Courtesy photos
Four retellings of an incident resulting in a dead husband and a raped wife … four perceptions of a reality in which each teller confesses to a crime instead of hiding it. All are plausible, and all seem understandable for the characters. What to do?
If you’ve seen “Rashomon” before, it’s worth seeing again (and again). If you’ve never seen it, the time is long overdue to enjoy a classic that still stands up as such. Either way, a brand new 35 mm print of the film comes to UCSB this Tuesday evening.
The film is based on two short stories by 20th-century author Ryunosuke Akutagawa. “In a Grove” provides the multi-angled tale of rape and murder, although director Akira Kurosawa wisely pared down the story’s seven perspectives to four. The other short, “Rashomon,” gives the film its name and its opening setting, which is the derelict Rashomon gate, once the medieval pride of Japan’s medieval capital, Kyoto. Akutagawa’s story goes elsewhere, but Kurosawa populates the gate with three desperate men. A farmer, a priest and a commoner all prep us for another trio in the movie — the bandit, samurai and wife — and puzzle over the story as the audience does.
“Rashomon” opened the world of Japanese film to the West when it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, and then an Honorary Award for outstanding foreign language film at the Oscars in 1952. Like “Catch 22,” the title became added to the Western lexicon to describe such a multiple-perspective film, the most recent example of which is “Vantage Point.” The daring conclusion of “Rashomon,” still effective now, is that there is no one truth to be divvied out, no solution to the mystery. It’s more of a question: Which version of humanity do you want to believe?
This explains Kurosawa’s use of the framing device, the three men stuck in the rain, debating the true nature of man. The commoner believes all men are selfish and lie, even to themselves. The priest cannot believe in man’s corruption, or it would undermine his faith. The farmer, who has witnessed the events firsthand, says, “I don’t understand,” and this is his (and the movie’s) first line.
The film itself is made with precision and craft. Kurosawa and his cameraman Kazuo Miyagawa set up a series of geographic triangles, where many shots show the evolving allegiances between the three characters in the woods. It’s a master class in blocking that any aspiring filmmaker needs to see. Also, it’s difficult to shoot in a forest in black and white and make the thing readable, but Kurosawa makes it look easy.
“Rashomon” uses few sound effects, relying instead on dialogue (of which there is little) and music (of which there is much). A silent film fan, Kurosawa instead defers to the fascinating and very different countenances of his leads.
Ingmar Bergman loved the opening-walk-in-the-woods montage so much that he attempted his own in “The Virgin Spring” (1960). He later admitted in interview that he had failed to match Kurosawa, and that should give some idea of where “Rashomon” stood in its day. It still stands there now.
‘RASHOMON’
*****
Starring: Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyo, Masayuki Mori
When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday
Where: UCSB’s Campbell Hall
Cost: $6 general, $5 students
Information: (805) 893-3535