For various reasons, I have had to change part of my course, and will for the next semester be taking East Asian Cinema. As a result I’m going to have a handful of interesting films to talk about over the next few weeks, and where better to start than Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 classic “Rashomon”.
The film tells the story of a murder of a Samurai and the rape of his wife by a bandit. The same event is retold four different times by the Bandit, the wife, a woodcutter who witnessed the events, and by the murdered Samurai himself through a medium. Whilst not Kurosawa’s first film or his last, it is without a doubt one of the most influential pieces of work that introduced the West to Japanese cinema.
The film opens with a priest and a woodcutter sheltering from the rain an abandoned ruined shrine gate. A traveller approaches to hide from the rain, and overhears the other two discussing a “terrible story”. He asks them to expand on it. At this point we the audience become a jury as each of the four characters involved in the murder tell their version of the events, all wildly contradictory from each other.
The film itself upon watching seems overly drawn out but it is absolutely great and well worth sticking with until the end. The murderer, played by Toshiro Mifune makes an amazing crazy man – it’s truly creepy when he does his “crazy laugh”. The samurai’s wife to begin with starts off as a disappointingly typical downtrodden female role, but worry not, her particular character twist is very well done and the stereotype is cleverly flipped.
From a language point of view, the Japanese in the film is very hard to understand – I had absolutely no chance without the subtitles, and I could rarely make out more than a few words at a time. You may have more luck, but beginners and intermediates alike are going to struggle with some of the older style Japanese present. Still well worth watching though, and you can pass it off as revision! Hurrah!
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I watched this last year for EAC and I thought it was pretty boring, probably my least favourite of the all the films on the course. Confusing too. Tampopo is where it’s at.
Joe: Fair enough. If this is the worst movie in the course I am pretty excited about the rest :) I’ve heard a lot about Tampopo and it has an AMAZING title so…