Rashomon (film)

The action takes place in Japan in the XI century. In the ruins of the stone gate of Rashomon, a lumberjack ( Takashi Shimura ) and a wandering monk (Minoru Chiaki), who testified in the trial of the murder of samurai Takehiro Kanazawa ( Masayuki Mori ) and the rape of his wife Masako ( Matiko Kyo ), are hiding from a thunderstorm. They are joined by a peasant passing by (Kichijiro Ueda), to whom they tell this story. Both the monk and the lumberjack are amazed that the stories of the participants do not coincide. The following are four versions of what happened.

The lumberjack talks about how he found the corpse of a samurai in the forest and immediately ran away to notify the nearest official.

The History of the Robber

The robber Tazomaru ( Toshiro Mifune ), accused of rape and murder, does not deny his guilt. According to him, he tricked the samurai by telling him that he had unearthed an ancient burial place and found valuable weapons there. The robber offered to inspect the prey and divide the treasure. The samurai had to leave the horse, wife and luggage and go deep into the thicket. Having brought the samurai into the thicket, Tazomaru attacks him and binds him to the roots of the tree. Then he brings his wife there and rapes her in front of her husband. After that, he wants to leave, but the woman begs him to challenge her husband to a duel in order to save her from shame. She promises to leave with him after the murder. There is a duel on swords, the samurai fights valiantly and skillfully, but the robber is the winner. The woman runs away. At the end of the interrogation, the judge asked where the dagger with precious stones belonging to the samurai’s wife had gone, to which the robber replied that he had forgotten everything in the bustle and it would be foolish of him to leave such an expensive object.

Wife's Story

The version of the samurai's wife ( Matiko Kyo ) is very different from the version of the bandit. After the rape, the bandit leaves. She unties her husband, begs to forgive her, but he looks at her with contempt and disgust. Then she asks her husband to kill her, because she cannot bear the shame. Her husband's cold gaze and his silence shock her very much, she faints with a dagger in her hand. Waking up, she sees the corpse of her husband with a dagger in his chest, after which he unsuccessfully tries to kill herself.

Samurai History

A medium woman (Noriko Homma) is invited to court to evoke the spirit of the murdered samurai. According to him, after the rape, Tazomaru persuades a woman to abandon her husband and become his wife. She agrees, provided that he kills her husband. Struck by her cunning, the bandit offers the samurai a choice - to kill his wife or forgive. The woman runs away. The robber cannot catch her, he unties the samurai and leaves. Samurai stabs himself with a dagger of his wife. Then someone took the dagger out of the wound.

Lumberjack History

The action returns again to the gate of Rashomon. The lumberjack admits that he saw much more than he said in court. In fact, he saw both rape and murder. He claims that the robber persuaded a woman to marry him and leave with him. The woman says that she does not decide anything and frees her husband. Men must decide by a duel with whom the woman will remain. The samurai does not want to fight when he sees the shame of his wife and accuses her of not killing herself when she could. The robber is also against senseless murder and is about to leave. But the woman provokes both, calling them cowards, as a result, there is a duel with swords, but not at all like in the story of the robber: Tazomaru and the samurai fight cowardly and ineptly, in the end Tazomaru wins by pure chance. Without hesitating for a long time, he kills the samurai, who humiliatesly begs for mercy. The wife runs away in horror. The robber leaves, taking both swords.

Final

The story of the lumberjack is interrupted by the cry of a child. Heroes come to the ruined gate, where they find a basket with a child, in which there are a kimono and an amulet. The peasant immediately appropriates them. The lumberjack reproaches him for stealing from a helpless baby. To this, the peasant replies that he now understood why the lumberjack did not tell everything at the trial as it was: it is clear that he took the expensive dagger of the woman, which means that he is also a thief. The peasant declared to the lumberjack: “the swindler called the swindler a thief,” and leaves, hitting the lumberjack, who is humiliated and not protected. The monk is amazed that everything around is a lie. He picks up a child. When the lumberjack holds out his hands to the child, the monk is dumbfounded: “Do you want to remove the last diaper ?!” The lumberjack explains that there are already six children in his family, so one more will not become a big burden. Now the assignment of a dagger by a lumberjack appears in a completely different light. The monk gives the child back and thanks the lumberjack that he restored his faith in man. The rain ends and the sun shines again.

The director of the Soviet dubbing is Elena Arabova.

Minimalism

Kurosawa’s fascination with silent films and contemporary art was reflected in the minimalism of this film: “I always loved silent films, I wanted to restore their beauty. I thought about it as I recall in the following vein: one of the techniques of contemporary art is simplification, and therefore I have to simplify this film ” ^[3] . Therefore, the film has only three locales: the gate, the forest and the courtyard. The forest is real, and the courtyard and gate are the simplest scenery. This is also partly due to the small budget that Daiei provided to Kurosawa.

Camera Work

Cameraman Kazuo Miyagawa brought some of his ideas to the movies. So, in one part of the film one after another shows three close-ups - a bandit, a wife and a husband, then they are repeated. This is done in order to show the trilateral nature of their relationship. According to the connoisseur of Japanese culture, Donald Ritchie, the duration of plans with his wife and thug is the same in cases where the thug behaves barbarously, and the wife goes crazy in hysteria ^[3] . In Rashomon, there are shots where the camera is aimed directly at the sun ^[4] . Kurosawa wanted to use natural light, but it was too weak, so it was decided to use mirrors to reflect it. The result was a bright ray of sunlight penetrating through the branches on the heroes. In the scene at the gates, Rasyomon Kurosawa could not make it so that the rain was visible not only in the foreground, but also in the depths, where it merged with the gray decorations. Therefore, ink was mixed into the water of the rain machines, which made the rain contrasty ^[4] .

Symbolism of the Light

Tadao Sato believes that the sunlight in the film symbolizes evil and sin, as the wife succumbs to the bandit when she sees sunlight. However, Professor Keiko I. MacDonald contrasts Sato with his vision: light is “good” or “reason”, and darkness is “evil” or “impulse”. She interprets the scene indicated by Sato differently - the wife surrenders to the bandit, as the sun begins to set. MacDonald also points out that Kurosawa has long been waiting for a big cloud to shoot the last scene at the gate of Rashomon, when a lumberjack takes an abandoned child and takes him home. Kurosawa wanted to show that dark rain could rain at any moment, even if the sky is clear at the moment. Unfortunately, the final scene turned out to be very optimistic, as it was too sunny and clear to fulfill the idea.

Editing and Music

Stanley Kauffmann writes that Kurosawa often shot the same scene with different cameras at the same time, which allowed him to freely edit the film and put together pieces shot with different cameras, but which together created the effect of smooth movement from one subject to another. He also often combined short plans into one, and the audience did not notice this. Donald Ritchie wrote: “there are 407 glues in the film, twice as many as in the usual film of that time, but half of the glues do not attract attention” ^[3] .

The music for the film was written by the famous Japanese composer Fumio Hayasaka . Especially for the film, he made the Japanese adaptation of Maurice Ravel 's Bolero : it sounds in the frames of the logger’s entrance into the thicket and in the scene of a samurai with his wife ^[4] .

Reviews in Japan

The film received two awards in Japan, but was not successful at the Japanese box office. Local film critics accused Kurosawa of being too free to use literary sources ^[5] .

Screening at the Venice Film Festival

"Rashomon" was shown in 1951 at the Venice Film Festival thanks to the Italian Japanese scholar Juliana Stramigoli who recommended the film to Unitalia Film for screening at the festival. At first, the Daiei film company and the Japanese government did not agree with Stramigoli's choice, offering as an example of the achievements of Japanese cinema one of the works of the more famous director Yasujiro Ozu . Despite these disagreements, the film was still shown and had a triumphal success, receiving the Italian Film Critics Prize and the main prize of the festival - the “ Golden Lion ” ^[6] .

US Display

In the United States , the film premiered on December 26, 1951, and the next year he received the Academy Award “Honorary Award” for “the most outstanding foreign language film released in the USA in 1951” ^{[note 1]} .

• 1951 - two prizes of the Venice Film Festival : The Golden Lion and the Prize of Italian film critics (both Akira Kurosawa).
• 1951 - two awards of the National Council of Film Critics of the United States : best director (Akira Kurosawa) and best foreign film.
• 1951 - The Mainity Award for Best Actress (Matiko Kyo).
• 1951 - Blue Ribbon Award for Best Screenplay (Akira Kurosawa and Shinobu Hashimoto).
• 1952 - Honorary Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
• 1953 - nomination for an Oscar for the best work of the artist and decorator (Takashi Matsuyama, H. Motsumoto).
• 1953 - BAFTA Best Film Award nomination .
• 1953 - Nomination for the prize of the Guild of Directors of the USA (Akira Kurosawa).

The revolutionary film about the search for truth, which is always somewhere nearby, opened for Europeans the fact of the existence of Japanese cinema. And from a historical perspective, it spawned an independent genre of films, the so-called “Rashomon effect”, reproducing one event from different points of view ^[7] .

The film was restored and digitized by the Japanese company Kadokawa Pictures with the participation of the American Film Academy. The premiere took place on September 18, 2008 in Los Angeles at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, as part of a retrospective of Kurosawa ^[8] .

Sources

Comments

• Stuart Galbraith. The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune . - Faber and Faber, Inc, 2002. - 823 p. - ISBN 9780571199822 .
• Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and their legacies: [ eng. ] / Edited by Blair Davis, Robert Anderson and Jan Walls. - Routledge, 2015 .-- 178 p. - (Routledge Advances in Film Studies). - ISBN 978-1-138-82709-7 .
• Catherine Russell. Chapter 4. The Men with Swords and Men with Suits: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa // Classical Japanese Cinema Revisited . - Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2011 .-- 192 p. - ISBN 9781441107770 .
• Paul Tatara. Rashomon Turner Classic Movies (December 25, 1997). Date of treatment January 11, 2016.
• Wheeler Winston Dixon, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. A Brief History of Cinema = A Short History of Film. - Rutgers University Press, 2008 .-- 492 p. - ISBN 0813544750 .
• Donald Richie. The Films of Akira Kurosawa . - University of California Press, 2008 .-- 273 p. - ISBN 9780520220379 .
• Christian Davenport. Rashomon Effect, Observation, and Data Generation // Media Bias, Perspective, and State Repression: The Black Panther Party. - Cambridge University Press, 2010 .-- 260 p. - (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics). - ISBN 0521759706 . - ISBN 978-0521759700 .
• Akira Kurosawa. Akira Kurosawa on Rashomon // Something Like an Autobiography = 蝦 蟇 の 油, 自 伝 の よ う な も の / Trans. Audie E. Bock. - Vintage Books, 1983. - 240 p. - ISBN 0-394-71439-3 .