Rashomon

With respect to women, men come in two types:  abusers and rescuers.  A perennial problem is that these categories are fluid -- a man may be both abuser and rescuer, sometimes with respect to the same woman.  Akira Kurosawa's famous 1950 film, Rashomon explores this fraught aspect of male-female relations in a stark, even apocalyptic context.  The film is far bigger than its content, primarily due to Kurosawa's aggressively detailed and, even, lyrical pictorial style.  Of course, the movie's fractured narrative, an account of a squalid rape and murder told from four different perspectives represents a landmark in the history of cinema.  The overtly unreliable narrators who inhabit this tale are pressed into the film's foreground in a way that seemed unprecedented in 1950 and, that, has been enormously influential in the intervening 69 years -- as President Trump's apologist, Kelly Anne Conway would say:  "there are facts and, then, there are alternative facts."  Earlier films gestured in the direction of the radical uncertainty that Rashomon highlights: Teinosuke Kinugasa's  A Page of Madness (1926), at least in the fragmentary form that I have seen, adopts the perspective of a highly unreliable point-of-view -- accordingly, this sort of effect was not unknown in Japanese cinema.  Similarly, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) exploits effects arising from the point-of-view of a madman.  Preston Sturges posits different operatic scenarios for the slaughter of an unfaithful wife in his Unfaithfully Yours (1948) and, of course, Orson Welles explored the notion of a biography constructed from a prismatic perspective comprising a half-dozen or so witnesses to the great man's life and times.  But there is no doubt that Rashomon, whatever its precedents, feels like something new under the sun.

A woodcutter and another man, apparently a Buddhist priest, have taken shelter from torrential rains in a ruined palace or fortress.  The place seems to have been burned and we are told that "unclaimed bodies" still freight the charred, skeletal structure above the gate.  Clearly, this spectacular set, streaming water in the downpour, stands for post-War Japan -- the battle is over, the cities are in ruins, and the survivors now huddle together in the icy rain trying to figure what exactly happened to them and their civilization.  Kurosawa exploits the apocalyptic wreckage of Japanese culture to raise fundamental questions about whether human beings are capable of telling the truth and, if they can not be trusted except to lie to one another, then, how is any sort of civilization possible.  (Kurosawa ultimately evades the questions that his narrative raises on this level, providing a non sequitur or deus ex machina ending that is emotionally satisfying but more than a little limp.)  A third man, some kind of peasant, joins the colloquy in the ruins -- this character seems demonic, a kind of accuser, who laughs at human pretensions toward virtue and civilization.  The plot has an eerie Noh theater ambience -- the cynical third man may be some kind of ghost or devil, although Kurosawa doesn't really twist the film in the direction of the supernatural.

The woodcutter has come from a hearing in a literal court -- that is, the fore-court of a palace or military compound where the witnesses sit under a broiling sun at an inquest into the death of a nobleman found in the nearby forest.  The thunderstorm is approaching -- sometimes, the witnesses look  up to see big clouds, thunderheads, towering over the land.  The woodcutter, as first witness, explains that he discovered the body of a nobleman, arms upraised in a kind of aghast rigor mortis in the woods.  A bandit, bound hand and foot, then, says that he was sleeping in the forest when the nobleman passed him, leading a woman of great beauty on a horse or mule -- the woman was veiled, a vision of bright light radiant on her pale silk kimono, and, when the wind stirred in the woods, the parasol under which she was riding was disturbed and, for a moment, her white face was visible to the bandit.  The bandit claims that he was the victim of circumstance -- that if he had not been accidently vouchsafed this vision of the woman's beauty, the killing would not have occurred. (Throughout the film, accidents of light trigger action -- a sunbeam picks out a dagger in the shadows of a forest and this triggers a killing.) As it happened,the bandit inflamed by lust, lured the nobleman into a sun-bathed but shadow-dappled clearing, bound him with a rope, and, then, after threatening to rape the woman, instead seduces her.  In his account, the bandit unties the nobleman, duels with him, and kills his opponent.  The woman, then, testifies -- she claims the bandit raped her and that, because of this her husband looked upon him with loathing in his eyes.  She, then, kills the husband, ostensibly in a fit of temporary insanity, and fails at her attempt at suicide.  A medium is, then, summoned to channel the spirit of the dead nobleman.  Humiliated by his wife's embrace of the bandit whom she has enthusiastically accepted, he stabs himself to death.  In the shelter of the smashed palace, the woodcutter, then, admits that he lied to the tribunal -- he actually saw the encounter between the bandit, the nobleman and his wife.  The woman feigned indignation at the rape and, when released by the bandit, she peremptorily demands that the men fight over her -- there follows a farcical duel in which both combatants are so terrified that they spend most of the fight scrambling away from one another.  In the end, the bandit, more or less, accidentally kills the nobleman.  Left unsolved is the mystery of the disappearance of the nobleman's gilded dagger -- however, it seems clear that the woodcutter has stolen the weapon. 

Kurosawa's style is elaborately maximalist.  He uses ten shots to illumine what most directors would show in two or three images.  As an example, when the woodcutter narrates his first account, we see him ambling through the forest, an impressive place with massive trunks and dark shadows, streams rippling under small bridges and, finally a sort of clearing or amphitheater where most of the action takes place -- Kurosawa shows his character from the side, from above, he tracks the man's motions, and, when he crosses the bridge, shoots from underneath the figure.  He cuts from shots showing the man moving through the woods in a sort of cubist montage of different angles and perspectives to images taken from the woodcutter's point-of-view -- moving shots of the woods ahead of him or the overhead canopy of leaves shot-through with sun-flares.  This sort of intensely pictorial style is used throughout the film -- every sequence is elaborated into a complex decoupage of different points of view and different techniques for staging action:  sometimes, Kurosawa uses huge close-ups in quick montage, then, long shots with the figures widely separated on the screen -- unlike many of the director's later films the movie is not shot in wide-screen but uses Academy ratio.  In some sequences, Kurosawa stages the action balletically, figures moving in long choreographed takes across the amphitheater-like clearing where most of the film takes place.  The scenes showing the court are highly stylized.  We never hear questions put to the witnesses, not do we see the officials presiding at the inquest.  The characters kneel in the sunbaked arena of the courtyard and address the camera -- we, the audience, are the ultimate arbiters of what is shown in the film:  our judgement ultimately is paramount.  The only exception to this rule are the scenes involving the medium -- the soothsayer seems to be of some intermediate gender, speaks in a weird hollow voice, and his or her swooning testimony is given under the aegis of a sort of parasol with a rattle that clatters above the contorted figure.

The film skillfully alternates between the war-ravaged ruins battered by rain, the sun-dappled glade where vagrant beams of light pick out face or the glitter of a weapon, and the stark theatrical court, a set that looks like something out of a Beckett play.  As the movie progresses, the woodcutter and priest begin to doubt the meaning of human life -- the fact that the sordid little encounter can't be better understood and that everyone, inevitably, lies casts them into profound, nihilistic doubt about the human community.  In fact, the two men ultimately agree that "if men don't trust one another, this world might as well be hell."  It's risky to criticize a work of art that operates on this level, but, frankly put, this assertion seems more than a little bit hysterical and overblown.  Why does it come as a surprise to Kurosawa that human beings are unreliable narrators, that they have difficulty telling the truth and tend to be self-aggrandizing?  This seems an obvious proposition and it's puzzling that Kurosawa's protagonists, who have seemingly witnessed a time of warfare, the most profound exercise of human evil, would be surprised by the fact that sometimes people lie.  The solution to the conundrum is not a solution -- someone has left a baby in the ruins of the temple or palace (or whatever it is) and the woodcutter resolves to raise the child as a member of his family; he already has six children.  The rain stops and the sun comes out and the woodcutter's act of ordinary kindness seems to signal that the world is not really hell after all.  Everyone should see this movie and, even, debate it -- but, in comparison, with the much richer (and longer) Ikiru or The Seven Samurai,  I think its a brilliant, but shallow, work.