The son of a house painter and a factory worker. Golden Lion, Silver Lion, Knights of the Arts and Letters, Legion of Honor. Director, actor, painter, poet.T akeshi Kitano is the total artist of a certain Japan. Yakuzas, family men, children, compose a cinema of absence.
Designer Yohji Yamamoto tells it thus:
“Two padded kimonos, one for a woman and one for a man, were made using Yuzen dyeing by Chiso, an old Kyoto Yuzen company formed in the 16th century. They cost more than 10 million yen. I paid for everything myself. But my relationship with Takeshi is not about money, but a friendship between two men. It is a spirit of generosity and chivalry. And thus, “Dolls” was released in 2002. Although it did not set a box-office record, it is apparently being used in art schools around the world as a teaching tool for the use of color. It holds important memories for me as well.”
Dolls draws its inspiration from the japanese bunraku theater: giant puppets playing the four seasons of endless love. Kitano grounds them:
“When I was still an aspiring actor in Asakusa, I once saw a man and a woman tied together by a rope. The locals called them ‘wandering beggars’. There were a lot of rumors about them, but nobody really knew how they had become vagrants. The vision of the wandering beggars has remained engraved in my memory, and I have always wanted to make a film with characters like them.”
It is however as a comic, then as a comedian that Kitano’s career began: he plays the sergeant to David Bowie’s imprisoned colonel in Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, a policeman or a killer in the films of Ryūchi Takamori or Yōjirō Takit. It is by the serendipity of an illness that he becomes a director, replacing one in an emergency. From his days as a comic, he keeps the nickname of his duo: the manzai “The Two Beats” became “Beat Takeshi”.
Directing fits his taste for retreat. Kitano cauterizes emotion, narrows down narration, streamlines dialogue. Hoarse voice, tight lips: in Sonatine, his character commits suicide in a rictus. His countenance and clothes then become the way to read him. In Violent Cop, a grey, white, and black tweedwoolen fabric, more or less rustic, woven with multicolored blazer with low notch lapels grows tattered from chase to chase; in Boiling Point, a flowered shirt and double-striped jacket undo the character’s coldness; in Sonatine, a white shirt.
Yamamoto designs the costumes for three of his films:
for Brother – a black three-button with wide volumes, a camp-collar white shirt. for Dolls – boiled woolcontinuous growth fiber of animal origin (alpaca, camel, Kas, a fine synthetic prussian blue shirt.
for Takeshis’ – a slim black suit with frank shoulders, an oliver rain poncho.
In Hana-Bi, Brother, Takeshis’, and on the red carpet, Kitano wears sunglasses inspired by those of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin.
In his autobiography, My Dear Bomb, Yohji Yamamoto writes: “In the places where he wants a message to get across, he intentionally does not insert that message.”
KITANO, Takeshi, dir. Brother. 2000.
KITANO, Takeshi. Dolls. 2002.
KITANO, Takeshi. dir. During a fitting.
OSHIMA, Nagisa, dir. Furyo. 1983.
KITANO, Takeshi, dir. Dolls. 2000.
KITANO, Takeshi, dir. Sonatine. 1993.
KITANO, Takeshi, dir. Takeshis’. 2005.
KITANO, Takeshi, dir. Violent Cop. 1989.
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