In general, Gerow strikes a balance between identifying these films within a historical and critical context (relying on studio-produced pamphlets and other promotional materials in addition to film criticism) and identifying how Kitano was using the materials of filmmaking to produce new, often unpredictable movies.
In contrast to other recent publications about Japanese cinema—such as Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000) or Michael Baskett's The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008—Gerow's book does not engage with the American academic community in terms of theoretical frameworks or issues of modernity and nation identity. This does not hinder the book's argument, but it may limit the degree to which it will find an audience within the academic community. Similarly, that Gerow's arguments are often based on formal readings of the films will also likely skew the readership toward students of film rather than popular culture or Japan studies in general. Likewise, while Kitano's history as a television personality contributes a great deal to Gerow's historical framework for analyzing these films, his engagement with Kitano's non-film-related activities is mostly for context, so those interested in learning more about how celebrity functions in Japan may be disappointed. Still, the rigor of Gerow's analysis and his use of original-language sources is impressive enough to warrant a reading for those who are interested in Japanese cinema, particularly given the relative absence of strong materials regarding contemporary cinema.
