By Jasper Sharp
Translator: Chen Sihang
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: See and Hear
On the seventieth anniversary of The Rashomon, you might want to look back at milestones in the film's history.
Rashomon (1950)
Your reasons can be many. It was because of this film that overseas audiences knew Akira Kurosawa's name for the first time. They also learned about stars such as Toshiro Mifune, Kyomachiko, and Joe Shimura of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema.
In 1951, it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and it was also a symbol of film history, meaning that world audiences began to be interested in Japanese films. In addition, it became the first Japanese film to be released by a major North American studio.
It is an exciting new style of cinema that emerged from the East. But when Japanese movies first became popular, people loved specific period dramas rather than stories set in the contemporary era.
The Japanese image is presented not only in Rashomon, but also in a series of art films in the film festival system that followed, including Kenji Mizoguchi's "The Tale of the Rain Moon" and "Doctor Yamana" and "Hell's Gate" by Sadasuke Igusa.
Hell's Gate
It is worth mentioning that these films neither show the heyday of Bushido in Japan nor the more recent, feudal Tokugawa period (1603-1868). In the 1950s, these two periods provided the backdrop for most japanese audiences. The above-mentioned films depict medieval Heian period (794-1185) Japan.
In that era, this almost mythical land was far removed from Japanese audiences not only in terms of life experience, but also culturally from overseas audiences, which is why it provided fertile ground for allegory, mystery and abstraction.
Rashomon's contribution to film history is mainly due to its revolutionary narrative approach. It introduces the uncertainty of the narrative in the form of flashbacks.
Rashomon
In this film, the four main witnesses provide contradictory representations when recalling an important dramatic event. Its screenplay was written by Shinobu Hashimoto and adapted from two short stories by the modernist writer Ryunosuke Wasagawa (1892-1927). Its central events are this: a noblewoman is violated, her husband, a samurai, is murdered in an isolated bamboo forest, and then people try to find out the elusive truth behind the crime – which originates from the 1922 story "In the Bamboo Forest".
The shorter emotional work of 1915, Rashomon, became the title of Akira Kurosawa's work, which described the natural environment around Rashomon, the south gate of the ancient capital of Kyoto, and when you walk out of this door, you will lead to the dark, sin-ridden wilderness.
It was this venue that provided the stage for the film. We try to reconstruct what really happened through the descriptions of criminal witnesses: a lumberjack who happened to be in the area, a notorious bandit (he was the main suspect), the raped samurai's wife, and even the slain victim himself, who was summoned by the psychic medium and floated out of the grave to provide evidence, which added a supernatural element to the narrative and disturbed the clues of the individual narrative.
Even Rashomon itself is portrayed as an independent "character" who is subjected to the onslaught of rain and isolated from the world in the darkness. As the Japanese literary scholar Paul Andler points out, Rashomon is like "another allegorical man who searches in the shadow of the postwar period and the emptiness of nothingness."
Apparently, Akira Kurosawa wanted to make this parable clearer. Today, the gate, built in 789, is in near ruins. Even at the end of the Heian period, it was in such a state of ruin that it became a place of thieves, murderers, and other outlaws.
In 1919, Ryunosuke Wasagawa saw the building as a symbol, and in his pen, the door represented the unrest that swept through Japanese society. But at the end of Akira Kurosawa's film, we see an abandoned baby under a destroyed arch — which means that it plays an even more tragic historical role at a time when physical existence is about to wither away: those who are not welcome are thrown into this garbage dump.
According to André, in Kurosawa's original idea, it would be surrounded by a series of crumbling stalls. This is similar to the streets of Occupation-era Tokyo, which are paved with black market stalls. In the end, however, Akira Kurosawa spent a fortune rebuilding the immortal building in the story. He also hired fire trucks to soak them in endless drizzle. In this way, he blocks this clear visual connection between the past and the present.
Although Akira Kurosawa had already made eleven films at the time, he was far from a local legend or an international master he was about to become. The big screening, which funded Rashomon, also had little confidence in the project. The studio had just produced a Akira Kurosawa film, Duel in the Quiet Night (1949).
Duel of Silent Night
Akira Kurosawa later pointed out in his memoirs that his next work, "The Idiot" (1951), produced by Shochiku and adapted from Dostoevsky's original work, suffered a double disaster of business and criticism, so Daiei withdrew his proposal to produce another work by Akira Kurosawa.
When Rashomon was released on August 26, 1950, it was not particularly commercially successful. Contrary to popular belief, however, it has received a good response in the critical community. The writers of the Film Magazine named it the fifth best work of the year in the top ten of the year. Its subsequent position in the international film industry can be attributed to the representative of italia Films, Giuliana Stramijoli.
She saw Rashomon on a trip to Japan and recommended it for the following year's Venice Film Festival. Daiei did not inform Akira Kurosawa of the good news, even when it won the prestigious Golden Lion Award. Later, this honor saved the director from the slump of the post-"Idiot" era.
The Idiot (1951)
Needless to say, Rashomon has become the most watched Japanese film for more than a decade. Its acclaim at the Venice Film Festival led Raiden hua to decide to release it in North America in December 1951. At that time, the market for today's so-called "foreign art films" had not yet been established.
As Greg Smith points out in the article "The West's Critical Acceptance of < Rashomon >," large studios attempted to release foreign films with subtitles before that, dating back to 1948, when RKO released René Claire's Silence is Gold (1947).
In the United Kingdom, Rashomon was released in March 1952. Critics of Film Monthly noted that it was "the first film from Japan that the country has seen in many years". A few months later, in August 1952, its distributor, The London Film Company, released a second Akira Kurosawa film, his early comedy-era work The Man Who Stepped on the Tiger's Tail (1945).
"The Man Who Stepped on the Tiger's Tail"
Akira Kurosawa's breakthrough in the international market has greatly affected his reputation in Japan. He is considered a Japanese director who caters to a foreign audience. As he wrote in his autobiography, because he won the Golden Lion award and the subsequent Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Japanese critics insisted that "Westerners still retain curiosity and curiosity about the exoticism of the East, and this evaluation makes me feel terrible, both then and now."
The evaluation of Rashomon by some foreign critics does confirm the possibility of this situation.
Simon Harcourt-Smith begins his review of See and Hear by warning the reader: "This film represents a tradition and view that may be the most distant from our world, and it confronts our own traditions and views." The author makes a perverse but enlightening comment, arguing that Rashomon is "strangely reminiscent of the emotions of the silent German films of thirty years ago, and that they were also things created after defeat."
When the painter James Whistler discovered Japanese art, over the course of seventy years, a considerable number of commentaries described in detail the qualities of Japaneseism. That is why the writer declares, "it took a certain amount of time and experience in the West to distinguish between the pure novelty and the truly remarkable."
Harcourt-Smith often refers to Kabuki, and he notes that "repetition is indeed a prominent feature of Kabuki art", and while this is a misleading argument, he is clearly suggesting the narrative technique of revisiting the plot from multiple angles in Rashomon.
Indeed, while Harcourt-Smith sees Rashomon as "one of the most exciting and extraordinary films in the world since the end of World War II," there is also the comment that "we find ourselves witnessing a world in which social customs and psychological reactions are incompatible with ourselves, but infinitely attractive to us," which is enough to point out that most English-language critics are faced with an unpleasant truth when writing about the work. The only version it screened at the festival was in Japanese with Italian subtitles.
In a Venice report published in the same issue of Sight and Hearing, Catherine de la Roche noted that she "does not know Japanese and has little understanding of Italian" ( ) . In addition, the festival also named the director "Achira Curosawa" (should be "Akira Kurosawa"), which is obviously a mistake that continues from the original promotional materials.
As a result, De la Roche had to focus on its striking texture at the formal level. She notes that composer Fumio Hayasaka has made an innovative re-creation of Ravel's Bolero, and she praises Kazuo Miyagawa's breathtaking photography, which draws attention to the forest scene, where he presents "the state of sunlight penetrating the leaves, showing all the naturally formed patterns."
In the midst of this, we witness the movements of the characters, their faces and hands, all of which make up a very convincing and wonderful picture. Because of this, in my opinion, Rashomon is indeed the highest example of sound film. Its pictorial narrative maintains its own continuity, and it is constantly reinforcing. Its image is combined with sound, but it is not interrupted by sound."
When Rashomon was released in the United States, it was subtitled in English. Because of this, American critics are better equipped to evaluate its narrative innovations.
Henry Hart wrote in the January 1952 Film Review that the film's standout was "an insight into the human heart." This is enough to put Western psychoanalysis to shame. We can realize that different versions of the story of forest events either amplify or protect the narrator's self-esteem. The film's basic argument is that the Japanese are asking the world, 'Who knows who is guilty?' Who are the innocents in this terrible event?"?" 」
On December 27, 1951, Bosley Clauser wrote about the film in The New York Times, stating that "this is a unique and exotic work of art that is difficult to compare with traditional feature films," and asked, "So, is the film relevant to the contemporary era?" Does its frustrating cynicism, and the way it ultimately grasps hope, reflect Japan's current national character? We may not be able to tell you that."
It's easy to forget that the West adapted the film in 1964, and that's 1964's Rashomon of the West, a work directed by Martin Ritter. Paul Newman played the bandit, Claire Bloom played the woman who was victimized, and Edward Broom played the woman who was victimized. G. Robinson served as narrator.
Most people probably don't realize that Ryunosuke Wasagawa's original materials have since been repeatedly remade in Japan, such as Sato Shouho's The Secret of Kusama (1996), Kenki Mitsue's Mist (1997), and Nakano Hiroyuki's Tadashi Maru (2009).
However, even people who have not seen Akira Kurosawa's films are likely to know the psychological term "Rashomon effect". It describes unreliable eyewitnesses who make contradictory representations of certain events.
Any competent director, critic or screenwriter will know how Hashimoto's groundbreaking storytelling skills have widely influenced Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), Brian Singer's Very Suspect (1995), Richard Linklater's Tapes (2001), and Zhang Yimou's Heroes (2002) and the sheer volume of television dramas.
After all, this is a post-truth era in which the boundaries between subjective experience and objective facts are increasingly blurred, and isn't this the best time to revisit Rashomon?