Rashomon (1950)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Daiei Film Co., Ltd.
Rashomon was the breakout film not just for director Akira Kurosawa, but for Japanese cinema in general. It was awarded the prize for best film of the year at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, and received the Academy Award for best foreign language film in 1952.
It took me a few years to really “get” Rashomon. I was a big fan of Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) and Seven Samurai (1954) from a young age (I saw both of them on the big screen when I was 12), but when I started exploring the rest of his filmography on VHS tapes I checked out of the library, Rashomon didn’t make much of an impression on me. I enjoyed both Yojimbo (1961) and Throne of Blood (1957), but I thought Rashomon was “boring.” (Forgive me! I was a teenager.)
I remember watching Rashomon for the first time and seeing it as a kind of “whodunnit.” I thought the different viewpoints were all leading up to some kind of pat conclusion. When it ended ambiguously, I was vaguely unsettled and a little bit angry. Perhaps, since it took place in 11th-century Japan, I was expecting more swordplay. And of course, seeing it on VHS wasn’t an ideal presentation.
Flash forward maybe 10 years. Rashomon was playing at Film Forum in New York, so I went to see it. It was like seeing a completely different film. Not only had I grown more comfortable with ambiguity, but seeing a 35mm print on the big screen revealed what a deeply beautiful film Rashomon is. Kurosawa and his cinematographer, Kazuo Miyagawa, shot Rashomon deep in virgin forests in the heat of midsummer. Searing flashes of sunlight wash across the characters, alternating with washes of darkness. Thickets of leaves tremble in the breeze, and look so close you could reach into the screen and touch them. Sweat pools on the actors’ faces, falling from their chins in heavy drops.
Rashomon is an uncomfortable meditation on the elusiveness of truth. It exposes the world as a kind of hell, because human beings cannot even be honest with themselves. But it is also a deeply sensuous experience, and an utterly beautiful film.
OCD Viewer 