The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

INTRODUCTION

This chapter covers the shortest time period of any in the book—the 10 years between 1950 and 1959. Yet in that one decade we find a swathe of extraordinary movies. Many, as before, are American movies produced in Hollywood (which, by this period, had enough of a history to inspire the Tinseltown satire Sunset Boulevard), but great cinema was also rising to prominence in other parts of the world.

In the years that followed World War I, it had been Germany that blazed the trail of cinematic innovation. Now, after World War II, it was the turn of Japan.

Rise of Japan

In 1950, Akira Kurosawa released Rashomon, a fractured, brilliant story of a murder in ancient Japan. The movie’s impact was sudden and immense: not only did it make Kurosawa’s name as a director, but it sparked a growing curiosity in the West toward international cinema. Also from Japan came the finely drawn, deceptively simple dramas of Yasujirô Ozu. And of course, there was Godzilla, whose towering monstrousness was inspired by Japan’s direct experience of nuclear war, still raw in the national memory.

Cold War dread

Many movies of the 1950s provided the most delirious form of popular entertainment (even today, it’s impossible for anyone to watch Singin’ in the Rain without a grin on their face), and yet some of the key movies of this period also reflected anxieties over the Cold War and are imbued with an existential dread. In The Wages of Fear (1953), a movie about a group of desperate men driving truckloads of nitroglycerine through rough country, French director Henri-Georges Clouzot made what was probably the most tense movie since Battleship Potemkin (1925). It was also a bitingly satirical story of imperialism, capitalism, and human greed.

In several countries, directors were creating movies that offered at once entertainment, intellectual stimulation, and stunning displays of technique. Douglas Sirk, for example, made lush melodramas about suburban American life, such as All That Heaven Allows (1955). Long dismissed as kitsch, they are now recognized as sensitive, multilayered masterpieces. In France, meanwhile, a group of young film critics from the magazine Cahiers du Cinémaexpounded a whole new way of looking at movies. To them, movies deserved respect and intellectual scrutiny. Their studious gaze examined not only “serious” directors such as Ingmar Bergman, but also the populist brilliance of Alfred Hitchcock. The best directors, they argued, filled their work with personal obsessions and visual signatures—what we saw on screen was “authored” by a director just as a novel is by its writer. This was the auteur theory, and for decades it would shape perceptions of movies and their makers.

"If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on."

Alfred Hitchcock

High ambition

Fittingly, this was the decade in which Hitchcock made what is now the most highly regarded of all his movies. Some years before, he had been eager to adapt a novel by French crime writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. On that occasion he was beaten to it by Henri-Georges Clouzot, with whom he enjoyed a friendly rivalry, and who turned the book into the supremely creepy Les Diaboliques (1955). Hitchcock made sure he secured the movie rights to what Boileau and Narcejac wrote next—and the result was the intense psychological thriller Vertigo (1958), a tale of memory, lust, and loss that now frequently tops the lists of the greatest movies ever made.

In 1959, a movie was made by one of those young French critics responsible for the auteur theory. His name was François Truffaut, and the movie, a portrait of a rough Parisian kid, was The 400 Blows. Influenced by Orson Welles but possessed of an energy all of its own, it marked the end of an extraordinary cinematic decade, and the start of a new era.

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Mystery drama

DIRECTOR

Akira Kurosawa

WRITERS

Akira Kurosawa (screenplay); Ryunosuke Akutagawa (short stories)

STARS

Toshirô Mifune, Machiko Kyô, Masayuki Mori, Takashi Shimura

BEFORE

1943 Akira Kurosawa makes his directorial debut with Sanshiro Sugata, a historical drama about the struggle for supremacy between the adherents of judo and jujitsu.

AFTER

1954 Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, a 16th-century epic in which a village enlists seven warriors to protect it from bandits, is widely regarded as his masterpiece.

Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon is a thriller that revolves around two possible crimes that take place in a secluded glade: the rape of a woman (Machiko Kyô) and the violent death of the woman’s samurai husband (Masayuki Mori). The truth, however, is hard to get at; it is tangled up in a knot of yarns spun by four eyewitnesses. Whom does the audience trust to tell them the truth? The alleged rape victim? The bandit accused of committing the offense? The ghost of the dead man? The woodcutter who found the body? Whose story is the story?

"Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings."

Akira Kurosawa

The movie established Kurosawa as an internationally renowned filmmaker. It also made a star of Toshirô Mifune (the bandit), with whom Kurosawa would make 16 movies between 1948 and 1964.

Beneath the gate

The opening shot of the movie is of the Rashomon city gate, a huge ruin in medieval Kyoto, seen from afar through a curtain of rain. Sheltering beneath the gate are a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) and a priest (Minoru Chiaki), and they are soon joined by a commoner (Kichijirô Ueda). The newcomer strikes up a conversation, and is told about the crime and the subsequent arrest of the bandit Tajômaru (Toshirô Mifune).

As the woodcutter and the priest relate the tale, flashbacks show the bandit and the woman explaining what they saw at an inquest—or what they think they saw. Then a medium (Noriko Honma) shows up and channels the spirit of the dead samurai, who gives his version of events. Finally, the woodcutter relates what he saw. Each of the stories is radically different, and in its own way entirely self-serving. The bandit asserts that he killed the samurai in a heroic battle; the woman claims not to recall the moment, but suggests that she stabbed her husband on seeing his expression after the rape; the samurai claims to have killed himself; and the woodcutter says that he observed a fight between the bandit and the samurai, but that it was a messy scrap between two physical cowards.

On the surface, Rashomon is a whodunit: it sets up a mystery, introduces the suspects, presents the evidence, and asks the audience to draw its own conclusions. But there’s a problem. Kurosawa is more interested in the elusive nature of truth than he is in capturing it—he refuses to provide the audience with a definitive account of what happened in the glade.

Shot in an unfussy, austere style, Rashomon relies on subtle symbolic imagery to communicate its ideas about memory and truth. The curtain of rain, tinted black by Kurosawa so that it would show up on camera, divides the present from the past, which is sun-dappled in flashbacks. The forbidding gate symbolizes the viewer’s gateway to the world of the movie, a realm in which nothing is what it seems and no one can be trusted.

The glade is also symbolic. We first see it through the woodcutter’s eyes as he traipses deep into the forest at the beginning of the first flashback. In this beautiful, wordless sequence, Kurosawa leads the viewer away from reality and into the febrile undergrowth of the subconscious; the forest clearing is an enchanted space in which the drama of the samurai’s death will unfold again and again, each time in a different way.

Forests have always had a primal association with the human imagination—as dark places located far from civilization. In the traditional folklores of many cultures, forests are the sites of magical, inexplicable encounters. The earliest known Japanese prose narrative, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, also known as Princess Kaguya, is a 10th-century fable in which a lonely and childless woodsman stumbles across a phantasmal infant in the depths of a forest.

Kurosawa’s movie reaches back to such folklore with its rural setting, its archetypal characters, and its notion that what we see is shaped unconsciously by our deepest fears and desires. The movie even features an abandoned child at the end, whom the woodsman takes home with him as the rain stops.

“Dead men tell no lies.”

The priest / Rashomon

Tajomaru describes the fight between himself and the samurai as a heroic struggle between two master swordsmen. The woodcutter saw it as a brawl between two terrified men.

Embellishing stories

Kurosawa has said that humans cannot help embellishing stories about themselves, and this is what happens in Rashomon’s glade: four people witness a simple chain of events, but they interpret it through the filter of their own imaginations. Each of them transforms what they have seen into a story. These stories are not lies, however, but tricks of the mind—indeed, with Rashomon, Kurosawa suggests that there is no such thing as objective truth.

Since the movie’s release in 1950, the primary storytelling device of Rashomon has been borrowed and imitated countless times, from the American remake in 1964, The Outrage, a Western starring Paul Newman, to the sleight-of-hand potboiler plots of The Usual Suspects (1995) and Gone Girl (2014). However, rarely do the imitators dare to withhold a satisfying solution, as Kurosawa does at the end of his masterpiece. We never find out who killed the samurai, nor what really happened between the woman and the bandit, but we do see the characters change as they sift through their own recollections.

“Just think. Which one of these stories do you believe?”

The commoner / Rashomon

The Rashomon effect

The “Rashomon effect” has entered language as shorthand for any situation, in art or life, in which the truth remains elusive because no one can agree on what happened. What is certain is that Rashomon was one of the most influential movies of the 20th century. It set box-office records for a subtitled movie and acted as a gateway through which Western moviegoers could look for the first time at the beguiling, unfamiliar world of Japanese cinema. And each of those moviegoers would have seen something different.

In the wife’s story, she offers her husband a knife to kill her after she sees a look of disgust on his face following the rape.

Kurosawa was the first Japanese director to find popularity in the West. His movies Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo were remade as Westerns (The Outrage in 1964, The Magnificent Sevenin 1960, and A Fistful of Dollars in 1964, respectively). Kurosawa ultimately found greater critical appreciation in Europe and the US than he did in his native country.

The son of an army officer, Kurosawa studied art before embarking on his career in cinema, which saw him develop a sensibility that was partially Westernized. He experimented with courtroom drama, crime thriller, film noir, and medical melodrama. He continued making movies until his death in 1998.

1950 Rashomon

1954 Seven Samurai

1961 Yojimbo

1985 Ran

What else to watch: Possessed (1947) ✵ Stage Fright (1950) ✵ To Live (1952) ✵ The Hidden Fortress (1958) ✵ The Outrage (1964) ✵ Red Beard (1965) ✵ Samurai Rebellion (1967) ✵ Ran (1985) ✵ The Usual Suspects (1995) ✵ Fight Club (1999)