Blue Kitano

Abstract

This thesis proposes to explore the ways in which Takeshi Kitano, a Japanese director and actor revealed in the 1990s with a golden lion for "Hanabi" in 1998, employs the motif of the sea as a poetic space in his cinema. The collapse of the Japanese studio system has led to the emergence of new kinds of authors, individuals with different, unconventional training, such as Kitano Takeshi. Born in an impoverished district of Tokyo, Kitano was the son of a house painter and a housewife. Successively, Kitano became a liftboy, a stand-up comedian, an actor, a man of television, and then moved on to directing in 1989 with Violent Cop. Although his films develop personal themes, aesthetics and a sense of editing, the author nevertheless inscribes himself in the continuity of Japanese cinema. The sea, as a foundational element of Japanese culture - Japanese mythologies make the sea the birthplace of its humankind - asserts itself as both the theater and the acting subject of his stories. By exploring the relationships he weaves between his cinema and extra-film elements (biographical elements, cultural paratexts), this thesis intends to demonstrate that the sea, far from being a simple decor for the plot, participates in a poetics of space specific to its author. By blending burlesque and drama, under the influence of the sea and the powers of his daydreams, Kitano exposes the vanity, inadaptibility and loneliness of a man cut off from his origins, from his childhood. Obsessive element of his plots, this relentless escape from the city to the sea gives the Kitanian hero an Sisyphean air. By blurring the boundaries between burlesque and drama, filmic and extra-filmic elements, Kitano interweaves this quest for origins with a return to childhood. This thesis intends to demonstrate that by acting in this way, Kitano weaves a continuous mesh that binds the subject to his environment, the artist to his land, the man in the sea. The importance of the milieu, of geography participates in the poetics of the artist and contributes to his formation.