The Cinema of Takeshi Kitano: Flowering Blood is a detailed aesthetic, Deleuzian, and phenomenological exploration of Japan’s finest currently-working film director, performer, and celebrity. The volume uniquely explores Kitano’s oeuvre through the tropes of stillness and movement, becoming animal, melancholy and loss, intensity, schizophrenia, and radical alterity; and through the aesthetic temperatures of color, light, camera movement, performance and urban and oceanic space. In this highly original monograph, all of Kitano’s films are given due consideration, including A Scene at the Sea (1991), Sonatine (1993), Dolls (2002), and Outrage (2010).

Combining a detailed account of the situation in Japanese film and criticism with unique close analyses of Kitano's films from Violent Cop to Takeshis, the author relates the director to issues of contemporary cinema, Japanese national identity, and globalism.

Combining a detailed account of the situation in Japanese film and criticism with unique close analyses of Kitano's films from Violent Cop to Takeshis, the author relates the director to issues of contemporary cinema, Japanese national identity, and globalism.

Called "the world's most original action auteur" by the Village Voice, world-renowned Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kitano is an enormously popular figure in his own country, not only for his films but for his legendary alter ego, comedian Beat Takeshi. The U.S. release this summer of his latest film, Kikujiro -- an official selection at Cannes 1999 -- will add to the recognition he gained here with Fireworks two years ago, and expose an even larger audience to the stylish noir aesthetic previously lauded by such directors as Martin Scorcese and Quentin Tarantino. Kitano's films have won awards at the Venice and Cannes film festivals, but despite his impact on contemporary cinema, Beat Takeshi vs. Takeshi Kitano is the first English language book to be published on his work. This collection of essays by Casio Abe, one of Japan's preeminent cultural critics, examines both Kitano's films and his Beat Takeshi persona, offering an incisive and revelatory critique of the Japanese consumer culture which Kitano's films and comedy both draw on and play against. Beat Takeshi vs. Takeshi Kitano is the first book in Kaya's Wicked Radiance series, which examines the work of the new wave of Asian filmmakers who are reshaping contemporary cinema.

The Cinema of Takeshi Kitano: Flowering Blood is a detailed aesthetic, Deleuzian, and phenomenological exploration of Japan’s finest currently-working film director, performer, and celebrity. The volume uniquely explores Kitano’s oeuvre through the tropes of stillness and movement, becoming animal, melancholy and loss, intensity, schizophrenia, and radical alterity; and through the aesthetic temperatures of color, light, camera movement, performance and urban and oceanic space. In this highly original monograph, all of Kitano’s films are given due consideration, including A Scene at the Sea (1991), Sonatine (1993), Dolls (2002), and Outrage (2010).

From the internationally renowned filmmaker Beat Kitano comes a rare piece of literary fiction. This collection presents three heart-warming stories of brotherhood, boyhood, and friendship.

The Japanese Cinema Book provides a new and comprehensive survey of one of the world's most fascinating and widely admired filmmaking regions. In terms of its historical coverage, broad thematic approach and the significant international range of its authors, it is the largest and most wide-ranging publication of its kind to date. Ranging from renowned directors such as Akira Kurosawa to neglected popular genres such as the film musical and encompassing topics such as ecology, spectatorship, home-movies, colonial history and relations with Hollywood and Europe, The Japanese Cinema Book presents a set of new, and often surprising, perspectives on Japanese film. With its plural range of interdisciplinary perspectives based on the expertise of established and emerging scholars and critics, The Japanese Cinema Book provides a groundbreaking picture of the different ways in which Japanese cinema may be understood as a local, regional, national, transnational and global phenomenon. The book's innovative structure combines general surveys of a particular historical topic or critical approach with various micro-level case studies. It argues there is no single fixed Japanese cinema, but instead a fluid and varied field of Japanese filmmaking cultures that continue to exist in a dynamic relationship with other cinemas, media and regions. The Japanese Cinema Book is divided into seven inter-related sections: · Theories and Approaches · * Institutions and Industry · * Film Style · * Genre · * Times and Spaces of Representation · * Social Contexts · * Flows and Interactions