Rashomon [Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray]

Director: Akira Kurosawa Akira Kurosawa

Overview

Akira Kurosawa's classic examination of, as Pauline Kael put it, "the relativism, the unknowability of truth" and the mutability of human nature, won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival and the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award of 1952. It also opened the western market to Japanese films and made international stars out of Toshiro Mifune and Machiko Kyo. Set in 11th-century Japan, the film examines a brutal rape and murder from four different perspectives. Three men have taken refuge from a deluge under the ruins of the ancient Rashomon Gate. A priest (Minoru Chiaki) relates the trial he witnessed involving the rape of Masago (Machiko Kyo) and the murder of her samurai husband Takehiro (Masayuki Mori). As the priest tells the story, the rape is seen from the perspectives of Masago, the channeled ghost of Takehiro, and a bandit named Tajomaru (Toshiro Mifune). Tajomaru's version has the bandit coming upon Takehiro and Masago in a forest, where he is so smitten with the beauty of Masago that he restrains her husband and rapes her. Masago is distraught at the rape and decides that since no two men should know of the rape, she arranges for a duel between Takehiro and Tajomaru, resulting in the death of her husband. In Masago's version, she reveals how repulsed her husband was by her rape. Continually humiliating her with insults, Masago kills him. In Takehiro's version, rendered through a medium, Masago, after the rape, begs Tajomaru to kill her husband. Tajomaru refuses and leaves and Masago follows after him. Takehiro, now alone, kills himself. Finally, a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura), who has listened to the tales of the priest, reveals that he has witnessed the events and relate his own, entirely different version, of the rape and murder.

Product Details

Release Date:	11/06/2012
UPC:	0715515100915
Original Release:	1951
Rating:	NR
Source:	Criterion Collection
Region Code:	A
Presentation:	[B&W]
Language:	English
Time:	1:28:00
Sales rank:	3,859

Special Features

Audio Commentary by Japanese-film historian Donald Richie; Interview with Director Robert Altman about Rashomon; Excerpts from The World of Kazuo Miyagawa, a documentayr on Rashomon's Cinematographer; A Testimony as an Image, a sixty-eight-minute documentary featuring interviews with cast and crew; Archival audio interview with actor Takashi Shimura; Original and rerelease trailers; ; Plus: a booklet featuring an essay by film historian Stephen Prince; an excerpt from Director Akira Kurosawa's Something Like an Autobiography; and reprints of Rashomon's two source stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, "Rashomon" and "In a Grove"

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Toshiro Mifune	Tajomaru
Machiko Kyo	Masago
Masayuki Mori	Takehiro,Actor
Takashi Shimura	Firewood Dealer
Minoru Chiaki	Priest
Kichijiro Ueda	Commoner
Fumiko Homma	Medium
Daisuke Kato	Policeman
Noriko Honma	Actor
Fumio Hayasaka	Composer

Technical Credits

Akira Kurosawa

Shinobu Hashimoto

Akira Kurosawa	Director,Screenwriter
Shinobu Hashimoto	Screenwriter
Jingo Minoura	Producer
Masaichi Nagata	Executive Producer

Editorial Reviews

With ringing moments of intensity and a radical manipulation of time, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon stands legitimately alongside Citizen Kane as one of the movies that altered the rules of cinematic storytelling. Based on two short stories by author Ryunosuke Akutagawa ("In a Grove" and "Rashomon"), the movie is set in 12th-century Kyoto and centers around a trial in a prison courtyard. Four defendants -- the bandit Tajomaru (Toshiro Mifune); a young woman, Masago (Machino Kyo); the spirit of her samurai husband, Takehiro (Masayuki Mori); and a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) -- each offer varied and often contradictory versions of an incident, the only certain elements of which are a rape, a death, and an ambush. Teasing and hooking a viewer at the same time, Kurosawa mines the fallibility of memory, in the process framing human unpredictability, selfishness, and weakness with multiple points of view. The movie is also distinguished by superior performances by Mifune and Kyo. Filmmakers have chased Kurosawa's achievement for years -- recent movies like Memento, The Usual Suspects, and Jim Jarmusch's overt homage Ghost Dog all pay some tariff to Rashomon's unusual pulse and rhythm. The Criterion Collection DVD edition of this classic boasts a glistening restored image and adds two fantastic extras to the mix: The World of Kazuo Miyagawa, a documentary on Rashomon's painstaking, passionate cinematographer, plus a moving tribute from Robert Altman.

Barnes & Noble - Eddy Crouse

Rashomon's winning the Golden Lion in the 1951 Venice Film Festival is one of the key events of world cinema. Not only did it establish director Akira Kurosawa as one of the masters of the medium, but it compelled European and American audiences to look seriously at non-Western cinemas. Without Rashomon, the international critical successes of Kenji Mizoguchi, Satyajit Ray, and others are difficult to imagine. The film's structure, which replays the same event though different characters' eyes, layers ambiguity atop ambiguity. Not only are the witnesses' testimonies completely incompatible but the reliability of the film's primary narrator, the woodcutter, is seriously questioned. If the woodcutter initially lied about his role in this crime, then what else could he be lying about? The film comes precariously close to nihilism--the denial of all objective truth and the utter senselessness of existence. Yet Kurosawa pulls back from the abyss in the film's final moments. Though most of Rashomon is adapted from two short stories by famously misanthropic Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Kurosawa himself penned the final sequence, an elegant summation of his signature humanism. The truth may be inscrutable, even unknowable, Kurosawa argues, but hope and compassion remain. This vision struck a chord in European audiences for whom the horrors of war were still fresh and the existentialist philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus were gaining popularity. Kurosawa's dynamic editing and swaggering camerawork seemed vibrant and sophisticated for a national cinema thought at the time to be second-rate, and the film proved influential to several generations of filmmakers. Ingmar Bergman included a sequence in The Virgin Spring (1960) strongly reminiscent of the film's most memorable sequences--the woodcutter's walk through the forest--and Alain Resnais acknowledged Rashomon's influence on the bold plot structure and existential content of his art-house classic Last Year at Marienbad (1961). In both artistic achievement and historical importance, Rashomon remains one of the masterpieces of cinema.

All Movie Guide - Jonathan Crow