Movies at Home - Rashomon

 

When I was searching for a film by Akira Kurosawa, I came across this movie from 1950. Rashomon had won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, a year after its release in Japan. I only found out the story behind the film after I had watched it. But before that, my first impressions. The superb black-and-white photography by Kazuo Miyagowa opens with three men sheltering from constant pouring rain in an old Rashomon gate. That must be one of the greatest opening scenes in movie history. Two have given evidence at a trial about the death of a samurai. They have been amazed at how the witnesses all tell a different story about what happened, and we see these conflicting scenes one at a time. What we do know is that the crime involves three people, a bandit, a samurai and his wife. As I said, the samurai ends up dead. 

My special edition of the DVD includes a forty-page booklet. The first twenty pages are an extract taken from "The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune" written by Stuart Galbraith. It starts, 'In Rashomon, Kurosawa examined the relative nature of truth". It goes on with a detailed story about how the film came to be made, how nobody had seen a film like it before, and how it finally influenced so many features in the West. It's about the unreliability of witnesses to an event: the Rashomon effect. 

There are some lines of dialogue that resonated with me. One character concludes, "I don't know what's going on either." And another: "It's all a lie. " I turned to Philosophy Now's Issue 127, which ends, "Perhaps the most fitting thing that can be said about this action-packed, carefully choreographed, supremely poetic and superlatively-executed movie is its opening line, 'I don't understand it. I don't understand it at all. "And for a philosopher, recognising this is, perhaps, the beginning of wisdom."  

Afterwards, I could not help thinking about the film's not similarities but feelings with Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, which was published about the same time. When I first saw this play, I was not that impressed (November 1987), but that staging with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart (see post in March 2019) was one of the best things I have been fortunate to see. Maybe when I see this film again I might feel the same.