RogerBW's Blog

Rashomon (1950) 30 August 2025

1950 Japanese drama, dir. Akira Kurosawa, Toshirō Mifune, Machiko Kyō; IMDb / allmovie. Strangers meet at a ruined city gate, and various accounts of events in the woods get re-told.

We're three years before the Seven Samurai, but there's that same unglamorous-history feeling to this film: maybe there's a flashy court a long way away, but we here are in the rain and the mud, and we should probably be grateful for the leaky roof over our heads.

There are innovations that are lost now unless one's at least an amateur historian of film: pointing a camera at the sun was considered revolutionary at the time, and I suspect that even the degree to which the camera is allowed to move and become part of the action would have been unexpected to audiences in 1950.

The original story that provides the meat of the narrative, "In a Grove", had seven testimonies, and perhaps it's suffered in the cutting down. Or maybe it's just me, noticing that nobody ever argues that Tajomaru didn't rape the samurai's wife (not even Tajomaru himself, and hey ho it's the same old stupid excuse of "she was so beautiful I couldn't help myself"), and in three out of the four narratives he killed the samurai too. And while other reviewers tend to assume that the last version of the tale to be told is the true sequence of events, I can't help thinking that there is no diegetic reason to assume this: why should that last story be any more reliable than anyone else's?

But hey, never mind, sudden baby.

And it's always good to see Toshirō Mifune, though this isn't the most demanding of roles for him; insofar as he got typecast, it was as this sort of tough guy who's a bit outside normal society.

Many TV series have done versions of this idea (perhaps not as many as have done The Most Dangerous Game), a story told from different viewpoints that gradually becomes clear. Often, though, I've seen a variant in which everyone is trying to give an honest account but simply didn't observe correctly; to me as a modern viewer that's rather more satisfying (and consistent with the real world, in which eyewitness accounts of an event are often the least reliable way of finding out what happened) than people simply lying to serve themselves.

I talk about this film further on Ribbon of Memes.

Tags: film reviews

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