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 I'm writing a paper on the Japanese director Takeshi Kitano (BTW Thanks to
those of you who have offered opinions/comments) I have been interested in
the influence of American films on his work and how he reworks American
genre conventions in a film like 'Violent Cop'. I have been looking at
J.P.Melville as a similar case of a non-american director reworking
conventions in a different cultural context. While it is beyond the scope of
my essay I think it would be interesting to discuss this aspect of
cross-cultural generic change. There seems to be a dialectical process at
work, consider Kurosawa's influence on the Western and Ford's influence on
Kurosawa; the influence of the American gangster film on Melville ( and the
Japanese influence! 'Le Samurai'!) and how melville's stylization feeds back
into american films via the likes of Tarantino; Sergio Leone is another
example of the process at work.I would be interested in hearing any opinions
or ideas you may have, or other examples you can think of.
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  Darrell Wilson.
  University of Glasgow.
  [log in to unmask]
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