Rashomon

1950, Akira Kurosawa, Japan

Content Note: Sexual violence theme

Rashomon is one of Akira Kurosawa’s most influential films, perhaps only rivaled by Seven Samurai in terms of its impact on cinema and the way we discuss storytelling. Its title has become shorthand for the cinematic innovation it introduced: a formal development of the classic literary convention of the unreliable narrator. By depicting the same event from multiple characters’ perspectives, the film highlights their subjectivity and the ways we shape stories to suit ourselves.

Set near Kyoto, Japan, in the 12th century, three people take shelter from the rain and discuss recent events: the attack of a woman and the murder of her samurai husband by a bandit, followed by the subsequent investigation. The film stars regular players from Kurosawa’s stable, including Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura (both of whom also appear in other Kurosawa films featured in our series this year).

Not only is Rashomon notable for the influence of its central conceit, but it is also a landmark in the history of Japanese cinema’s recognition in the West. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and an honorary Foreign Film Academy Award, cementing its legacy.

“The feeling of liberation Rashomon brought to young filmmakers was less a response to an enigmatic theme than to Kurosawa’s flouting of the established rules of narrative cinema, ten years before the French New Wave made it fashionable. Seeking to regain the freedom of silent film, Kurosawa breaks the 180-degree rule, thus reversing spatial relationships, juxtaposes long shots and close-ups and shots of contrary motion, displays a bold inventive use of camera movement as cinematic punctuation, and restores to respectability a mode of transition that had once flourished but almost disappeared with the development of the classic sound film, the wipe, which becomes and remains for Kurosawa an element of style.” Alexander Sesonske, Criterion