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DVD Rashomon - Criterion Collection
This 1950 film by Akira Kurosawa is more than a classic: it's a cinematic archetype that has served as a template for many a film since. (Its most direct influence was on a Western remake, The Outrage, starring Paul Newman and directed by Martin Ritt.) In essence, the facts surrounding a rape and murder are told from four different and contradictory points of view, suggesting the nature of truth is something less than absolute. The cast, headed by Kurosawa's favorite actor, Toshiro Mifune, is superb. --Tom Keogh
Hands Down, One of the Finest Films that Has Ever Been Made
First of all, let me just say this: if you are not a fan of Japanese films, Kurosawa, or "Samurai" flicks in general, you owe it to yourself to see RASHOMON and change your opinion. It is a gorgeous film visually, emotionally powerful, and is short enough to keep even the most impatient filmgoer content. The plot is deceptively simple: a heinous crime has been committed in the dream-like landscape of the forest. A samurai has been found dead in the woods and his wife raped. What unfolds is four different "versions" of what happened, told by each of the persons involved in the incident.
Many viewers have complained about the lack of objective truth in the film. They do not want four "versions" of the story. They want the truth. Some viewers expect this film to be a murder/mystery, a "whodunit" film. "So who actually killed the samurai?" they ask. But the film is not about discovering who, nor is it concerned with figuring out the objective truth. If anything, Kurosawa's film cares about humanity's inability to experience life unfiltered from our subjective viewpoints. The result: a statement that there is, perhaps, no such thing as objective truth. RASHOMON seems to be interested in the way that each of us experiences and observes the world differently by enlarging and distorting the role that we play in various events. Each of the initial three storytellers claims to be responsible for the crime, suggesting how we each "personalize" reality to provide ourselves with meaning and understanding. The effect is marvelous.
Realism looms large in the film. From their own viewpoint, our samurai warriors are the paragons of bravery and military excellence. Yet, from a different viewpoint, they are both examples of cowardice, yielding one of the most truthful and honest swordfighting sequences I have ever seen. I'm talking about a sequence in which people get exhausted (fighting is tough) and are afraid to die. Few films manage to capture life with such a purity.
The visual cinematography in this film is absolutely stunning. The film begins with a dreary rain sequence in which the audience is invited under a shelter with some of its principle characters. The rest of the film flashes back and forth in time between the crime and the dreary rain. The contrast of the downpour with the "dreamlike" forest is effective and disturbing. The forest sequence, which soon follows the opening, finds our principle storyteller walking into the woods, as if to symbolize a journey to another reality. The camera work in the woods is phenomenal and we get to witness several new techniques being tried out: shooting directly at the sun through the leaves of trees, casting dark (false) shadows from fake trees on the characters' faces, and one long-rail shot that, for its time period, is light years ahead of its time. The trial sequence is also unique and interesting. Rather than show us who is doing the questioning, instead we just get to hear the witnesses' side of the investigation. Moreover, the witnesses speak directly into the camera, giving the film the feel that they are confessing their story to us, the audience.
RASHOMON is a brilliant film and I believe it holds up to Kurosawa's THE SEVEN SAMURAI, often regarded as his masterpiece. Buy this film today. You will be transported to another world only to find yourself facing difficulties in your own life.
A famous and important film on the idea of different realities
Yes, this is a very important and influential movie, but it is also fascinating to watch. Made more than fifty years ago, only five years after the end of World War II, it holds up extremely well and even without understanding all or even most of the things in the movie that speak directly to Japanese culture. The movie challenges us by providing us a sense of reality and then undermining our certainty. At the end of the movie it is common for a viewer to think that there is no independent reality, that reality is simply a personal construct and that all our personal "stories" are simply lies. That is indeed a very twentieth century post-modern college sophomore lesson to derive from it.
The story opens with two men sitting forlornly at the ruined Rashomon (Dragon gate) outside twelfth century Kyoto. It is pouring rain and they keep muttering that they don't understand, they don't believe what they have recently been through. An unnamed man, obviously a poor and very cynical individual, joins them inside the structure to get out of the rain. He breaks off pieces of the structure to make a fire and, overhearing the muttering, and asks the men to tell what it is they don't understand.
The woodcutter tells how he went into the woods to get the firewood he sells and came upon a body and ran to get the police. We learn that the other man is a priest and his encounter with the man and his wife before they met the bandit. The woodcutter then recounts the trial of a bandit. Tajomaru (Mifune) and his testimony of how he came to kill the man and rape his wife. After the testimony we think we have the story. However, they then bring in the wife who has been found hiding out. She tells a completely different story including the statement that SHE killed her husband.
The dead man testifies through a woman who evokes his spirit. She becomes possessed and recounts what he knows about his death. He doesn't know who killed him or who removed the weapon. The cynical man senses something is wrong with the woodcutter's story and challenges him to tell what really happened. We then get another very different version.
There is much more to the story than this broad outline, but I don't want to take away from your viewing pleasure.
There is a very interesting commentary on the disk by Donald Richie, an authority on the films of Kurosawa. He sounds a lot like a professor teaching undergraduates driving home the same points multiple times. One of them is that every one of the speakers has his or her own story and that each is true for them and that there is no other truth to know.
This is clearly a lesson you could learn from the film, but that would be like learning you can never get a pepperoni and mushroom pizza because the driver delivered a ham and pineapple pizza instead. It may well be that there is no perfect or Platonic Ideal pepperoni and mushroom pizza. Some may have more pepperoni than others, others may use different kinds of mushrooms. What is pizza anyway? Yet, when I give you a pizza, you know if it is pepperoni and mushroom or something else, right?
As for the impossibility of reconciling these stories, well, we have forensics nowadays. Even before scientific analysis, intelligent folks could and did compare the various testimonies given and then did some analysis to come up with a more likely scenario that is different than any individual testimony. It will also likely be incomplete and wrong in details, but will reveal more than accepting only one version or none.
It is also important to remember that the testimonies recounted here are also not direct, but are also recounted by the woodcutter even though we see them as if they were direct accounts. So, there is another level of potential distortion. And it is clear that everyone here is indeed bearing false witness. This is a very different thing than a person who is trying to provide a truthful account, but is limited by the human condition and is only able to provide a partially complete version (even with errors). This kind of error is quite different than a conscious lie that is meant to deceive. The person telling a real lie often understands how their story differs from reality because they are calculating their distortion to be believable but deceptive. It may be that they eventually commit so strongly to the lie that they forget reality, but others can still get closer to what really happened than accepting the lie at face value and shrugging one's shoulders saying, "Well, what can you do. It is his reality."
Anyway, this is a fascinating and important film. Watch it and enjoy!
STILL CONTAINS TRUE HOPE THAT HUMANKIND MAY BE A "WORK-IN-PROGRESS"
RAMBLING ABOUT RASHOMON:
This film is not an easy thing to watch. In English it is somewhat less effective and in Japanese one must contend with the subtitles. Still, I suggest the Japanese with subtitles. Be aware, however, that this is a highly visual film so avoid getting bogged down in the subtitles. More than any other film I have seen, "Rashomon" shows rather than tells, so be prepared to pay very close attention to seemingly small details. Like Kubrick, everything you see and the way you see it has been reduced or altered to be just what is needed for the story. In essence, this is a rather stark though epic production and it may take a few viewings to truly appreciate "Rashomon's" true splendor and significance. It is a short movie that I wished was longer though I was quite satisfied with the ending.
WHAT THIS FILM IS ABOUT: [Without giving away the plot of course.]
HOPE! Through the re-enactment of some perceptional permutations and nuances of a tragic event we are almost left with the conclusion that human beings are fatally-flawed, evil, weak beings fueled by lust and driven with selfish motives and little else.
THE MESSAGE OF HOPE:
But then there is a ray of hope in the form of a helpless abandoned infant and what follows. What we see is intrinsically-flawed humans that through self-awareness may seek to improve their character. If this is true, maybe then through self-awareness, human flaws may be intrinsic but solvable over time making us flawed but NOT FATALLY FLAWED! Sentience may over time be our deliverance in the form of character and integrity. If this is true, then humans are not naturally depraved and everything may not be preordained. Perhaps we are a kind of "work-in-progress". What a nice thought, though Kurosawa gives it to us rather like castor oil.
ABOUT THE DVD:
This is a Criterion Collection DVD and that speaks for itself. Here, however, the best special feature is the rather large booklet that is included with the DVD. The transfer is excellent for a 55-year-old black and white film and it is in Full Screen Format.
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Arguably the greatest of American films, Orson Welles's 1941 masterpiece, made when he was only 26, still unfurls like a dream and carries the viewer along the mysterious currents of time and memory to reach a mature (if ambiguous) conclusion: people are the sum of their contradictions, and can't be known easily. Welles plays newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, taken from his mother as a boy and made the ward of a rich industrialist. The result is that every well-meaning or tyrannical or self-destructive move he makes for the rest of his life appears in some way to be a reaction to that deeply wounding event. Written by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz, and photographed by Gregg Toland, the film is the sum of Welles's awesome ambitions as an artist in Hollywood. He pushes the limits of... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Joseph Cotten - Orson Welles Director(s): Orson Welles DVD Release Date: Released the 25 September 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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