Japan film school
1950
bw 87 min.
Director: Akira Kurosawa
CLV: $49.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # CC1149L
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema
Three men seek shelter
from the rain under the ruined gate of the ancient city of Kyoto. There is
nothing to do but talk, about a topic which torments two of the wayfarers, who
have just been witnesses in a police court inquiry. In the woods a woman was
raped, a man killed. A notorious bandit, Tajomaru, was later found riding the
dead man's horse. The two witnesses describe the inquiry to the third man, a
skeptical commoner.From this slight material Hollywood might have fashioned a
murder mystery or a courtroom drama. Akira Kurosawa, instead, created
Rashomon, the best known, most widely shown Japanese film of all time,
transforming the accounting of a sordid crime into a meditation on truth and
human nature, affirming the possibility of human goodness while asserting the
reality of destructive passion and self-deception. With a puzzling theme of
unusual depth, presented in a distinctive style that owed more to Russian silent
films than to Hollywood classic film of the '30s, Rashomon intrigued
audiences world-wide and became one of the most influential films of the 1950s,
even inspiring a lackadaisical remake, The Outrage, a dozen years
later.
Two time strands, interwoven, create the meditation. Under the Rashomon
gate time hangs heavily, dead, empty, idle; in the forest time is charged with
passion and anxiety, with life and honor at stake. Kurosawa first breaches the
distance between these two by a dazzling two minutes of pure cinema which
combines both -- the woodcutter's walk into the forest, sixteen shots of
continuous varied movement while the story waits in abeyance. Thus this scene,
like those at the Rashomon gate, represents dead time, yet its energy and
impulsion, created by movement and rhythm, links it to events in the woods. These
two minutes do not advance the plot at all, still they are essential for our
experience of the film. For the woodcutter's progress into the heart of the
forest, with its almost hypnotic flow of motion through surprising cuts and
camera movements, becomes our progress into the heart of the film. When he stops,
we are there and the forest has become the central setting of the film; the three
men in the rain at the gate become a chorus commenting on the action in the
clearing.
Their comments are mostly of incredulity; for the three participants
in the crime each tell a completely different story of the husband's death. Each
claims to be guilty of the killing; each telling preserves the teller's
self-image of honor. Then the woodcutter gives a fourth account, similar in
outline to the bandit's version, but very different in detail. The commoner
remarks, "I suppose that's supposed to be true." The woodcutter responds, "I
don't tell lies." Yet, of the four tellers, the woodcutter is the only one we
know has lied, for he told a different tale earlier.
Given all this, some
viewers have treated Rashomon as a puzzle to be solved, insisting that
there must be one true account of the killing which we can discover if we sort
the clues carefully enough. For others, like Pauline Kael, Rashomon is
"the classic film statement of the relativism, the unknowability of truth." There
is no truth, only subjective perception of events. Kurosawa, when asked by his
assistants to explain his baffling script, replied, "Human beings are unable to
be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves
without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings -- the kind who
cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they
really are."
This obscurity of literal meaning has prompted symbolic
interpretations. The most plausible of these sees Rashomon as an allegory
of Japanese history, with its recurrence of Japanese culture being destroyed by
barbarians, with hope for the future of Japan seen in the appearance of the baby
at the end, an interpretation supported, perhaps, by the fact that the western
music dominant through the film is replaced by traditional Japanese music at the
close.
But Rashomon's power and popularity derive not only from its
meaning, but equally from fine performances by its principal actors and
Kurosawa's mastery of innovative film form. The first western showing of
Rashomon at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, where it won the grand prize,
the Golden Lion, and consequently became the work that broke the barrier and
opened the western market to Japanese films, brought to world cinema a new top
class director, Akira Kurosawa, and two new international stars: Machiko Kyo, the
first Japanese actress to be advertised for her sexuality rather than her
domestic virtues, and Toshiro Mifune, whose animal vitality and compelling
presence would grace Kurosawa films for the next 15 years. In Rashomon
these two each consummately play four roles, though only one character, who has a
new personality each time a new speaker tells the tale.
The feeling of
liberation Rashomon brought to young filmmakers was less a response to an
enigmatic theme than to Kurosawa's flouting of the established rules of narrative
cinema, ten years before the French New Wave made it fashionable. Seeking to
regain the freedom of silent film, Kurosawa breaks the 180-degree rule, thus reversing
spatial relationships, juxtaposes long shots and close-ups and shots of contrary
motion, displays a bold inventive use of camera movement as cinematic
punctuation, and restores to respectability a mode of transition that had once
flourished but almost disappeared with the development of the classic sound film,
the wipe, which becomes and remains for Kurosawa an element of style.
We are
still profiting from his audacity.
-- ALEXANDER
SESONSKE
Credits
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Scenario by: Akira
Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto
Based on "In a Bush" by: Ryunosuke
Akutagawa
Director of Photography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Music: Fumio
Hayasaka
Transfer
This edition of Rashomon was transferred
from a 35mm master print. The soundtrack was mastered from both the original
Japanese and an English language track, on separate audio tracks.