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Emperor of Cinema: the career of Kurosawa and the faces of "Rashomon"
By M. Leary | Kurosawa gained international attention in 1951 with Rashomon and enjoyed
critical status as the "Emperor" of Cinema until he passed away 31 films
later in 1998. At the same time he was criticized in Japan for being too
"Western" in his storylines and techniques his directing proved distinctly
exotic, stark, and at times unintelligible to Western viewers. Critical
reviews of his films show that he was caught between these assessments
throughout much of his career.
Known for having a high aesthetic standard, Kurosawa would labor even over
the most simplistic shots, striving to eliminate the unnecessary and
highlight the eternal; sometimes in elegance, and sometimes in disturbing
candor. Thus each visual within his long streams of continuous takes becomes
a parable in itself. With few directors before him could it be said that
rain, wind, or light played essential, even starring, roles. In a classic
example, such close attention was paid to environmental elements that black
ink was added to the rain pouring from the gate in Rashomon so that it could
be recorded in all of its spontaneous drama.
However, for all of his lofty standards, Kurosawa had a peculiar stance
regarding actors. Even though he often used the strong and archetypically
Japanese Toshiru Mifune in primary roles, he managed to stay away from the
"star" mentality that still cripples Western Cinema. This sensibility is
perhaps what strikes the uninitiated viewer immediately after he gets over
the shock of Kurosawa's highly visual approach. In Rashomon and Dersu Uzala,
for example, much time is spent just apprehending the faces of the
characters. Old and tired, or young and smooth. Strong and rainswept, or
frightened and creased by the wind. Kurosawa draws us into his films by
drawing us first into the humanity and reality of his characters, and thus
pulls us into the necessity and spirituality of this human narrative.
Everything is precisely what it appears to be in Kurosawa's strange and
beautiful world. Many directors and writers feel that in order to be "deep",
a narrative must have a taste of the transcendent. As if a narrative is only
spiritually relevant if it involves something like chasing a white rabbit
down a hole. But Kurosawa exposes this sensibility as simply not true.
Humanity at its least complex is terrifying and profound. His characters and
situations represent ways of dealing with everything from the haunting
realities of "man's inhumanity to man" to the counter-intuitiveness of love.
Thus Kurosawa is a cinematic philosopher, and at the same time an iconoclast
of film. Revolting against the sterile conventions of pre- WW II and WW II
propaganda filmography, Kurosawa blazed a trail for both Japanese and
Western cinema. He is the pioneer of the hyper-real, an Edward Hopper in an
expressionist world.
"I don't mind a lie if it is interesting."
--Bandit
"If men don't trust one another, then the earth becomes a hell."
--Priest
Rashomon won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1950 and formally introduced the world to Kurosawa. The film is named after a gate that once was the largest gate in Japan's ancient capital Kyoto. After the capital was moved, the gate fell into disrepair and became known as a home for thieves and dead bodies. Thus the film itself begins within this cultural code of fallenness, of the shattered image of an historical illusion that was in some sense the greatness of Japan itself.
It is the story of the attack and murder of a man who is escorting his wife through the forest. After the man is found dead, his wife and the accused murderer are brought before a jury to account for the events. The unfolding of these events takes place through the agonizing testimony of these individuals before the camera interspersed with hyper-realistic flashbacks of the event. In both cases we are the jury. We view both the events and their presentation of them, forced to rely on the perspectives and testimonies of the characters in the story. Each testimony is completely different, colored by the witnesses' interest. So by the end of the film the murder itself is not resolved and thus Kurosawa leaves us to ponder not the story, but its meaning. And at its very core, the story is a classic treatment of the dark side of relativism. So much so that the term Rashomonesque is synonymous with narratives that expose the prejudice that fuels interpretations of life and history, and is still used in contemporary film criticism. Truly this film was way before its time!
The narrative focus of the film is not the young lady who is attacked, the man who is killed, the killer, or even us the jury. Rather the narrative center is the priest, the woodcutter, and the bandit on whom the film opens on, simply trying to find shelter from the natural elements. The priest struggles throughout the tale to make religious sense of both the event and the absurd trial. The bandit struggles to maintain his cynical facade, remarkably resembling the gate he stands beneath and all that it stands for within Japanese history. Both of these reactions are exposed as insufficient by Kurosawa. The priest simply cannot factor in the murder into his worldview and the bandit cannot care about it at all, doomed to crumble on account of his density.
The only answer Kurosawa gives to us is not a mediation between these two. At the end of the film, the shelter-seekers encounter an abandon baby and are forced to decide what to do with it. Kurosawa often closes his films with a microcosm for the film as a whole (as in Ran, when the blind monk drops a picture of Buddha over a precipice on accident), and here we are brought to recognize that suffering will occur regardless of our perspective. We are never just bystanders, but participants. We are participants in a suffering world, and a world where truth is difficult to find. This seems to be Kurosawa's curious answer.
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