Japn 340 Kurosawa's Rashômon:

Prince sees it as his "most profoundly pictorial and cinematic work…with visual flamboyance…with narrative conceived as a pure flow of imagery." In doing all this, Kurosawa is rediscovering what cinema is all about.

Didn't we hear a version of this from Wim Wenders talking about Ozu?

But for Wenders, it was all about Ozu's simplicty, his ability to strip things down to their very essence and project that essence onto the screen for people to see the nature of what film is all about, what it can be, what it could be.

As Wenders put it, "With extreme economy of means, and reduced to but the bare essentials," Ozu tells a story that is at once particualr to Japan and unviersal. "Never before and never again since has the cinema been so close to its essence and its purpose."

But Kurosawa is almost at the opposite pole as Ozu because for him is not about simplicity, minimalism, stillness or fixed, repeated images. Instead, it is about creating a body of the "most profoundly pictorial and cinematic work,"…work that is characterized by "visual flamboyance…[and] where narrative is conceived as a pure flow of imagery."

That is, for him, the essence of film is "‘the beauty and grace of the photography, the deft use of forest light and shade achieve a variety of powerful and delicate pictorial effects.’” (from Bosley Crowther, NYT)(Prince, 127) Once a painter, Kurosawa sees both beauty and truth in the way that images can shimmer, glow brighly, lapse into darkness--and are able tell a story independent of the use of language, of dialogue. He loved his silent films, after all!

So, it is not only then WHAT the film is SAYING but HOW things are being said. It's about the NARRATIVE STYLE, or as Yoshimitsu wrote about Stray Dog, the film itself is actually a self-reflexive film about the "rhetoric of filmic narration." (149)

Prince says that Rashômon conducts an inquiry into the social constructedness of reality, and the role of subjectivity. So it is not about the Relativity of Truth so much as the Relativity--or the different kinds--of Reality that we experience as humans.

We have the intercutting of flashbacks to create a Non-linear narrative, and the insistence on the subjectivity of memory. Kurosawa is not really investigating the cinematic representation of temporality—we know where we are in the film despite the non-linear narrative. It is not what is recalled that is problematic, not the mode and form of it representation; it is the content of the frames, the events enunciated by the voices, that shift and provide the film with its ambiguity. The film refuses to validate any of the witnesses’ stories as a true account. (129-30)

A thoroughgoing attempt to penetrate the depths of the human heart and a celebration of the inability to do so. No one’s story can be fully validated.

Kurosawa himself says:
Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing.

...Egoism is a sin the human being carry with him since birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. (130)

The paradoxes in the film are of the human heart, not of the image. When it comes to Image, Kurosawa is very comfortable; he knows what he is doing.

We have basically three different locations in the film:

1. The Rashômon gate itself

2. The forest; and

3. The tribunal in the open courtyard

The Setting is late 12th century, end of the Heian era—400 years of peace—now shattered. Also the end of the days of the law, mappô.

Pestilence, fires, earthquakes, rebellions by warrior monks—ikki—violent crimes in the capital city of Kyoto, all seemed to be signs of the dissolution or order, the world teetering on the brink of chaos. The gate where people take refuge is in such a state of disrepair, it is a sign of the times; the gate is the haunt of beggars, murderers, and thieves.

And we see the different people who congregate there:

--the Priest—with his hopes and ideals for human beings,

--the cynical Commoner, and

--the Woodcutter.

We can also think about the Basic Symbols that appear in the film:

--the dilapidated gate itself: a metaphor social breakdown, loss of order, the chaos and the challenges this poses to humanity

—the patterns of light and shadow throughout the film (see Yoshimitsu)

--the deeper Philosophical questions raised:

--loss of faith in human beings,

--the world as a kind of living hell, a nightmare

--the human propensity to lie in order to benefit themselves

--the crisis of faith the Priest experiences:

--"This time I may finally lose my faith in the human soul."

--"Men are weak; that is why they lie, to deceive themselves."

[Commoner: "Not another Sermon! I don't mind a lie if it is entertaining!"]

--"It's horrifying! If men don't trust each other then this world is hell."

--"I can't believe humans would be so sinful."

--Then there is the cynical voice of the Commoner:

--"Is there anyone who is really good? We all want to forget the bad stuff so we make up stories. Maybe goodness is just make-believe."

--"It's human to lie. They cannot tell the truth even to themelves."

--After hearing the woman's tale, which ends with her crying and saying, "What should a poor helpless woman like me do?", the Commoner quips,

"Women can lead you astray with their tears. They even fool themselves. So you have to be wary of the woman's story."

--Finally, there is the symbol of the rescued infant which can be pivotal to our "take away" from Rashômon.

Rashômon is a thoroughgoing attempt to penetrate the depths of the human heart and a celebration of the inability to do so.

No one’s story can be fully validated. Kurosawa:

Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing….Egoism is a sin the human being carry with him since birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. (130)

What else?

On Kurosawa's "experimentalism," Prince writes about:

Long sequences structured as purely visual passages, sequences that communicate narrative information and achieve an emotional effect strictly through the imagery. Dialogue is minimal or non-existent.

A long sequence composed of 19 shots, detailing Tajomaru’s first glimpse of the woman proceeds without dialogue. Most striking example is woodcutter’s walking through the forest before he finds evidence of the crime. Composed of 15 tracking shots, it is an extended essay on the capabilities of the moving camera. Intercuts low-angle tracking shots of the trees, through the sun sporadically peeps, high-angle tracking shots of the woodcutter moving through the forest, and extreme close-ups of the character with the camera following from both the front and the rear. These are among the most sensuous moving camera shots in cinema history, and the entire sequence has a hypnotic power.

Much of the effect is due to the ‘silence’, to the absence of dialogue and ambient sound. Fumio Hayakawa’s percussive, rhythmic score is the only accompaniment to the images. Kurosawa intended Rashômon as a kind of silent film. Silent films he found more beautiful; one of the techniques of modern painting is simplification; I must, therefore, simplify this film. (132)

Reliance on Images:

He kept script short so he could rely on images. Kurosawa fashions the cameras patterns of movement so that they become the archtechtonics of narrative and generate metaphor. The woodcutter intuitively responds to the rhythms of the forest by leaping a river, ducking a branch, crossing a log bridge. He does not recognize these objects consciously but glides over them in a mystical state. He is ONE with the forest. The lyrically tracking camera simulates the rhythms of his walk and the topography of the forest and is, therefore, a formal indicator of this condition. But his reveries is broken when he discovers evidence of a crime. Now is alarmed and rational, out of his reverie; his thinking mind is switched on and his sensuous, intuitive response to the forest is lost. (133)

Defamiliarizing the Familiar:

Excessive language of Mifune—hissing, cackling, spitting—de-familiarizes the familiar. Kurosawa manipultes image and dialogue to create a "co-mingling" effect (Anderson's term): the two are not fused but separated by conflict, flamboyance which stand in contestation with the hysteria of the performances. This displacement, indeed, is what the film is all about. The physical world of events and objects is reconstructed verbally, but language is an unreliable mediator. Stories do not match, gaps and contradictions prevail between word and event. The ‘inner relationship’ between word and reality is denied. This communicative disjunction is viewed in the film in ontological terms as a space wherein human sin and evil originate. The failure of language to contain the world of events s a story about the human fall from grace into a world determined by heterodoxy and multiplicity. (134)

Rashômon advances a claim that reality is essentially a construction that is structured by subjectivity. Kurosawa is not an analytic filmmaker and Rashômon deals with fragmentation and relativity in terms of content of the narratives, not their structure.

Instructions

Japn 340 Kurosawa's Rashômon:

Prince sees it as his "most profoundly pictorial and cinematic work…with visual flamboyance…with narrative conceived as a pure flow of imagery." In doing all this, Kurosawa is rediscovering what cinema is all about.

Didn't we hear a version of this from Wim Wenders talking about Ozu?

But for Wenders, it was all about Ozu's simplicty, his ability to strip things down to their very essence and project that essence onto the screen for people to see the nature of what film is all about, what it can be, what it could be.

As Wenders put it, "With extreme economy of means, and reduced to but the bare essentials," Ozu tells a story that is at once particualr to Japan and unviersal. "Never before and never again since has the cinema been so close to its essence and its purpose."

So, it is not only then WHAT the film is SAYING but HOW things are being said. It's about the NARRATIVE STYLE, or as Yoshimitsu wrote about Stray Dog, the film itself is actually a self-reflexive film about the "rhetoric of filmic narration." (149)

Prince says that Rashômon conducts an inquiry into the social constructedness of reality, and the role of subjectivity. So it is not about the Relativity of Truth so much as the Relativity--or the different kinds--of Reality that we experience as humans.

A thoroughgoing attempt to penetrate the depths of the human heart and a celebration of the inability to do so. No one’s story can be fully validated.

Kurosawa himself says: Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing.

...Egoism is a sin the human being carry with him since birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. (130)

The paradoxes in the film are of the human heart, not of the image. When it comes to Image, Kurosawa is very comfortable; he knows what he is doing.

We have basically three different locations in the film:

1. The Rashômon gate itself

2. The forest; and

3. The tribunal in the open courtyard

The Setting is late 12th century, end of the Heian era—400 years of peace—now shattered. Also the end of the days of the law, mappô.

And we see the different people who congregate there:

--the Priest—with his hopes and ideals for human beings,

--the cynical Commoner, and

--the Woodcutter.

We can also think about the Basic Symbols that appear in the film:

--the dilapidated gate itself: a metaphor social breakdown, loss of order, the chaos and the challenges this poses to humanity

—the patterns of light and shadow throughout the film (see Yoshimitsu)

--the deeper Philosophical questions raised:

--loss of faith in human beings,

--the world as a kind of living hell, a nightmare

--the human propensity to lie in order to benefit themselves

--the crisis of faith the Priest experiences:

--"This time I may finally lose my faith in the human soul."

--"Men are weak; that is why they lie, to deceive themselves."

[Commoner: "Not another Sermon! I don't mind a lie if it is entertaining!"]

--"It's horrifying! If men don't trust each other then this world is hell."

--"I can't believe humans would be so sinful."

--Then there is the cynical voice of the Commoner:

--"Is there anyone who is really good? We all want to forget the bad stuff so we make up stories. Maybe goodness is just make-believe."

--"It's human to lie. They cannot tell the truth even to themelves."

--After hearing the woman's tale, which ends with her crying and saying, "What should a poor helpless woman like me do?", the Commoner quips,

"Women can lead you astray with their tears. They even fool themselves. So you have to be wary of the woman's story."

--Finally, there is the symbol of the rescued infant which can be pivotal to our "take away" from Rashômon.

Rashômon is a thoroughgoing attempt to penetrate the depths of the human heart and a celebration of the inability to do so.

No one’s story can be fully validated. Kurosawa:

Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing….Egoism is a sin the human being carry with him since birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. (130)

What else?

On Kurosawa's "experimentalism," Prince writes about:

Long sequences structured as purely visual passages, sequences that communicate narrative information and achieve an emotional effect strictly through the imagery. Dialogue is minimal or non-existent.

Reliance on Images:

Defamiliarizing the Familiar:

Rashômon advances a claim that reality is essentially a construction that is structured by subjectivity. Kurosawa is not an analytic filmmaker and Rashômon deals with fragmentation and relativity in terms of content of the narratives, not their structure.

Instructions

Kurosawa himself says:
Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing.