Akira Kurosawa is one the greatest directors of world cinema, and Rashomon is the film that helped make his work internationally known when it earned the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. Kurosawa was a one of a small number of the post-World War II auteurs who were instrumental in changing the public perception of film from works of consumable entertainment into expressions of art. While Kurosawa himself admits that the story of Rashomon is a simple one, he notes that the simplicity was essential to creating the experience he desired, which he hoped would be able to plumb deep truths. He believed that cinema could teach and instruct, and often confronted audiences with philosophical questions about society and the individual, good and evil, meaning and meaninglessness.
Fyodor Dostoevsky had a considerable influence on Kurosawa’s work, as he and the Russian novelist both channeled the idea that the characters and the moral dilemmas they faced should be timeless and universal. Classic literature is where Kurosawa believed any artist who wanted to be a great director should turn, and helped him refine his understanding of the necessary elements involved in crafting a compelling narrative for an audience. Like many of Dostoevsky's protagonists, the priest in Rashomon struggles to maintain and uphold his belief in God, and "faith in the human soul." Like Crime and Punishment, Rashomon is essentially the moral and philosophical cross-section of a single act: here, the slaying of a samurai. The various accounts in Rashomon raise different ethical questions—for example, in the woodcutter's tale, is the wife to blame for manipulating Tajomaru into killing the samurai, or is Tajomaru to blame for actually striking the blow?
The cinematography of Rashomon builds complex visual metaphors using simple images like water and light. This symbolist approach reflects the aesthetic influence of Japanese poetry, where a single word or bodily gesture can evoke an entire landscape. The film opens during a heavy rainstorm—a turbulent event that represents the natural and man-made catastrophes that have brought the priest, the woodcutter, and the commoner to the Rashomon gate. The direct shot of the "sun" itself famously symbolizes truth's elusiveness for mankind's perception. During the grove scenes, Kurosawa employed a "dappled" lighting effect to represent visually how these scenes are unfolding in an imagined theater of memory and illusion. The fluid interplay of light and shadow in the flashbacks underscores the capricious, perhaps misleading modes of storytelling that each character inhabits when issuing their formal testimonies in the courtyard, a space that Kurosawa films in the unyielding sunlight of the truth.
Rashomon also owes a considerable debt to the legacy of silent films and Noh theater. Kurosawa studied silent films extensively, given that their images had to be both beautiful and expressive in order for the audience to understand the narrative. Kurosawa endeavored to imbue his moving images with a similar theatrical power, making them both visually striking and emotionally expressive. Consider, for example, the close-up in the scene in the samurai's wife tale where she slowly, dramatically covers her face with her fingers, before collapsing to the ground. Or the long, silent sequence of the woodcutter going deeper and deeper into the woods. In Rashomon, storytelling is often visual and unspoken.
Rashomon led the world to hail Kurosawa as a new and towering cinematic talent. Like any good storyteller, Kurosawa was able with Rashomon to make a film that catered to all sensibilities, to the priests and the commoners in the audience—the ones seeking lofty truths, and the ones seeking compelling entertainment. Along with other Kurosawa works like The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, it is now firmly entrenched in the pantheon of classics of world cinema.
