Rashomon reviewed in 1952

• This review was first published in Sight and Sound, July-September 1952

Rashomon, some may argue, can fairly rest upon the merits we first see in it, upon the pleasure and inspiration it gives to Western audiences. We are, of course, easily led to over-estimate a film where dialogue, setting and attitude are alike exotic. I have seen eminent Italian critics astonished and embarrassed by our admiration of certain Italian films, and at the same time they have perceived in some brightly conventional English picture a significance to us invisible.

It is, then, important to be able to set a foreign film in, so to speak, its national context. With Rashomon, moreover, the problem grows infinitely complicated, for it confronts us with a tradition and a point of view perhaps the most remote from our own world. Some seventy years ago the Whistlerian circle rediscovered Japanese art for the West; they admired blindly; the roughest theatrical print, the most repellent view of Fujiyama commanded their ecstasies; it took time and experience before the West could distinguish the attack of mere novelty from the claims of excellence.

In the case of Rashomon, an important first consideration is its historical setting. Japan escaped foreign invasion till the summer of 1945; nevertheless, few countries have known more violent vicissitudes of fortune. Periods of enlightened prosperity have continually alternated with others of agonising disorder; time and again the central authority has collapsed into banditry, or into a feudalism scarcely distinguishable from it. As suddenly, order has revived, and a brilliant period of tranquillity has followed.

Rashomon is set in a moment of desperate anarchy, in the eighth century, from which Japan seemed doomed never to rise. The first few feet of film masterfully establish the mood of the times. Relentless rain drives a servant, a priest and a woodcutter to shelter under a broken down, once pompous, Kyoto gate; while they wait there, the inner story of Rashomon is unfolded in four conflicting versions. Rain and dilapidation frame nine-tenths of the picture. Yet a Japanese audience would remember that upon this apparently hopeless moment will shortly follow one of the most glorious epochs in their history, the almost too exquisite age we slightly know from the Tale of Genji. We soon become tolerably certain that dawn must follow the darkness.

Sure enough, with the epilogue the downpour ceases, and an abandoned baby is discovered. If the woodcutter, already a father of six, heightens his plight by adopting it, this altruism at least restores the priest’s battered belief in humanity. Here the symbolism bears an implicit but obvious reference to Japan’s recent chastisement and her present recovery. It is also oddly reminiscent in mood of German silent films from some thirty years ago. They were also made in the aftermath of defeat.

With the central story, on the other hand, the film assumes a different style. This is an episode of violence, of virtue and of feudal honour in danger. In short, when one has stripped it of all modern embellishments, here is an episode in which the Japanese popular-heroic theatre, the ‘Kabuki’, habitually delights. In almost all Kabuki stories we find a duel, where the contestants, hissing and agile as cats, leap and spring about each other with an acrobacy that never becomes ridiculous, nor ceases to excite. In Rashomon we find just such a duel. And though we see it in two different versions, so admirably photographed and played is it, we are not for a moment fatigued by repetition. Repetition is indeed a salient quality of the Kabuki theatre. The pieces generally played are long, gestures are stereotyped, events move round and round to the same point. (Yet to the Western eye, provided one does not see too much of it, the Kabuki formula is probably the most satisfactory style for playing melodrama that exists today.)

The suggestion that the director, Akira Kurosawa, has borrowed the traditions of the Kabuki theatre for his central narratives does not at all decry the remarkable performances of his three principal actors – Toshiro Mifune as the bandit, Machiko Kyo as the wife, Masayuki Mori as the nobleman. The story is a basically simple one upon which almost musical variations are worked. A minor aristocrat travelling through a lonely forest with his wife, mounted on their only horse, has the bad luck to attract the interest of a notorious bandit. Through her long travelling-veil the bandit perceives and is inflamed by the wife’s beauty. The husband meets his death, the wife is enjoyed by the bandit, the horse is stolen.

These are the only certain facts. The crux of the film lies in the conflict between the bandit’s confession when arrested, the wife’s story, the husband’s evidence from the tomb conveyed through a medium, and the final revelation of the woodcutter sheltering under the gate. (The coincidence of his presence as a witness is perhaps the least satisfactory feature of the story). Was the husband killed in a fight that did him credit, did he die accidentally, did he commit suicide, was he despatched like a coward? Was the wife raped, did she submit joyfully to the bandit’s lusts, did she incite him to murder her husband? Live bandit and dead husband unite in preserving unimpaired the feudal code of honour, even at the expense of representing the wife as a wanton. But the woodcutter dares to suggest the husband has behaved in a manner which even.a modern Japanese nobility could hardly approve. For this reason, I understand, the film has been disliked in its own country.

We find ourselves here in a world where social conventions and psychological reactions are alike alien to us, and at the same time infinitely absorbing. When we discount the familiar elements of the Kabuki theatre, when we admit the occasional slowness of direction, the slightly monotonous quality of the wife’s tearful prostrations, we must still concede that here we are in the presence of a genuinely original work of art, one which by its example could enrich the technique of the Western cinema.

Kurosawa’s extraordinary alternations of long shot and close-up, particularly where we see the wife idly moving her hand in a stream, and the sequence of the woodcutter’s journey into the forest, reveal to us how much we have lost through fear of violent camera movement; the police examination of the bandit, staged against a plain whitewashed wall, has an unsurpassed simple reality; the invocation of the dead husband, the medium’s whirling sleeves, and the final revelation in the tortured face of a soul that has found no peace in death, is a moment of unique poetry.

Even if some recent visitor to Japan, then, were to assure me that the intelligentsia of Tokyo hailed Madonna of the Seven Moons as a pattern of advanced filmmaking, an inspiration to future Japanese films, I should still believe Rashomon to be one of the most stimulating and extraordinary pictures made anywhere in the world since the end of the war.