Rashômon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
“Rashomon expands the mythical, rural universe glimpsed at the end of Stray Dog and, in doing so, clarifies it as a mere deflection of the noir anxieties that haunted that film, producing the most idiosyncratic narrative structure since Citizen Kane, and evoking a crisis in masculinity that has reached epic, apocalyptic proportions. To this end, Kurosawa conflates two iconic short stories by Rynosuke Atukagawa, opening with an abstracted encounter between a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura), priest (Minoru Chiaki) and peasant (Kichijiro) at the Gate of Rashomon, during which a series of pessimistic denunciations and reflections (“War, earthquakes, giant winds, fires, famine, plague - each year is full of disasters”) give way to the priest and woodcutter’s recollections of a recent trial, in which a samurai’s (Masayuki Mori) body was discovered stabbed, and they were required to provide evidence as eyewitnesses, along with the samurai’s wife (Machiko Koyu), a bandit (Toshiro Mifune), and the samurai himself, through a medium (Fumika Homna). Unlike Kane, all four stories conflict, and are never resolved - although, given that each party describes themselves as the culprit, the focus quickly shifts away from the act of murder itself, settling on the dynamic between the samurai, his wife, and the bandit, and, more specifically, the degree and location of emasculation involved, to the extent that it feels as if the most palpable spectral presence is not the samurai, nor the collective memory of his murder, but a mocking, emasculating laugh against which everybody seems anxious to defend themselves, and whose implications are encapsulated in the final rendition of the crime, in which the samurai and bandit’s fight reached its pitiful, cowardly, childish apex, and the latter is forced to over-compensate with a monstrous display of bravado that horrifies the woman, and sits well with Mifune’s hyperbolic acting style. This produces the claustrophobia of a two-dimensional painting, reinforced by the circumscription of the action to three settings - the Rashomon gate, trial courtyard, and forest - as well as by Kazuo Miyagawa’s cinematographic evocations of the latter’s sweaty, sub-tropical humidity, encompassing rapid, extended pans, artful dappling of shadows, and, most strikingly, a tendency to shoot directly into the sun, all of which imbue every movement with a balletic grace, and draw a deep veil of silence over the proceedings; the common denominator between the wife’s concealed face, and the ceaseless rain that hems in the Rashomon gate.”
