[This is the first
entry in what will be a regular feature at the site, in which I offer
reflections and considerations of movies that aren’t on the reviewing circuit
of the past year.]
First-generation innovators rarely give us the best version
of an idea or expression. Often they provide the groundwork for others to
harness and perfect, which has certainly been the case with technology and also
to a lesser degree in various artistic modes. In terms of movies, many of the
most revolutionary entries (e.g. The
Wizard of Oz, The Jazz Singer, Star Wars) are known primarily for how they
changed the medium rather than how their advancements helped set a new standard
of aesthetics or storytelling. Citizen
Kane is one of the more famous examples of a film that offered both visual and narrative invention that few films have approached thereafter. Equally
significant in this regard is Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. The film is renowned for ascribing a dimension of reflexivity
to cinema that had been mostly unexplored until that point. It asks elemental
questions about vision and storytelling, specifically: How do the two enter
into a relationship through cinema, and what are the roles of truth and
perspective in that relationship?
Rashomon
offers several different accounts of the same event, which is recounted by the
different characters involved. Kurosawa frames this through a trial-like
setting in which the characters look directly at you, the viewer, and gives
their own description of what happened. But before I discuss Rashomon’s benchmark achievements, I
want to point out just how rich it is purely from a visual standpoint, as this
can be overlooked. For example, the interrogation scenes—with the witness in
the foreground and lookers-on in the background—have a downright avant-garde
sensibility that contrasts nicely with the sumptuous visuals that Kurosawa
creates in the forest. For a film that notably oscillates between perspectives
and points in time, Rashomon is fluid
in its storytelling and presentation. In addition, the film’s focus on faces
lends an expressive layer to its already complex inquiry into to human nature.
Moreover, Kurosawa’s full use of the expressive influence of images and
narrative to explore a deep range of emotion makes Rashomon one of cinema’s most significant entries, as well as one
of its most poetic.
Rashomon
deserves to be renowned for carving out the structural and visual methods that
would eventually be incorporated in all types of movies and ingrained
into our movie-going minds. But almost entirely apart from it’s pioneering of
these techniques, Rashomon employs
them as a means of exploring the full breadth of potential that visual
storytelling enables. This is evident not only in the film’s groundbreaking
techniques, but also in how it moves and feels. In the hands of Kurosawa,
something as simple as beating rainfall is eloquent and moving.
To see Rashomon having internalized its DNA in so many other movies is to
experience a potential and sense of newness about movies that precious few of
them still cultivate. (Akira Kurosawa,
1950) ****
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