The First Great Cut of Hana-bi

The first great cut of Hana-bi (1997, dir. Takeshi Kitano) occurs 10 minutes into the movie. I use “great” here not in assessment of the cut’s quality, but to mark its significance. By cutting from the ignition of a lighter to a paralyzing gunshot, Kitano (who also serves as co-editor of his film) affirms the modus operandi of his film – to rupture the surface beauty of mundane life with unflinching violence.

Blink and you’ll miss it. Fire and flower.

The immediately obvious effect is that the cut mirrors the violence in the plot. In the first shot, a medium lasting a good ten seconds, Nishi takes a long, measured beat before lighting a cigarette. The flicker of the flame barely registers in the viewer’s brain before Kitano shockingly cuts to an extreme close-up of a bullet departing a gun barrel. This ECU lasts for only less than a second. (Kitano then cuts to a medium long of Horibe writhing in pain, but that’s not the cut in question.) Immediately, we see two major features that make up the effectiveness of this cut – shot length and shot duration. By cutting from a medium to an ECU, Kitano increases visual intensity and gives the gunshot emphasis. And by sandwiching the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ECU between two wider shots of longer action, Kitano tells us just how quickly a moment of violence can forever alter and damage people’s lives.

But what most intrigues me is the order of the shots, which produces a damning indictment of masculinity. Why cut from the lighter to the gun barrel? There are many other permutations of how to cut this scene, such as eschewing Nishi’s medium or showing Horibe first. But by doing a match on action, Kitano associates these two gestures together and creates a vacuum in which only they exist, without plot or context. (Look at my .gif: no Horibe, just flame and fire.) There are many ways to interpret this vacuum. For example, Kitano reveals the existence of violence in the everyday things in life. Or he uses the cut to shoot Nishi, foreshadowing the impact of the gunshot on his life. What stands out most to me is the phallism of the two objects. By pairing two such obviously phallic objects together, one of which performs such destructive violence, Kitano equates the violence with maleness. This reading is bolstered by a later scene in which Nishi forbids his wife from lighting a cigarette, further strengthening the tie between the lighter and maleness. Not only does Kitano uncover the violence inherent in daily life, he brands the violence as unmistakably male, if not a product of masculinity. If the world of Hana-bi is one of emasculation (Gerow 150), then masculinity fights back with this violent cut.

Like how it links violence to masculinity, the power of the cut lies in its ability to link. Here, it also links two disparate locations together. We have an indoor hospital and an outdoor street, yet thanks to the cut, the two locations are brought into the same space (that space being the vacuum). Between the two locations, the cut draws a connection – the violence that pervades society. Whether it’s a place meant for privacy, health, and rehabilitation, and shot with Ozu-esque tranquility, or a place of the public, where you are always exposed to danger, and shot with neo-noir sensibilities and camera movement – it doesn’t matter. Kitano collapses the locations into one world: the world of Hana-bi and of (masculine) violence. The cut also kickstarts some other similar connections that are later developed. We have the duality between Nishi and Horibe, both of whose opposite ways to deal with trauma are later the focus of the film. It foreshadows and contains the idea of Nishi as an active force (igniting a lighter) and Horibe as a reactive force (being shot). Whether their coping mechanisms are active or not is perhaps up to the viewer’s interpretation, but this idea is supported by Kitano himself (qtd. in Gerow 143). And almost like a wink to the audience, we have the fire (“bi”) of the lighter, followed by flowers (“hana”) behind the pistol. Without both fire and flower, Hana-bi would literally not be complete; the same goes for the hospital and the street, and Nishi and Horibe. The cut acts as the hyphen between the words, as the link between the locations, between the modes, and between the characters. In other words, the cut is the thing that brings the film together.

But that goes against the very essence of the cut being a “cut.” As much as a cut links, it also destroys. A cut is inherently violent, and that violence is certainly exaggerated by this cut’s abruptness. Kitano is able to demonstrate violence, as aforementioned, precisely because a cut is violent. And he draws the connections I mention above with something that inherently separates. By doing this, Kitano mirrors the deep irony of the story – to survive is to kill, which applies to both Nishi and Horibe (for the latter, I’m once again quoting Kitano, who thinks Horibe’s survival is slow suicide). If the cut is the connecting force between things in society, and it is so inherently violent, then it speaks volumes about the intrinsic darkness of society. To take it further, by brandishing this cut so prominently, Kitano is even endorsing the violence. And unless Kitano makes a Russian Ark, he has no escape from this inherent violence, much like Nishi, who embraces it. This makes the movie sound like the most nihilist and cynical thing ever. As an optimist, I find redemption in the goodness that lies on the sides of the violent coin – it is in Nishi’s love for his wife and in Horibe’s artistry. (I reject Kitano’s take on Horibe.) If the connecting force is inherently violent, then Kitano encourages the viewer, like the characters, to practice good in spite of it.

There are many other ways violence ruptures life in Hana-bi – for example, take Joe Hisashi’s lyrical melodies, which abruptly pause before resuming unaffectedly. But there is none more effective than this first great cut, which Davis calls Kitano’s “jack-in-the-box trademark,” and lists many similar ones to follow (289). Not only does this cut mirror violence’s rupture, it also draws thematic associations from the spaces and objects before and after, and harnesses its violent nature. Most impressive of all to me, a film student, is how all these things exist in just a simple cut. Above all, it operates as a mighty demonstration of cinema’s power.

Works Cited
Davis, Darrell William. “Therapy for Him and Her: Kitano Takeshi’s Hana-Bi (1997).” Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts. Routledge, 2008, pp. 284-295.
Gerow, Aaron. “Hana-Bi.” Kitano Takeshi. British Film Institute, 2007, 140-156.
Hana-bi. Directed by Takeshi Kitano, performances by Beat Takeshi and Ren Osugi, Nippon Herald, 1997.