Plot
This landmark film is a brilliant exploration of truth and human weakness. It opens with a priest, a woodcutter, and a peasant taking refuge from a downpour beneath a ruined gate in 12th-century Japan. The priest and the woodcutter, each looking stricken, discuss the trial of a notorious bandit for rape and murder. As the retelling of the trial unfolds, the participants in the crime -- the bandit (Toshiro Mifune), the rape victim (Machiko Kyo), and the murdered man (Masayuki Mori) -- tell their plausible though completely incompatible versions of the story. In the bandit's version, he and the man wage a spirited duel after the rape, resulting in the man's death. In the woman's testimony, she is spurned by her husband after being raped. Hysterical with grief, she kills him. In the man's version, speaking through the lips of a medium, the bandit beseeches the woman after the rape to go away with him. She insists that the bandit kill her husband first, which angers the bandit. He spurns her and leaves. The man kills himself. Seized with guilt, the woodcutter admits to the shocked priest and the commoner that he too witnessed the crime. His version is equally feasible, although his veracity is questioned when it is revealed that he stole a dagger from the crime scene. Just as all seems bleak and hopeless, a baby appears behind the gate. The commoner seizes the moment and steals the child's clothes, while the woodcutter redeems himself and humanity in the eyes of the troubled priest, by adopting the infant. ~ Jonathan Crow, RoviReview
Rashomon's winning the Golden Lion in the 1951 Venice Film Festival is one of the key events of world cinema. Not only did it establish director Akira Kurosawa as one of the masters of the medium, but it compelled European and American audiences to look seriously at non-Western cinemas. Without Rashomon, the international critical successes of Kenji Mizoguchi, Satyajit Ray, and others are difficult to imagine. The film's structure, which replays the same event though different characters' eyes, layers ambiguity atop ambiguity. Not only are the witnesses' testimonies completely incompatible but the reliability of the film's primary narrator, the woodcutter, is seriously questioned. If the woodcutter initially lied about his role in this crime, then what else could he be lying about? The film comes precariously close to nihilism--the denial of all objective truth and the utter senselessness of existence. Yet Kurosawa pulls back from the abyss in the film's final moments. Though most of Rashomon is adapted from two short stories by famously misanthropic Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Kurosawa himself penned the final sequence, an elegant summation of his signature humanism. The truth may be inscrutable, even unknowable, Kurosawa argues, but hope and compassion remain. This vision struck a chord in European audiences for whom the horrors of war were still fresh and the existentialist philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus were gaining popularity. Kurosawa's dynamic editing and swaggering camerawork seemed vibrant and sophisticated for a national cinema thought at the time to be second-rate, and the film proved influential to several generations of filmmakers. Ingmar Bergman included a sequence in The Virgin Spring (1960) strongly reminiscent of the film's most memorable sequences--the woodcutter's walk through the forest--and Alain Resnais acknowledged Rashomon's influence on the bold plot structure and existential content of his art-house classic Last Year at Marienbad (1961). In both artistic achievement and historical importance, Rashomon remains one of the masterpieces of cinema. ~ Jonathan Crow, RoviCast
- Toshiro Mifune - Tajomaru, the Bandit
- Masayuki Mori - Takehiro, the Nobleman
- Machiko Kyo - Masago, the Wife
- Takashi Shimura - Woodcutter
- Minoru Chiaki - Priest
Credit
So Matsuyama - Art Director, Akira Kurosawa - Director, Akira Kurosawa - Editor, Masaichi Nagata - Executive Producer, Fumio Hayasaka - Composer (Music Score), Shinobu Muraki - Production Designer, Yoshiro Muraki - Production Designer, Kazuo Miyagawa - Cinematographer, Jingo Minoura - Producer, Akira Kurosawa - Screenwriter, Shinobu Hashimoto - Screenwriter, Ryunosuke Akutagawa - Short Story Author| Rashi: A Light After the Dark Ages (1999 Film), Rashevski's Tango (2002 Film) | |
| Raskenstam (1983 Film), Raskolnikow (1923 Film) |
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