Rashomon : Akira Kurosawa

 

When most people see and talk about the Rashomon Effect in references with finding truth and fixing justice, broadly speaking in depicting how memory plays a seminal role to create and to mix up the fictional and real narratives, I have noticed more the Rashomon Triangle than effect when I have been noticing the framing and compositions of the scenes Akira had created in the Rashomon [1950].

 

I find the effect a bit universally present in the other forms of human artistic expressions but most probably Kurosawa gave it a justified floor in cinema. After watching the movie, I started reading Akira’s Something like an autobiography [1982] in the bus on the way to my office in the morning and I was stuck in a passage from the chapter Crybaby that gives a complete explanation of human subjective perspective on which Rashomon based upon.

 

The details of our life in this era can be found in a novel Uekusa wrote. But Uekusa has his viewpoint and I have mine. And because people want themselves to have been a certain way, they have a disturbing tendency to convince, 

I had also posted a statement, “Is the truth is the absence of lie; or the lie is also a truth itself” on Facebook back in 13^th June, 2018 that matches with the theme of the movie and what Akira had stated in his autobiography about the relative perception and understanding in human nature.

The film ran with an utter contempt to the world full of human fallibility and wretchedness, most probably right after the world wars and their detrimental impacts on human conditions. But when Kikori, The Woodcutter [Takashi Shimura] adopted the abandoned baby in the midst of his miseries and Tabi Hōshi, The Priest regained his trust on humanity.

Another reckoning that stamped the whole story is the misogynist attitude to women’s vulnerability and false notion of dignity and the self-importance of imposed masculinity which are discarded by the Wife in the end of the truth representing the men as weak and dependable.

One thing that seemed very lame and limited were the fighting scenes that had not fitted with neither the notion of Japanese samurai nor the real life fighting at all. May there be limitations of cinematic techniques.

What upholds the cinematic height of aesthetics are its camera movements [bottom-up, top-down, wide-angle, arc-angle] and triangular rules of compositions [three-characters staging] that are purely inimitable and exceptional in the cinema history.

 

Rashomon [1950]

 羅生門 [Japanese]

Akira Kurosawa

Japanese, Japan