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Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Rashomon (film)

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Rashomon (羅生門 Rashōmon?) is a 1950 Japanese crime mystery film directed by Akira Kurosawa, working in close collaboration with cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa. It starsToshirō Mifune, Masayuki Mori, Machiko Kyō and Takashi Shimura. The film is based on two stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa — ("Rashomon" provides the setting, while "In a Grove" provides the characters and plot).
Rashomon can be said to have introduced Kurosawa and Japanese cinema to Western audiences, albeit to a small and discerning number of theatres, and is considered one of his masterpieces. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and also received anAcademy Honorary Award at the 24th Academy Awards.

Plot

The film depicts the rape of a woman and the murder of her samurai husband through the widely differing accounts of four witnesses, including the bandit/rapist, the wife, the dead man (speaking through a medium), and lastly the narrator, the one witness that seems the most objective and least biased. The stories are mutually contradictory and not even the final version can be seen as unmotivated by factors of ego and face. Even the actors kept approaching Kurosawa wanting to know the truth, which he claimed was not the point of the film as he intended it to be an exploration of multiple realities rather than an exposition of a particular truth. Later film and TV uses of the "Rashomon effect" focus on revealing "the truth" in a now conventional technique that presents the final version of a story as the truth, an approach which only matches Kurosawa's film on the surface. This lack of a Truth is precisely what gives the film its power.
The story unfolds in flashback as the four characters—the bandit Tajōmaru (Toshirō Mifune), the samurai's wife (Machiko Kyō), the murdered samurai (Masayuki Mori), and the nameless woodcutter (Takashi Shimura)—recount the events of one afternoon in a grove. The first three versions are told by the priest (Minoru Chiaki), who was present at the trial as a witness, having bumped into the couple on the road just prior to the events. Each of these versions has a response of "lies" from the woodcutter. The final version comes direct from the woodcutter, as the only witness (but he did not admit this to the court), but by then he is no longer a reliable witness. All versions are told to a ribald commoner (Kichijiro Ueda) as they wait out a rainstorm in the ruined gate at the city limits of Kyoto, a ruin identified by a sign as Rashōmon.

[edit]Style

[edit]Influence of silent film and modern art

Kurosawa's admiration for silent film and modern art can be seen in the film's minimalist sets. Kurosawa felt that sound cinema multiplies the complexity of a film: "Cinematic sound is never merely accompaniment, never merely what the sound machine caught while you took the scene. Real sound does not merely add to the images, it multiplies it." Regarding Rashomon, Kurosawa said, "I like silent pictures and I always have ... I wanted to restore some of this beauty. I thought of it, I remember in this way: one of techniques of modern art is simplification, and that I must therefore simplify this film."[1]
Accordingly, there are only three settings in the film: Rashōmon gate, the woods and thecourtyard. The gate and the courtyard are very simply constructed and the woodland is real. This is partly due to the low budget that Kurosawa got from Daiei.

[edit]Kurosawa's relationship with the cast

When Kurosawa shot Rashomon, the actors and the staff lived together, a system Kurosawa found beneficial. He recalls "We were a very small group and it was as though I was directing Rashomon every minute of the day and night. At times like this, you can talk everything over and get very close indeed".[2]

[edit]Cinematography

The cinematographer, Kazuo Miyagawa, contributed an enormous amount of ideas and support. For example, in one sequence, there is a series of single close-ups of the bandit, then the wife, and then the husband, which then repeats to emphasize the triangular relationship between them.
Use of contrasting shots is another example of techniques in Rashomon. According to Donald Richie, the length of time of the shots of the wife and of the bandit are the same when the bandit is barbarically crazy and the wife is hysterically crazy.[3]
Rashomon shot directly into the sun. In the shots of the actors, Kurosawa wanted to use natural light, but it was too weak; they solved the problem by using a mirror to reflect the natural light. The result is to make the strong sunlight look as though it has traveled through the branches, hitting the actors. The rain in the film had to be tinted with black ink because camera lenses could not capture rain made with pure water.

[edit]Symbolic use of Light

Robert Altman marvels at the use of light in the film. He compliments Kurosawa's use of "dappled" light throughout the film, which gives the characters and settings further ambiguity.[4] In his essay "Rashomon", Tadao Sato suggests that the film (unusually) uses sunlight to symbolize evil and sin in the film, arguing that the wife gives in to the bandit's desires when she sees the sun. However, Professor Keiko I. McDonald opposes Sato's idea in her essay "The Dialectic of Light and Darkness in Kurosawa’s Rashomon". McDonald says the film conventionally uses light to symbolize "good" or "reason" and darkness to symbolize "bad" or "impulse". She interprets the scene mentioned by Sato differently, pointing out that the wife gives herself to the bandit when the sun slowly fades out. McDonald also reveals that Kurosawa was waiting for a big cloud to appear over Rashomon gate to shoot the final scene in which the woodcutter takes the abandoned baby home; Kurosawa wanted to show that there might be another dark rain any time soon, even though the sky is clear at this moment. Unfortunately, the final scene appears optimistic because it was too sunny and clear to produce the effects of an overcast sky.

[edit]Editing

Stanley Kauffman writes in The Impact of Rashomon that Kurosawa often shot a scene with several cameras at the same time, so that he could "cut the film freely and splice together the pieces which have caught the action forcefully, as if flying from one piece to another." Despite this, he also used short shots edited together that trick the audience into seeing one shot; Richie says in his essay that "there are 407 separate shots in the body of the film ... This is more than twice the number in the usual film, and yet these shots never call attention to themselves".

[edit]Music

Hayasaka's film score included the application of "Boléro" by Maurice Ravel.[5][6]

[edit]Allegorical and Symbolic content

Due to its emphasis on the subjectivity of truth and the uncertainty of factual accuracy, Rashomon has been read by some as an allegory of the defeat of Japan at the end of World War II. James F. Davidson's article "Memory of Defeat in Japan: A Reappraisal of Rashomon" in the December 1954 issue of the Antioch Review, is an early analysis of the World War II defeat elements.[7]
Another allegorical interpretation of the film is mentioned briefly in a 1995 article "Japan: An Ambivalent Nation, an Ambivalent Cinema" by David M. Desser.[8] Here, the film is seen as an allegory of the atomic bomb and Japanese defeat. It also briefly mentions James Goodwin's view on the influence of post-war events on the film.
However, Akutagawa's "In a Grove" predates Kurosawa's film adaptation by 28 years, thus any international postwar allegory would have been the result of Kurosawa's editing (based more on the framing of the tale than the events themselves).
Symbolism runs rampant throughout the film and much has been written on the subject. Bucking tradition, Miyagawa directly filmed the sun through the leaves of the trees, as if to show the light of truth becoming obscured. The gatehouse that we continually return to as the 'home' location for the storytelling serves as a visual metaphor for a gateway into the story, and the fact that the three men at the gate gradually tear it down and burn it as the stories are told is a further comment on the nature of the truth of what they are telling.

[edit]Impact and Influence

Japanese poster for Rashomon

[edit]Japanese responses

The film was produced by Daiei. When it received positive responses in the West, Japanese critics were baffled; some decided that it was only admired there because it was "exotic," others thought that it succeeded because it was more "Western" than most Japanese films.[9]
In a collection of interpretations of Rashomon, Donald Richie writes that "the confines of 'Japanese' thought could not contain the director, who thereby joined the world at large".[10] He also quotes Kurosawa criticizing the way the "Japanese think too little of our own [Japanese] things".

[edit]Influence outside Japan

The film appeared at the 1951 Venice Film Festival at the behest of an Italian language teacher, Giuliana Stramigioli who had recommended it to Italian film promotion agency Unitalia Film seeking a Japanese film to screen at the festival. However, Daiei Motion Picture Company (a producer of popular features at the time) and the Japanese government had disagreed with the choice of Kurosawa's work on the grounds that it was "not [representative enough] of the Japanese movie industry" and felt that a work of Yasujiro Ozu would have been more illustrative of excellence in Japanese cinema. Despite these reservations, the film was screened at the festival and won both the Italian Critics Award and the Golden Lion award—introducing western audiences, including western directors, more noticeably to both Kurosawa's films and techniques, such as shooting directly into the sun and using mirrors to reflect sunlight onto the actor's faces.
The 1964 Western The Outrage, which starred Paul Newman, Claire Bloom, Edward G. Robinson, and William Shatner, was a remake ofRashomon, with Kurosawa acknowledged for the screenplay.
The film's concept has influenced a variety of subsequent films, such as Hero, Vantage Point, Courage Under Fire, Basic and One Night at McCool's. The first act of Michael John LaChiusa's musical, See What I Wanna See, is also based on the same short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, and features a main character who goes to a theater to see Rashomon.
The multiple-perspective concept has also been used, sometimes with over-the-top exaggeration for comedic expression, in episodes of many television programs.
TV ShowEpisodeComments
All in the Family"Everybody Tells the Truth"Archie Bunker and Mike Stivic give conflicting accounts of an incident involving a refrigerator repairman and a black apprentice repairman.
CSI"Rashomama"The episode required the CSIs, deprived of any of the usual forensic evidence, to rely on the eye witness accounts of guests at a wedding to solve the case.
FameUnder a theater marquee, two characters huddle to wait out a rainstorm. Only after the entire story has unfolded in flashback does the camera pan back enough to disclose that the theater marquee announces "A Kurosawa Festival".
King of the Hill"A Firefighting We Will Go"The main characters recount the events that led to a fire station burning down while acting as volunteer firefighters. Each character's story make themselves out to be heroic while the others are bumbling.
Leverage"The Rashomon Job"Team members recount contradictory stories about a night five years earlier, when it turns out they each unwittingly tried to steal the same artifact at the same time.
Magnum, P.I."I Witness"During a robbery at the King Kamehameha Club, the three main supporting characters of the series (Higgins, Rick, and T.C.) are victimized and relate widely-varying, self-serving statements to investigator Tanaka.
Mama's Family"Rashomama"Eunice, Ellen, and Naomi tell overly exaggerated versions of how Mama got hit in the head with the pot while making gooseberry jam.
NewsRadio"Catherine Moves On"Catherine announces she is leaving WNYX. The rest of the staff offer Mr. James their versions of how Catherine quit and why, colored by their own perceptions.
Star Trek: The Next Generation"A Matter of Perspective"A character is accused of murdering a scientist because of an alleged interest in the scientist's wife. Several similar but contradictory scenarios based on the testimony of the people involved are played out on the holodeck.

[edit]Influence on philosophy

  • Rashomon plays a central role in Martin Heidegger's dialogue between a Japanese person and an inquirer. Where the inquirer praises the film early on for being a way into the "mysterious" Japanese world, the Japanese person condemns the film for being too European and dependent on a certain objectifying realism not present in traditional Japanese noh plays.[11]
  • The political scientist Graham Allison claimed to have used Rashomon as a starting point for his magnum opus, Essence of Decision, in which he told the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis from three different theoretical viewpoints (and, as a result, the Crisis is described and explained in three entirely different ways).

[edit]Awards

[edit]Top lists

The film appeared on many critics' top lists of the best films.




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