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  • DAVID THORBURN: Kurosawa's Rashomon

  • is a particularly dramatic example

  • of a film that understands itself

  • to have the kind of claim on its audience

  • that the greatest art has always imagined

  • itself to have on its audience.

  • So I want to begin by talking very briefly about what

  • I call the moment of Rashomon.

  • There's a bit of confusion, or at least

  • chronological confusion, or inconsistency in the principle

  • that we end the course with a film that was made and shown

  • internationally before the last two films

  • that we've seen in our course.

  • My reasons for that, as I partly explained in an earlier

  • lecture, had to do with my desire

  • to show a certain continuity amongst forms

  • of European cinema and the link between Jean Renoir,

  • and the Italian neorealists, and the French nouvelle vague

  • is so intimate that it seemed to me

  • important to show you that progression in sequence.

  • But if we had been going by strict chronological order,

  • we would have introduced this Kurosawa film a bit earlier,

  • because it was made in 1950.

  • And in 1951, it won an important international prize, The Golden

  • Lion, the highest prize available at the Venice Film

  • Festival in 1951.

  • And this had a seismic effect on movies around the world.

  • The dramatic and powerful subject matter

  • of Kurosawa's film of course riveted attention.

  • But even more than that, the freedom and imaginative energy

  • of his stylistic innovations in the film

  • had a profound impact on filmmakers around the world.

  • And when the film was shown at Venice in 1951, another effect

  • it had when it won the prize was to introduce Japanese cinema

  • to a wider world.

  • It was the first significant Japanese film, Kurosawa,

  • the first important Japanese director

  • to gain a reputation outside of Japan itself.

  • In fact, there are many film buffs, and especially

  • specialists in Japanese film, who

  • are somewhat resentful of Kurosawa's eminence,

  • even though no one denies that he is an eminent

  • director, because there are other directors.

  • The two I've listed under item 2 in our outline

  • are the most dramatic examples, Mizoguchi and Ozu,

  • who are often thought to be his superior, even greater

  • directors than Kurosawa.

  • This is a debate of nuances.

  • All three of these directors are major artists.

  • But it is true, I think, and it is widely recognized

  • that Kurosawa was the director who crossed that barrier more

  • immediately, more dramatically than any other,

  • and opened the world, not just to Japanese cinema,

  • in some degree, but opened the world in some longer

  • sense to Asian cinema more generally,

  • that the so-called Western world,

  • the European and American cinema universes

  • had been fairly oblivious to Asian cinema

  • and certainly to Japanese cinema prior to this.

  • And the appearance of Rashomon, its enormous impact in 1951,

  • began to change that.

  • So that what was demonstrated in moment when Rashomon

  • won this reward, won The Golden Lion at the Venice Film

  • Festival, was a reinforcement of a principle

  • I've been discussing throughout the semester, the notion

  • of film as an international medium, the notion

  • that directors from different national cinemas

  • were now being deeply influenced by directors

  • from other nations, and that film itself

  • was in some deep way, a global phenomenon, even

  • an international form.

  • And I think it was in the '50s and early '60s

  • that this idea began to become more widely embraced

  • by film goers in the United States and in Europe,

  • but perhaps especially in the United States.

  • And one mark of this, the emergence

  • of cinema as a fully recognized independent art form.

  • Obviously people had thought this,

  • and many directors had achieved artistic distinction

  • before this.

  • But I'm talking about the public understanding of movies,

  • the way people in different cultures actually recognized

  • and thought about movies.

  • It was as if this is the moment in which movies were understood

  • to enter the museum in a certain way,

  • to earn in a public sense, the status

  • that more traditional art forms had had.

  • And one of the explanations for why this would have been so,

  • why it would have had such a powerful impact-- now,

  • I think I mentioned last time that this insight was

  • partial in the United States-- especially,

  • that is to say, in the '50s and early '60s,

  • it began to dawn on movie critics and scholars

  • of whom there were only a few at that time and then movie

  • audiences that European films and Asian films, especially

  • Japanese films, might have great artistic value.

  • But it was a longer time before Americans

  • began to realize that their own native forms of films

  • had had a similar kind of authority.

  • So this moment, in the early 1950s,

  • was a deeply significant one.

  • Let's remember historically what it represented in Europe

  • and in the United States.

  • It's the moment of the emergence of Italian neorealism, which

  • itself begins to establish a kind of very powerful claim

  • on people's attention.

  • One irony of Rashomon's success was

  • that it was not very successful in Japan

  • when it was released in 1950.

  • And the producer, the production company

  • responsible for the film was very dubious about entering it

  • in the competition, didn't think it was a significant film, even

  • though it transformed Kurosawa's career

  • because of the immense recognition it finally got.

  • And Kurosawa himself recognized--

  • he'd been making films for almost a decade before that,

  • but Rashomon was his most ambitious film to that point,

  • and it also incorporated more innovative strategy,

  • visual strategies than any he had tried before.

  • It established him as an international director.

  • And I mentioned the names of two other directors

  • just from different traditions as a way

  • of reminding you of another feature of this phenomenon,

  • another reason, as I began to say earlier,

  • for why this moment was such a significant one.

  • And the term I use here is modernism, modernist cinema.

  • Remember, one of the ways to understand this idea

  • is to recognize that a great revolution in the arts

  • had occurred at the turn of the 20th century,

  • the end of the 19th, and at the turn of the 20th century.

  • We've talked about this earlier.

  • It's the movement we call modernism.

  • It's the moment of Picasso.

  • It's the moment of James Joyce, and it

  • was a kind of revolution in both visual art, literature,

  • music took place in this period.

  • And among the characteristics of this modernist

  • movement was a newly complicated and self-conscious attitude

  • toward narrative itself, toward storytelling.

  • So modernism in literature and in art involved,

  • among other things if not a hostility or antagonism,

  • at least a kind of skepticism about

  • inherited traditional categories and ways of doing things.

  • And one form this took in narrative

  • was to dislocate or disorient the narrative line.

  • Instead of telling a story in a chronological sequence,

  • a lot of the great works of fiction of the modernist era,

  • books by writers like Joseph Conrad, or Proust,

  • the great French novelist who was so

  • preoccupied by memory and human subjectivity,

  • or the great German novelist, Thomas Mann,

  • a number of other great figures that we could mention

  • began to construct stories in which chronological order was

  • profoundly disrupted.

  • And they also began to create stories in which there

  • were multiple narrators.

  • And the effect of multiple narrators

  • begins-- even if you do nothing more than have

  • multiple narrators, you begin to raise questions

  • about the veracity, the truthfulness

  • of any single perspective.

  • And you will understand when you look at Rashomon

  • why this movie embodies many of these same modernist

  • principles.

  • But the point is that cinema, as a narrative form,

  • lag behind these more traditional arts.

  • And it really wasn't until the 1950s,

  • and partly because of films like Rashomon,

  • that it began to be recognized that the movies too

  • could embrace and embody the principles of modernism.

  • So one way to understand what happened in the 1950s

  • is to recognize that directors like Kurosawa and Ingmar

  • Bergman, the great Swedish director,

  • and Fellini, the great Italian director,

  • and the inheritor and expander of the neorealist tradition,

  • going far beyond a narrow realism,

  • that directors like that began to create films

  • that in a formal sense, in a structural sense,

  • and also in terms of their content

  • had the kind of complexity, nuance, and skepticism,

  • and even the philosophic self-awareness

  • that was characteristic of high modernism

  • at the turn of the 20th century.

  • So it's as if what was going on was the movies

  • themselves were now asserting themselves as a modernist art.

  • I don't mean as a contemporary art.

  • I'm referring specifically to the modernist movement,

  • and to the dislocated, and much more demanding

  • kinds of narrative strategies that

  • are characteristic of the modernist movement.

  • So Rashomon played a fundamental role

  • in this sort of transformation of what

  • we might call the cultural understanding of movies

  • among ordinary people, as well as among scholars, critics,

  • and other filmmakers.

  • I want to mention one other point.

  • I'll give you a kind of note to clarify

  • some of what I've been implying, some

  • of what I implied when I talked about Mizoguchi and Ozu

  • as directors who were often even more highly

  • regarded than Kurosawa.

  • I'll leave that to each individual film goer.

  • All three directors are astonishing and remarkable.

  • But it wouldn't be appropriate to talk, even

  • about this single film, Rashomon,

  • without paying respects to those two great directors whose

  • dates I've put on your outline.

  • I won't talk about individual films by these directors,

  • but I urge you all to look them up, read about them

  • in David Cook's history of narrative film,

  • and think about experimenting by extending

  • your knowledge of Japanese cinema

  • by trying films by these two remarkable directors.

  • One of the things that's characteristic of all three

  • of these directors, of Kurosawa, even more fully

  • of Mizoguchi and Ozu, Ozu most fundamentally of all,

  • is that their films are marked by a kind of impulse

  • toward stylization, toward fabular, fable-like equations

  • that distinguish them in some ways

  • from Western, from European, and American films.

  • And I think that one explanation for this

  • has to do with the longer artistic traditions

  • of Japanese society.

  • Japanese film grows out of theatrical traditions,

  • like kabuki theater, or Noh drama,

  • N-O-H drama, both of which have profoundly stylized and fable

  • like qualities.

  • They're anti-narrative, in some sense,

  • and any of you who have ever had even a minimal experience

  • with either of these two theatrical traditions

  • will understand what I'm discussing.

  • These are theaters of gesture and of very decisive,

  • symbolic representation.

  • What we would think of as sort of realistic characters

  • or realistic stories are not a part

  • of these very ancient traditions.

  • These theatrical traditions go back hundreds, even

  • thousands of years.

  • So there's a tradition in Japan of a kind of stylized,

  • of symbolic representation.

  • And you'll see, I think, how in Russia,

  • how powerfully this principle operates in Rashomon.

  • Even when film itself emerged in Japan in the silent era,

  • it emerged in a slightly different way.

  • And one of the most interesting features of silent film

  • tradition in Japan was the appearance of a character who

  • has no counterpart in Western cinema,

  • a character called a benshi, B-E-N-S-H-I.

  • Any of you heard of it?

  • None.

  • Well, he essentially was a narrator and explainer,

  • and he stood next to the movies in a way and gave explanations.

  • He said now, we will introduce the villain.

  • Now, we will introduce-- he was like a kind of intermediary,

  • a narrator or a concierge who mediated

  • between the audience and the text, who gave the audience

  • information.

  • Again in one sense, we might think of it

  • as an anti-narrative tradition, as a tradition in which things

  • are presented or spoken rather than literally acted out,

  • and certainly one in which the details of a story

  • are less important than its general outline.

  • So when we talk about stylization,

  • one of the things we're talking about

  • is an impulse toward what we might

  • think of as generalized argument instead of specific argument,

  • an impulse to have one moment stand symbolically

  • for many other moments, and what we

  • might think of as a simplification

  • or a distillation of reality into certain symbolic moments

  • that are thought to be emblematic in certain ways,

  • but don't necessarily have a realistic feel.

  • And you'll see almost instantly when this film begins,

  • there's a kind of prologue.

  • And then when the film makes a transition

  • into the first sequence that takes place in the forest,

  • you'll begin to see what I mean when I say that the film seems

  • to enter into a kind of symbolic realm

  • in which your sense of reality is in some sense undermined,

  • as if you're entering into a dream or a symbolic space.

  • Kurosawa, talking about that astonishing sequence

  • at the beginning of Rashomon, said

  • that camera's complex movements and the movements

  • of a character himself-- everything

  • is in motion in that remarkable opening sequence.

  • Some people have called it the most visually poetic sequence

  • in the history of movies.

  • Kurosawa called this moment a moment

  • in which the camera was shown to be penetrating into a space

  • where the heart loses its way, as if you're penetrating

  • into an ancestral space, into a space that's

  • dreamlike in fundamental ways.

  • So the very opening of the film, or almost

  • the very opening of the film establishes

  • this kind of complexity.

  • I don't want to exactly call it an ambiguity,

  • but this complexity about the nature of the reality

  • that you're watching.

  • And this is even before the film proceeds

  • to present essentially four different accounts

  • of the same event, these four different accounts

  • conflicting with each other in a variety of ways.

  • So these abstracting, or symbolizing,

  • or stylizing narrative and dramatic traditions

  • lie behind and shape the movies in Japan, even movies

  • like Kurosawa's, which embrace the camera's freedom

  • in a way that's much more characteristic

  • of Western directors than of Eastern ones.

  • Ozu, the second of the two directors

  • I've listed on your outline, is especially

  • famous for holding his camera almost stationary

  • for a tremendously long time.

  • And in fact, he's sometimes called a director

  • who tries to create a zen aesthetic,

  • because the camera is so quiet, and so stationary,

  • and relatively inactive.

  • It's a style that lays tremendous emphasis

  • on the nuances of facial expression and vocal tone.

  • And both Mizoguchi and Ozu do, in some sense,

  • have an even greater sense of stylization

  • in many of their films than Kurosawa does.

  • But I don't want to oversimplify,

  • because they are also capable of very great, realistic moments,

  • and they have a moral realism that's

  • at least as powerful in their films as Kurosawa himself.

  • Kurosawa's career is a very remarkable one.

  • And I wish I had time to talk about it in detail.

  • Organizational structure of Japanese cinema

  • was not unlike the structures that

  • developed in Western societies in the United States

  • or in France.

  • There were essentially monopolies

  • of not a small number, but a relatively larger number

  • of film production companies operating at different levels

  • of significance.

  • So they were second rate, and then they

  • were second level and third level production companies,

  • as well.

  • But all of them operated in a similar way.

  • The director was a more dominant than major figure

  • in this system, and surrounding each director

  • were a group of workers and a group of creative people,

  • including usually performers who went with a director from film

  • to film, as well as his technical people.

  • They would often use the same people to write their music,

  • and the same crew to work on the film-- if they could succeed,

  • get the same cinematographer.

  • And Kurosawa's-- so Kurosawa's group was called the Kurosawa

  • gumi, G-U-M-I. It means the group, or cadre.

  • The Kurosawa group worked on a series of films.

  • I don't mean it was always identical.

  • There were changes, but it was a stable group

  • unified especially by Kurosawa's vision and supervision.

  • And I've listed here a few of his most famous and fundamental

  • films besides Rashomon.

  • Ikiru, maybe his greatest film, a realistic film

  • set in the modern world.

  • The title means to live, and it's

  • about a man who discovers that he has only a few months

  • to live.

  • And it stars the actor Takashi Shimura,

  • who plays the woodcutter in Rashomon.

  • The other actor that you'll see in Rashomon

  • that is one of Kurosawa's favorites

  • and appears again and again in Kurosawa's films

  • is the actor Toshiro Mifuni.

  • Rashomon, he plays the bandit.

  • You'll see what a remarkable figure he is.

  • So I've only listed a few of his films here,

  • but among his most important, Rashomon, Ikiru,

  • Seven Samurai-- many people would

  • say the greatest of all samurai movies,

  • and probably the greatest of all Western movies,

  • because it puts most American Westerns to shame.

  • It's influenced by American Westerns,

  • as Kurosawa himself acknowledged.

  • And it was itself, that film, made in 1954,

  • remade as an American film some years later under the title,

  • The Magnificent Seven.

  • And it was so successful that a sequel

  • was made, something like The Magnificent Seven Return.

  • And in fact, one of the deep features of Kurosawa's work

  • is that many of his films have been

  • remade by other directors, both American

  • and European directors.

  • Rashomon was made 14 years later,

  • remade 14 years later, with Kurosawa given screenplay

  • credit in a film directed by Martin Ritt in the United

  • States called The Outrage.

  • And it retells the story that's at the heart of Kurosawa's

  • film.

  • It starred Paul Newman among others, and Edward G. Robinson,

  • among other significant American actors.

  • Throne of Blood I mentioned, because many people see it

  • as the most successful of all adaptations of Shakespeare.

  • It's a Japanese kabuki-ized version of Macbeth starring

  • Toshiro Mifune.

  • And many people think of it as the greatest

  • of all Shakespearean adaptations.

  • Yojimbo is a samurai film, a much more straightforward

  • samurai film in many ways than Seven Samurai,

  • also stars Mifune, and it has brilliant, brilliant sword

  • fight sequences in it that anticipate the kind of thing

  • that is now common in Asian cinema, but much less trivially

  • done in Kurosawa's than in many of these later films that

  • merely seem to want to entertain us by their sword

  • play and the physical grace of their actors,

  • but don't connect nearly so powerfully

  • as Kurosawa's films do to a profound and serious historical

  • setting and story.

  • Yojimbo was also made into an American movie called Last Man

  • Standing, in 1966.

  • I mentioned Kagemusha, only because it's a later film,

  • and many people admire it, because it

  • shows that Kurosawa was working effectively, even in old age.

  • He made another film in 1985, one of his final films

  • called Ran, R-A-N, which is a remake of King Lear.

  • And these two older films, later films, Kagamusha and Ran,

  • show Kurosawa's visual sense, visual imagination to great

  • effect, but they feel stylized in the way that

  • they're-- stylized may not be the right word.

  • They feel abstract in a way that earlier, Kurosawa's films

  • do not.

  • They are extraordinary spectacles,

  • but they don't have the same interest in character,

  • the same focus on character that his earlier

  • films, despite their stylisation, seem to do.

  • I've saved most of my time to talk about Rashomon itself,

  • because it's such a central and significant film.

  • And I hope when you watch it, you'll not be impatient,

  • and especially that you watch for the ways

  • in which from sequence to sequence,

  • the visual style alters.

  • It's a very demanding film, in that sense.

  • Let's begin by talking a little bit about the problem of rape

  • in cultural stories, because I think

  • that one of the problems with responding fully to Rashomon

  • is that we, especially in the Western world,

  • are newly struggling with notions of gender identity

  • and of the legacy of patriarchy that

  • put us in a fraught and complex position in relation

  • to stories like that of this film.

  • And I want to confront it right in the beginning.

  • As some of you may know, the story of Rashomon

  • is the story of a rape.

  • There are four different-- a rape occurs

  • at the center of the film, and there

  • are four different accounts of what happened,

  • of how the rape occurred.

  • And the film is partly a meditation

  • on what motives do the different tellers have

  • for putting this particular spin on the story?

  • And part of what's subtle and disturbing about the movie

  • is that when the first testimony is given,

  • it's not fully clear yet to us that we should

  • be skeptical of the testimony.

  • And I think the first time-- one of the people whose testimony

  • we heard is the murderer himself,

  • or the rapist himself, the Mifune character.

  • He's the first one to testify.

  • And as he's testifying, it begins

  • to dawn on an attentive viewer that maybe his testimony

  • is self-serving in certain ways, that there's

  • certain things he's saying that maybe we shouldn't fully

  • accept.

  • And then, when the next account comes, our sense of skepticism

  • is reinforced and fortified.

  • We begin to worry.

  • And then the film itself reminds us of the fact

  • that these tales are problematic, because the film's

  • structure is so interesting.

  • Roughly every 10 minutes or so, I've

  • timed most of them-- a little less than 10 minutes

  • in some cases, a little longer than some--

  • you'll have an extended narrative sequence which

  • will last about 10 minutes.

  • Usually it's the testimony of one

  • of the people appearing before the court.

  • And then after that happens, the film sort of

  • shifts into another mode.

  • And the way you can tell is that it shifts back

  • to the scene with which the film opens.

  • All the way through the scene, it's marked by this.

  • The structure of the film is marked

  • by this return to a scene at Rashomon gate,

  • which I'll explain in a moment.

  • So one point that I'm trying to get to here

  • is the idea that as we watched the film

  • and we begin to weigh the accounts that different people

  • give of this rape, many of us are

  • likely to feel uneasy and disturbed,

  • because one of the things that disturbs me in the film

  • is the woman's reaction to her rape.

  • She feels terrible shame.

  • It's as if she felt-- and there seems

  • to be an impulse in the film that certainly some people have

  • certainly gotten there.

  • At least they perceive an impulse

  • in the film or an impulse in the narrative to blame the victim.

  • In some sense, what I'm suggesting

  • is not that that response is inappropriate,

  • but that it's a little bit off key, off center, because if you

  • recall the idea that the film is deeply stylized,

  • and it's set in an ancestral past, in a medieval Japan,

  • in a moment of terrible social breakdown in which

  • vestigial or ancestral attitudes towards sexuality and gender

  • are being mobilized or awakened.

  • And if we understand it in that way,

  • we can begin to recognize that our own discomfort

  • with the subject matter is a discomfort that the film itself

  • may even be aware of and may even be encouraging.

  • And as you're watching the film, watch how, in some sense,

  • especially in one moment where the victim of rape

  • makes an appeal to her husband right

  • after-- there's a sequence where we

  • see her embracing her husband and looking into his face.

  • Now the problem is she's giving this testimony,

  • and there's some reason.

  • It's after the fact, and there's some reason

  • to doubt what she's saying, especially as the film goes on.

  • Nonetheless, it's a moment of great power.

  • And that moment at least mobilizes a sympathy

  • for the victim of rape.

  • That is very significant, because you hear so little

  • of it elsewhere in the film.

  • Not that the woman is treated badly,

  • but she's subjected to the same suspicions

  • as the other central characters.

  • But there's a larger thing to think about,

  • a larger way in which we can accommodate ourselves

  • to the slight discomfort we might feel

  • at turning a story of rape into a philosophic discourse

  • as this film does.

  • And here's how we might do that.

  • Let me just remind you that stories about rape

  • are at the heart of many cultures.

  • How many of you have heard of the story

  • of The Rape of Europa?

  • It's a Greek myth.

  • None of you?

  • In many ways, it's the story of the foundation of Europe.

  • Zeus disguised as a white bull, the great Greek god,

  • the god of all gods.

  • One of Zeus's best habits or the most remarkable habits

  • in these mythological stories is that when

  • he gets a yen for a human female,

  • he will disguise himself as a creature of the earth

  • and go down and rape her.

  • And he does this with Europa.

  • The rape of Europa is a kind of symbolic story

  • which later Europeans actually took

  • as one of the founding tails of how Europe itself was founded.

  • Can you think of another story in which Zeus was a rapist?

  • How many of you know the story of Leda

  • and the Swan, about which Yeats wrote such beautiful poems?

  • Again, Zeus, the god of gods, disguises himself

  • as a great spawn and swoops down on lead of this beautiful woman

  • and rapes her in the guise of a swan.

  • And there's a brilliant, almost pornographically powerful poem

  • by W. B. Yeats in which he describes

  • this terrible moment of rape.

  • It's one of the great poems of the Western world,

  • and it's about this rape.

  • So what I'm reminding you of is that the misogyny,

  • that you may sense there is a misogyny that's

  • embedded in culture.

  • It's a misogyny that's embedded in all the stories

  • that human beings tell, in many of the stories

  • that human beings tell themselves about the world,

  • about the relations of men and women,

  • and often, especially about the foundations of society,

  • so that this meditation on human frailty

  • and human deceit focused on a rape from that perspective

  • is one of many such stories.

  • Not a unique object at all.

  • And it seems to me that that's one

  • of the ways in which we can recognize that what Kurosawa

  • is doing is part of a long, and complex,

  • and in many ways, very disturbing habit of mind

  • that many, many cultures share.

  • The title-- Rashomon.

  • Western students are often puzzled by it.

  • It's a reference to the name of the gate,

  • but the word gate is complicated too,

  • because it's not an American gate that

  • just opens and closes.

  • It's a great, massive entrance to the city of Kyoto

  • in the southern part of Japan in the late 11th

  • or early 12th century.

  • It's a period of complete disillusion

  • and destructive poverty, political chaos.

  • And the broken down condition of the gate,

  • which you get long shots of, you see this massive structure.

  • There's a terrible rainstorm going on,

  • under which certain people come to get shelter from the rain.

  • And that is Rashomon gate.

  • And it's broken down condition symbolizes

  • the broken down condition politically

  • and socially of the society that is represented there.

  • And again and again, the characters

  • gathered beneath the gate to protect themselves

  • from the weather and gauge in conversation

  • about human nature.

  • Are human beings innately evil?

  • Do they always lie?

  • Can we never trust them?

  • And one of the characters who carries on this discourse

  • is a priest who has an idealizing tendency, which

  • another of the character's a commoner.

  • He's called the commoner.

  • He's an ordinary man is constantly mocking and arguing

  • against.

  • It's almost a kind of argument that

  • reminds me in some ways of the argument between spirit

  • and flesh in Cervante's Don Quixote,

  • in which Sancho Panza is constantly

  • reminding the idealizing Quixote of the miserable

  • actuality of the world.

  • Look, when you get stabbed, you bleed.

  • When you haven't eaten, you're hungry.

  • The world is real in a way and miserable in some respects

  • in a way that idealists don't like.

  • And so that's a kind of argument that

  • runs through these interludes as the film goes on.

  • So the title refers to the Rashomon Gate,

  • and Rashomon Gate is itself a massive symbol

  • for the breakdown of order for the miserable circumstances

  • that individuals find themselves in.

  • And one of the things you'll see is that it's chilly.

  • It's cold.

  • It's raining like mad, a tremendous torrent,

  • a downpour incidentally created partly by fire trucks.

  • In his autobiography, Kurosawa talks

  • about how difficult it was to create

  • this sense of an immense ongoing,

  • almost a tsunami of rain, and he talked

  • about the technical difficulties of doing so.

  • Very impressive rain, the most impressive rainstorm

  • in the history of movies, I think.

  • So these people are gathered beneath the gate in order

  • to protect themselves, and the gate's symbolic significance

  • is important.

  • We will notice that one of the things they

  • do when they get cold is they go over

  • to certain parts of the building.

  • It's a wooden structure already half broken down and in decay.

  • And they'll break off banisters or other pieces of wood,

  • and break them up, and burn them up.

  • And the implication is if things go on like this,

  • pretty soon the whole gate will have

  • been consumed by people who have tried to take shelter under it.

  • So it's a symbol of the breakdown of social order

  • and of the society.

  • I've already mentioned the medium.

  • The Japanese word is miko.

  • And I mentioned it here, just because I

  • wanted to be sure all of you understood

  • what was going on there.

  • The husband is dead when the testimony begins.

  • He's a samurai who was the husband of the rape victim.

  • And as the story unfolds, you'll get the basic facts,

  • but even when the film is over, there

  • are many fundamental things you won't be able to have decided.

  • And I think that's certainly part of Kurosawa's point.

  • So the medium is just this clairvoyant type apparently

  • real characters believed in and socially recognizable

  • in late medieval Japan, a character

  • who claims to have access to the words

  • and beliefs of dead people.

  • So the dead man testifies.

  • And another way of reminding you that we're

  • looking at a very stylised, a story that

  • isn't in a narrow sense, realistic at all.

  • The visual style of a film is especially

  • remarkable and astounding, in some ways.

  • It's almost as if each form of testimony has its own style.

  • And you might want to watch the way in which Kurosawa builds

  • his eclectic and dynamic way in which Kurosawa's editing

  • camerawork use of music combine to a kind of almost

  • constant visual excitement.

  • One of the most remarkable things about the film

  • is how many sequences in it are without dialogue-- extended,

  • wordless sequences, truly entirely cinematic.

  • The opening sequence-- almost the opening sequence--

  • the first extended sequence in a forest, which

  • comes after the sort of introduction, which I've

  • described earlier, is a magnificently

  • clear example of that process.

  • And one of the things that you may notice in that sequence

  • especially is the way in which you become increasingly

  • disoriented about the direction in which the woodcutter is

  • going.

  • He's apparently narrating the story, and his narration sort

  • of segues into a visual experience,

  • as happens again and again in the film.

  • And the visual experience we have

  • shows him going into the woods, walking, and then discovering

  • first the woman's hat, and then discovering other things,

  • and discovering a body, and then running away in fear.

  • And as he penetrates into the woods,

  • one of the things that happens is the camera is always moving.

  • And the camera becomes as interested in the forest

  • itself, in this densely wooded forest

  • and in the play of light and dark,

  • because the sunlight comes through the wooded canopy

  • in odd and profoundly visually powerful ways.

  • You begin to have a sense that the camera is at least as

  • interested in the woods and in the play of sunlight

  • as it is in the motions of the woodcutter.

  • And the whole sequence has a kind

  • of profoundly lyrical, but also in some degree,

  • disorienting sense that as Kurosawa said,

  • you're entering a space that's dreamlike, that's dangerous,

  • a place where the heart will lose its way, as if you're

  • entering a symbolic space, not a realistic space--

  • a stylized space in some deep way.

  • And there are a couple of specific strategies

  • that Kurosawa uses in the film to reinforce, I think,

  • our sense that he's engaging every element

  • of his cinematic palate in order to create his effects.

  • One thing he does, he violate certain rules, especially

  • at the time where it would have been

  • tremendously shocking to professional directors.

  • One thing he does in the film was he

  • points the camera at the sun, and he creates sun effects.

  • That was a no-no.

  • It was a sort of a rule that directors should never do that.

  • Kurosawa does it.

  • And you watch how he does it.

  • It's very powerful.

  • It also has a disorienting effect,

  • the effect of making us understand more deeply what

  • it's like to work our way through the incredible dense

  • forest in which the crime occurs,

  • as if the forest itself is a space so complex and so

  • private, so cut off from the outer world

  • that almost anything could happen there--

  • a space of dream, a space of terror,

  • a space of symbolic fable.

  • And there are a couple of other things

  • I wanted to mention about the way his camera behaved.

  • One is that Kurosawa uses here a device at certain points

  • in the film, a very interesting device.

  • The official name for it, the fancy name for it,

  • the technical name for it is he makes what is called an axial

  • cut, A-X-I-A-L. It's really a form of a jump cut--

  • that is to say, an abrupt edit which you're not fully prepared

  • for.

  • A jump card, as you know, breaks the action

  • in mid-stride, or in mid-action, and then jumps

  • to something else in a way that's slightly

  • disorienting that eliminates.

  • It's elliptical.

  • It eliminates connection or transitions.

  • But the axial cut does this in a very dramatic way

  • that also calls attention to the apparatus of the movies.

  • The most dramatic places in which this occurs in the film

  • are certain scenes in which you see the samurai husband tied

  • up, sitting on the ground, tied up like this,

  • kneeling on the ground.

  • And the camera's at some distance from him

  • and moved toward him, but it doesn't move toward him

  • in a smooth trucking motion characteristic of most films.

  • What it does is it moves forward,

  • and it stops, and then it jumps.

  • It moves forward.

  • And what you feel is it leaps forward.

  • And what's happening, of course, is

  • that he stops the cameras forward movement,

  • moves it further, makes a cut.

  • So the effect is the camera moves--

  • not that the camera's jerky, but it's

  • as if it's speeded up in some sense.

  • We can feel that the camera is becoming elliptical.

  • So say this fellow in the front is the person I'm focusing on.

  • I'll be here.

  • You'll see this shot.

  • And then you'll see this shot, and the effect is very abrupt.

  • Watch how it happens.

  • One effect, one consequence of this kind of a shot

  • is that watching it, you can feel how mechanical it is.

  • You begin to think to yourself well,

  • how could that have been created?

  • You're aware of its mechanical qualities.

  • That is to say, you become partly aware

  • of the apparatus behind the making of the movie.

  • It's a moment of self-consciousness

  • that other elements on the film also reinforce.

  • So the visual style is profoundly

  • eclectic and dynamic.

  • I've mentioned the axial code in pointing the camera at the sun.

  • Maybe I'll mention one other device.

  • One of the other technically intricate, and at the time,

  • revolutionary thing that Kurosawa did was he

  • violates what's called the 180 degree rule.

  • And the 180 degree rule essentially

  • has to do with your sense of spatial orientation

  • within the frame.

  • Essentially the 180 degree rule holds

  • that if you're showing characters moving

  • in this direction, so you're showing a character moving

  • this way, you won't suddenly, if you're still

  • going in the same direction, show him walking this way,

  • because it disorients the viewer.

  • In our film, in Rashomon, there are certain moments.

  • There are hints of it in that opening sequence,

  • that lyrical, first sequence in the forest

  • that I mentioned in which you can see that the camera's

  • own movements complicate, and in some sense,

  • confuse our sense of where the woodcutter is going.

  • And it's in that sequence and some other places in the film

  • as well, where the 180 degree rule is violated.

  • And the effect again is to disorient us, is to feel gee,

  • I don't know whether I'm coming or going.

  • This guy doesn't know whether he's coming or going.

  • What kind of a space is he in?

  • Again, violating certain conventions of traditional

  • filmmaking in order to create new effect.

  • And the consequence of these choices,

  • the impact of these choices in 1951,

  • when the film won its prize, was profound.

  • I want to say one other thing, another aspect of the film's

  • structure, which I've described him perfectly.

  • And I apologize for being so tongue tied about it.

  • But as I tried to describe earlier,

  • the basic structure of the film becomes fairly clear.

  • What happens is you get testimony.

  • Then there are interruptions in which you-- essentially, all

  • four of the primary pieces of testimony

  • takes place in the past.

  • So what we have are flashbacks, but competing flashbacks.

  • And at various points, the film returns to our scene of reign

  • at Rashomon Gate in which the people

  • under the gate, the three people under the gate-- two of them

  • are actually partial participants.

  • The third, the commoner, is just a kind

  • of listener to the story, although a profound commutator

  • on it.

  • The Sancho Panza type who says, look.

  • The world is miserable.

  • Why should you believe anyone?

  • And the priest is constantly resisting him.

  • Well when we return to these moments--

  • so we return to Rashomon Gate several times,

  • many times in the film.

  • And every time we return to that spot, where are we?

  • We're in the present time of the film.

  • So one of the things the film does,

  • it creates what I call a drama of the telling

  • of the story in which the conversation that's going on

  • underneath Rashomon Gate is a kind of metacommentary

  • on the story that we're watching.

  • The characters inside the film comment on well,

  • can we believe her?

  • Is this credible?

  • Why did she say this?

  • And the effect of this metacommentary

  • is to create essentially a separate story.

  • What's the separate story?

  • It's a philosophic topic.

  • The topic is the telling of stories.

  • In other words, this interruption

  • creates a new kind of moral and thematic complexity

  • in the film, something that's characteristic

  • of the great novels and fiction works

  • I mentioned earlier in the lecture that

  • appeared at the turn of the 20th century.

  • Not is the principle of unreliable narration being

  • introduced, and the principle of competing flashbacks being

  • introduced, and the principle of dislocated chronology being

  • introduced-- all of those things are operating.

  • But what is even more important about it

  • is that these moments of conversation

  • amongst those three characters at Rashomon Gate

  • also constitute a kind of philosophic meditation

  • on the nature of storytelling and the nature of truth.

  • And they actually say oh, how can you believe a person?

  • Or what is truth?

  • How can we believe what anybody says?

  • So the film calls attention not only

  • to the profound subjectivity of human responses

  • and the profoundly unreliable nature of memory,

  • but also the extent to which individuals themselves

  • have reasons developing from their egos

  • to distort and tell stories that are more

  • flattering to themselves and so that by the time

  • we come to the end of the film, it isn't clear at all, when

  • the film is over, whether there is a truth, whether there

  • is any final truth that we can embrace.

  • The issues are not finally resolved.

  • But what is resolved for us is the idea that human reality is

  • immensely complex, that human beings

  • are endlessly deceitful, that the stories

  • they tell about themselves and others may not be trustworthy.

  • So in other words, the film opens out

  • into a kind of philosophic profundity

  • that's partly a function of its structure.

  • So it's another example, one of the most remarkable examples

  • that we've seen in our course, of what I call organic form,

  • of a text whose structure helps us understand what it's about

  • and whose structure is part of what it means,

  • whose structure is essential to its meaning.

  • We couldn't imagine this film as a straightforward,

  • chronological sequence.

  • It wouldn't be able to do what it does.

  • So what I mean by the drama of the telling of the story

  • is literally that.

  • That is to say, there's a second story,

  • a second subject matter in these interludes--

  • let's call them interludes in these interruptions in which we

  • return to the present time, get out of the past.

  • And those interludes are an extended, philosophic, and

  • moral conversation about human nature,

  • about the nature of our human capacity

  • to understand the world, and our capacity

  • to talk about it, to narrate it accurately and fully.

  • So this drama of the telling of the story, this drama

  • of the screening, this drama of the making of the story

  • is as important a dimension of the film as its actual story,

  • as the actual story that it wants to tell.

  • I have two other points to make about this remarkable film,

  • and I'll be done.

  • The first is that one of the things I think you'll notice,

  • as the story goes on, and as different people give

  • different accounts of what happened

  • is that the actual physical conflict between the two

  • male characters, which one would expect to be grand and heroic,

  • is almost always clownish and unheroic.

  • We expect this great-- he's a samurai warrior, after all,

  • and the man he's doing battle with

  • is a very famous or infamous bandit, criminal-- so

  • gifted a criminal that he's famous.

  • And one realizes in retrospect that when

  • the criminal, the Toshiro Mifune character, gives his testimony.

  • In the beginning, in the early part of the film,

  • he's exaggerating his own martial genius.

  • Although we don't fully realize that at first,

  • but it becomes clearer and clearer to us

  • as the film goes on that he has a motive

  • to exaggerate his heroic stature, and his strength,

  • and so forth.

  • Not to mention, a motive to exaggerate and maybe

  • to lie about the woman's reaction

  • to his forced attentions.

  • So all of that is an essential part of our understanding

  • of what is at stake, I guess, when

  • we think about the various subject

  • that Rashomon gestures toward.

  • So the clownish, unheroic behavior of these fighters

  • is something to note, because there's

  • a deep skepticism in the film itself

  • about all forms of human aggrandizement.

  • There's a skepticism that the film shares with the commoner

  • who maybe is too negative about human nature, who thinks

  • human beings are completely abject,

  • and that this is the justification for the most

  • selfish kind of behavior, because no one can behave well.

  • I have hardly exhausted the film,

  • but I hope I've said some things that

  • will be valuable and useful to you on your first viewing.

  • But let me end by talking about the ending, because the ending

  • of Rashomon presents us with a problem similar to the problem

  • that we confronted in a film like The Last Laugh, Der Letzte

  • Mann, in which there seems to be a kind

  • of optimistic or reassuring ending to this film.

  • The film has been very dark and rainy.

  • And in fact, one of the ways you can

  • tell that the film has changed registers

  • is that the rain finally disappears.

  • Well as you're watching the ending, which

  • is quite explicit, even heavy handed about its attempt

  • to return us to a sort of more hopeful view of mankind,

  • you should ask yourself, does it deserve to be deleted?

  • All through the '40s, when Kurosawa was first

  • learning his trade, he began to direct early in the '40s.

  • And this film in 1950 is his first real masterwork.

  • He's become more and more confident and ambitious

  • as a director during this period,

  • but he hadn't displayed his full capacities as a director

  • until this point, most accounts of his career suggest.

  • But during this period, in the 1940s,

  • Kurosawa took up part of himself what

  • he regarded as a social project, which

  • was to try to help renovate Japan after the devastations

  • of the war.

  • And his films of the '40s almost always

  • try to suggest various forms various ways

  • in which people could behave decently and heroically--

  • if not heroically, at least decently in an effort

  • to renovate and reconstitute a damaged

  • society, a broken society.

  • One of the reasons that the breakdown of ancient Japan

  • is so powerful in Rashomon, no question,

  • is that Kurosawa and his cast believed that in some sense,

  • there was a symbolic analogy to be made between conditions

  • in Japan, actual Japan in the 1940s and early '50s,

  • and the broken, terrifying conditions of society

  • in the 11th and 12th centuries in the past parable

  • that the narrative is telling us.

  • And this film continues that tradition.

  • But I think many, many viewers, I among them,

  • have the feeling that this is more wish fulfillment

  • on Kurosawa's part than reality.

  • And one could say from an artistic standpoint then,

  • one might conclude that it's a weakness in the film.

  • I think I might say that the film might

  • be more powerful, more truthful to itself,

  • that the ending that's tacked on may undermine its deepest

  • energies in disturbing ways.

  • So it's another example in which commercial and social

  • imperatives may be interfering with the artistic integrity

  • of the text.

  • But it's significant, important to understand

  • that this was a tendency that was present in Kurosawa's

  • work all the way through the '40s,

  • and that therefore, it's a kind of expression of a moral sense

  • that the director had that begins

  • to become less powerful after Rashomon,

  • although he remains a deeply moral director.

  • So the ending is a question, and you

  • might want to ask yourself how you would respond

  • to the question of the relevance of the ending to the rest

  • to the rest of the film.

  • Let me end with a reminder about maybe what is, in some ways,

  • the most powerful aspect of what happens

  • when you're watching Rashomon.

  • I've said that you feel that you've

  • entered into if not a dream, into a kind of uniquely

  • stylized space in which what happens

  • resembles what happens in real life,

  • but also distills what happens in real life,

  • highlights it in a way that isn't true of actuality.

  • And I think you feel this mythic tendency

  • all the way through the film.

  • In a certain sense, one way of capturing what I'm saying

  • is to say that there is a tension

  • in the film between this impulse to be mythic,

  • to tell a story that it understands

  • to have a fable-like significance and its sense

  • of the complexity and concreteness of actuality.

  • That is to say, so there's this wonderful, constant tension

  • in the film between the enormous persuasiveness

  • of the individual images that you see.

  • But you sense also that you're in a world that's

  • not totally real.

  • So the tension I'm trying to get you to feel,

  • you can feel it in the dialogue.

  • But especially you can feel it in the visual images,

  • in the visual texture of the film.

  • You can feel a kind of tension between an impulse

  • to mythologize, and to fable-ize,

  • and an impulse to show the world in its deepest and most

  • concrete elements, in its most authentic actuality.

  • And the tension between the two-- gee, this is so real.

  • Gee, this is so unreal.

  • This is so fable-like, is part of the secret of the movie.

  • And one way you can feel it with an immensely intense power

  • is sometimes when you see the way the film

  • deals with human flesh, there are certain scenes,

  • for example, where a woman's hand will be on a man's body--

  • talk about how you can be erotic without offending anyone.

  • There's a moment where you can see the woman's fingers

  • pressing into the man's flesh.

  • It's an immensely erotic and powerfully concretizing moment.

  • It reminds you of flesh.

  • It reminds you of film's power to capture actuality

  • with a vividness that goes far beyond what words can ever do,

  • the visual power of movie.

  • And that's what I mean when I say that there's

  • this constant tension in the film between the mythologizing

  • tendencies of the story, and of Kurosawa's imagination,

  • and what we might call the breaking tendency,

  • the concretizing tendency of the film medium,

  • which has this capacity to register

  • the gross, concrete reality of our experiences

  • with a detail and a power that no other medium can.

  • Now this sense of tension between a story that

  • wants to be a fable and a story that wants to persuade you

  • of its concrete reality is part of what

  • makes the film so memorable and so significant.

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22. Kurosawa and Rashomon

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US /sɔrt/

UK /sɔ:t/

  • verb
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meditation

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UK /ˌmedɪ'teɪʃn/

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UK /prə'faʊnd/

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