Kitano Beat Takeshi was the title of the volume edited by Michele Fadda and Rinaldo Censi for Stefano Sorbini Editore. In 1998, it accompanied the solo exhibition of the same name dedicated to the Japanese director, sponsored by Lab80 Film, F.I.C. – Federazione Italiana Cineforum, Bergamo Film Meeting and Fondazione Alasca, and presented in numerous Italian cities, including Milan, Bologna, Venice and Udine. The whole kit and kaboodle – retrospective and book – was conceived in Parma, thanks to the Black Maria film club, chaired by Roberta Parizzi, and which I was also a member of.
It was the first European monographic book on Takeshi Kitano, with articles written by numerous prestigious contributors (among others, Enrico Ghezzi, Maria Roberta Novielli and Aaron Gerow). It set a precedent. And an exciting one, too: because these were thrilling and influential years for film buffs, built and consolidated through unceasing research, discovery and epiphanies. It now seems like prehistory, just under five decades. Today, everything has changed, right down to the roots. The market, the films, the spectators have changed; cinephilia has changed; our gaze has changed profoundly.
Kitano Beat Takeshi originated and took his inspiration from the euphoria of the Cannes presentation of Sonatine (in the Un Certain Regard section) and in particular the Golden Lion for Hana-bi. But also from the excitement of the “clandestine” trade of pirated VHS copies of copies of his work, their faded subtitles at the limits of intelligibility, and thanks to which the curious cinephile discovered his early works like Violent Cop and Boiling Point. Remembering our “first time” with A Scene at the Sea and Getting Any?, which we saw in poor condition on grainy video with glaring subtitles at the bottom of the screen, is a bit like going back to the dawn of our love for images. At least for those images that then seemed original, new, so different and so distant.
The cult following that Takeshi Kitano’s films have gained is difficult to understand if you have not experienced it “live.” I vividly remember the applause of pure jubilation at the appearance of the “Office Kitano” brand at the beginning of the Venice press screening of Zatoichi. Kitano was already a cult, a religion, with devotees, liturgies and fanaticism. Sometimes it was just a question of applause: even he, Kitano himself, realised this, as he mentioned in one of his writings, comparing the applause he received at Cannes for Sonatine with that in Venice for Hana-bi. A French journalist confided to him that his films would create “Kitanists,” i.e. true worshippers, the undying faithful.
The cult of certain Hong Kong films and some of their auteurs came at almost the same time. In the 1990s, Takeshi Kitano became a guiding spirit, a role he has fleshed out for many years. His 2005 novel was called A Guru Is Born (not autobiographical, but the title is emblematic and significant). And the role of guru has been one that Kitano has been playing for a long time. Probably not too comfortably, and no doubt restlessly. However, it is clear that for at least 10 years, from 1993 to around 2005, the director’s position on the international scene took on a mediatic and ritualistic importance that was decisive for his career and the film market. A bubble. And even the most severe critics greedily breathed in its oxygen. Because this is what Takeshi Kitano’s cinema looked like, against the backdrop of an art-house scene at the end of its tether and a brain-dead Hollywood scenario, with the organoleptic qualities of regenerating oxygen required. Everyone abdicated, the most cynical, the most distrustful; everyone drank him in.
With the Takeshi Kitano of that golden age, the suspicion of festival exoticism never blossomed (on the other hand, it did materialise, just to cite another example from the Far East, in the aftermath of the western clamour following the recognition, success and critical acclaim generously bestowed on Zhang Yimou’s early works). We have all been Kitanists, we have all believed passionately in Kitanism, and we are proud of it. Those films grabbed us and shook us, even when they seemed to caress us with the simplest and most righteous sentiments (A Scene at the Sea, Kids Return, Kikujiro). To find an equally decisive Asian equivalent for the cinematic imagination, we could turn to the shock caused by the screening of The Island (2000) by Kim Ki-duk at the Venice Film Festival.
The Korean director subsequently experienced overwhelming veneration, but it did him no good, flattering him and finally isolating him above all from himself. Kitano, on the contrary, rode out his affirmation, even ably elaborating, articulating, crumbling, transforming and exploiting it with his so-called “Artistic Suicide Trilogy” (Takeshis’, Glory to the Filmmaker! and Achilles and the Tortoise), which became a sepulchral tombstone for Kitano’s cinema and also for the Kitanists and Kitanism. In fact, Outrage and Outrage Beyond served not only as a relaunch but almost as a recapitulation. And a resurrection. As if to say: one Kitano dies, another is made. But he always remains the same, because Takeshi Kitano is a prime number. Indivisible.
Pier Maria Bocchi