Film History for Translucent Boneheads, Article1:RASHOMON

ROSHOMON, based on two stories by Ryunnosuke Akutagawa, was the great breakthrough film for both Kurosawa and the Japanese cinema. His reputation had been hurt by the commercial and critical failure of THE IDIOT, but the success of RASHOMON at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, where it won first prize, helped renew his career. "Had I not won the prize, I would have been forced to remain silent for a considerable time. Thanks to RASHOMON, I was able to go on to make IKIRU." The film was also responsible for the Western world's belated recognition of the Japanese cinema. The story of how Daiei, the studio for which Kurosawa made the film was reluctant to submit it to international competition is well known. What is harder to recall today, and more important to remember, is the wave of excitement the film caused among film scholars and enthusiasts. Jay Leyda remarked that "The surprise of the entire film world at the appearence of RASHOMON at the 1951 Venice Festival will surely be a dramatic paragraph in all future international film histories." And, indeed it is. RASHOMON was the most profoundly pictorial and cinematic work anyone had seen in years. Its visual flamboyance was quite unexpected and all the more startling. Not since the silent cinema of Eisenstien and Murnau, it seemed, had narrative been conceived as such a flow of pure imagery. Again and again, critics cited the film's unrelentingly aggressive images, as if rediscovering what the cinema was all about. In his review in the New York Times, Bosley Crowther remarked that "Everyone seeing the picture will immediately be struck by the beauty and grace of the photography, by the deft use of forest light and shade to achieve a variety of powerful and delicate pictorial effects." Other critics called it a symphony of sight, sound, light, and shadow" and praised it's boldly simple, essentially visual technique."

It was not, however, simply the unabashedly extravagant imagery of the film that was startling. It was also what the film seemed to be saying and how it said it. RASHOMON employs what has now become a well worn and endlessly repeated convention. A group of characters recall the same set of events, a rape and an apparent murder, in strikingly different terms. Are these differences due to the effects of subjectivity? To the unreliability of memory? Whose story is correct? More has been written about RASHOMON than about perhaps any of Kurosawa's other work, and it has become one of those few films whose cultural importance has transcended their own status as films. RASHOMON has come to embody a general cultural notion of the relativity of truth. Certainly its success at Venice was partly due to its apparent congruence with then-contemporary currents of European thought, particularily a kind of fashionable existential despair over the instability of truth and value. But the film was also perceived as a useful ally by those waging a struggle to establish the value of the cinema as an art. As Bergman's films would do later in the decade, RASHOMON stimulated a great deal of commentary about what were regarded as its basic symbols---the ruined gate, the rain, the forest, the rescued infant, the patterns of light and shadow through out the imagery. These essays now fill several volumes. In the tradition of the "art cinema" the film seemed to reflect on important philosophical questions: loss of faith in human beings, the world as a hell, the human propensity to lie. The kaleidoscope structure of its narrative, the way the basic events of rape and murder were altered by different witnesses, seemed to place the film squarely within the modernist tradition of art. Parker Tyler wrote an essay in which he invoked comparisons with cubist and futurist painting in order to explain the film's temporal and spatial structure. RASHOMON has become an enormously powerful and symbolic cultural entity, which engages, then as now, diverse currents of history, philosophy, and art criticism.

What has made RASHOMON a tantalizing film is its refusal to validate any of the witnesses' stories as a true account. There is simply no way to know who is telling the truth. In this ambiguity Kurosawa has found a narrative expression for his own pessimism about what Conrad referred to as the human heart of darkness. Kurosawa has remarked that "What dwells at the bottom of the human heart remains a mystery to me." RASHOMON is the fullest expression of this mystery in all his work, a thoroughgoing attempt to penetrate the depths of the heart and a celebration of the inability to do so.

Kurosawa is the exemplar of an earlier mode of film making that surfaced in the industrial countries following World War II. That mode has been termed the 'art' film, and its practitioners---Kurosawa, Bergman, Fellini, Ray----caused a great deal of excitement in the film world of the 1950s. They helped make film an acceptable object of culture and study at a time when it was regarded as much as television is today. In the halcyon days of RASHOMON, BICYCLE THIEVES, LA STRADA, and THE SEVENTH SEAL, filmmaking became firmly established as an expression of national culture capable of international reception, and at the core of this new recognition stood a handful of directors. They were thrown forward by their era: functioning as codes legitimizing the seriousness of film and its identity, not as a machine or an industry, but as sensuous human expression, like the other arts.

Because Kurosawa belonged to the tradition of the art cinema, the initial reaction of his films was shaped by the influence of that tradition. RASHOMON's exhibition at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 dramatically announced the talents of Kurosawa to an international community, and each film after that received a great deal of critical attention. The reception and discussion during the rise of the international cinema in the 1960s was connected with the effort of film scholars to define the legitimacy of film criticism at a time when film studies was only just emerging as a field in the universities and was still regarded with suspicion and hostility. A close relationship exists, then, between the terms by which Kurosawa's films were understood and the needs of the discipline at the time.

Consistency and harmony were stressed as the measures of artistic stature. It was, of course, the age of the auteur, when the greatest distinction a film could claim was its revelation of the "signature" of the author, the director. The films that were regarded as being most accomplished were those that revealed a creator's recognizable, coherent imprint. This standard of authorship was vitally important because it helped make film like the other arts, not bryte technology or a commodity, but an expression of culture fashioned by human design. The great filmmakers could be studied, as were the great painters and writers. A human presence could be disclosed within the machine.

The critical work of revealing the auteur's presence implied a corolary: that the films themselves contain and communicate values of demonstrable social importance. Moreover, by revealing the latent meanings of work, film criticism itself could help communicate these values and thereby establish its worth as an enterprise. Toward this end, a major code discerned within the films was the ideal of "humanism." The films of Kurosawa and his peers---Rosolini, De Sica, Ray, Bergman---were praised for revealing the dignity of human life and a concern with human welfare. Writing shortly after RASHOMON had electrified the international film culture, Jay Leyda discerned that, "a high point is that element of Kurosawa's films that will keep them alive--- their pity and humanity." ---excerpt from The Warrior's Camera (The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa) by Stephen Prince


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