Merry Christmas everyone! After a short hiatus, I’m back for the home stretch of my list.
100 All-Time Films (To see the entire list, click here)
Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950)
This was an extremely important film for Japan. After the destruction and rebuilding of the infrastructure from World War II, Japanese cinema experienced a renaissance. Rashomon is considered to be the film that marked Japan’s arrival on the world stage. Some people see it as an allegory to the defeat of Japan by the atomic bomb in World War II. Western audiences quickly flocked to Japanese films and Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant crime mystery film was the reason.
Rashomon depicts the rape of a woman and the murder of her samurai husband through the widely differing accounts of four witnesses including the bandit/rapist, the wife, the dead man (speaking through a medium), and the narrator. The stories are purposely contradictory so we never get the real story behind it. It is very Citizen Kane-like in its structure. Kurosawa believed in the subjectivity of truth and the uncertainty of factual accuracy that has become known as the “Rashomon effect”. This is such a conventional technique in film and television today that we don’t even bat an eye when we see it.
After winning the Golden Lion and the Italian critics award, Kurosawa’s film and his own style was open for the world to see. Influential were his shooting directly into the sun while using mirrors to reflect it into the actors faces and using multiple cameras to make editing and movement more fluid. With Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa was beginning his long career as one of the top film directors in history.
