I feel a bit ashamed to say that I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen a film by Takeshi Kitano. I feel that surely I have seen Hana-Bi (1998) or Zatoichi (2003) but from the glimpses in this interesting short documentary by Yves Montmayeur, none really stand out.

We are given a pretty standard documentary structure – the working class boy made good, the director’s life parcelled out in talking heads and film clips. We see his early forays into comedy, something that has permeated his filmmaking ever since, his madcap antics on game shows, and his perennial irreverence for authority. When his first film won a Nippon award, the Japanese equivalent of an Oscar, he turned up to receive the award dressed as a geisha.

We hear a lot from Kitano himself, how his first serious acting role in Ôshima’s Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983) was greeted with laughter in Japanese cinemas, as they were so used to seeing him as a comedian. He deliberately took on parts as criminals and serial killers to try and dispel the pervading image of him. And he succeeded by making a string of well loved, genre- changing Yakuza films – minimalist, melancholy, bloody and deadpan.

He’s still making films, and recording music, and making TV, and video games, and dancing, and painting, and creating exhibitions in Paris, and and and. He comes across as an iconoclast and a cheeky boy, pulling pranks but always forgiven. I’m not sure if he has a huge ego, or none at all. He seems to regard his own artistic output with no reverence or false pride. It could all end tomorrow and he would be perfectly content. There is something incredibly charming about that and you get the feeling that he is a really decent guy, albeit one who might need a lot of attention.

The screening at the Japanese Film Festival was followed by a presentation by a professor at an Australian university who obviously specialises in Kitano. It was a heartfelt presentation based on the colour pallette of Kitano’s films, and although I felt much warmth toward the presenter (particularly when the pivotal sound for his favourite scene from A Scene at the Sea (1991) didn’t play), he seemed to be taking Kitano‘s films much more seriously than Kitano himself. Ah academia. I think Kitano would have loved it and would have perhaps provided an irreverent commentary over the silent scene.