1 00:00:00,040 --> 00:00:02,480 The following content is provided under a Creative 2 00:00:02,480 --> 00:00:04,010 Commons license. 3 00:00:04,010 --> 00:00:06,340 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare 4 00:00:06,340 --> 00:00:10,690 continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. 5 00:00:10,690 --> 00:00:13,320 To make a donation or view additional materials 6 00:00:13,320 --> 00:00:17,129 from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare 7 00:00:17,129 --> 00:00:17,753 at ocw.mit.edu. 8 00:00:21,420 --> 00:00:23,620 DAVID THORBURN: Kurosawa's Rashomon 9 00:00:23,620 --> 00:00:26,430 is a particularly dramatic example 10 00:00:26,430 --> 00:00:28,980 of a film that understands itself 11 00:00:28,980 --> 00:00:32,590 to have the kind of claim on its audience 12 00:00:32,590 --> 00:00:35,590 that the greatest art has always imagined 13 00:00:35,590 --> 00:00:38,852 itself to have on its audience. 14 00:00:38,852 --> 00:00:41,060 So I want to begin by talking very briefly about what 15 00:00:41,060 --> 00:00:43,210 I call the moment of Rashomon. 16 00:00:43,210 --> 00:00:47,340 There's a bit of confusion, or at least 17 00:00:47,340 --> 00:00:53,400 chronological confusion, or inconsistency in the principle 18 00:00:53,400 --> 00:00:57,880 that we end the course with a film that was made and shown 19 00:00:57,880 --> 00:01:02,880 internationally before the last two films 20 00:01:02,880 --> 00:01:04,840 that we've seen in our course. 21 00:01:04,840 --> 00:01:08,170 My reasons for that, as I partly explained in an earlier 22 00:01:08,170 --> 00:01:11,170 lecture, had to do with my desire 23 00:01:11,170 --> 00:01:14,720 to show a certain continuity amongst forms 24 00:01:14,720 --> 00:01:19,580 of European cinema and the link between Jean Renoir, 25 00:01:19,580 --> 00:01:22,970 and the Italian neorealists, and the French nouvelle vague 26 00:01:22,970 --> 00:01:25,090 is so intimate that it seemed to me 27 00:01:25,090 --> 00:01:29,400 important to show you that progression in sequence. 28 00:01:29,400 --> 00:01:32,840 But if we had been going by strict chronological order, 29 00:01:32,840 --> 00:01:36,510 we would have introduced this Kurosawa film a bit earlier, 30 00:01:36,510 --> 00:01:39,290 because it was made in 1950. 31 00:01:39,290 --> 00:01:44,660 And in 1951, it won an important international prize, The Golden 32 00:01:44,660 --> 00:01:47,910 Lion, the highest prize available at the Venice Film 33 00:01:47,910 --> 00:01:50,160 Festival in 1951. 34 00:01:50,160 --> 00:01:57,390 And this had a seismic effect on movies around the world. 35 00:01:57,390 --> 00:02:00,610 The dramatic and powerful subject matter 36 00:02:00,610 --> 00:02:04,010 of Kurosawa's film of course riveted attention. 37 00:02:04,010 --> 00:02:08,740 But even more than that, the freedom and imaginative energy 38 00:02:08,740 --> 00:02:11,550 of his stylistic innovations in the film 39 00:02:11,550 --> 00:02:17,350 had a profound impact on filmmakers around the world. 40 00:02:17,350 --> 00:02:25,480 And when the film was shown at Venice in 1951, another effect 41 00:02:25,480 --> 00:02:30,000 it had when it won the prize was to introduce Japanese cinema 42 00:02:30,000 --> 00:02:31,330 to a wider world. 43 00:02:31,330 --> 00:02:34,400 It was the first significant Japanese film, Kurosawa, 44 00:02:34,400 --> 00:02:36,420 the first important Japanese director 45 00:02:36,420 --> 00:02:40,830 to gain a reputation outside of Japan itself. 46 00:02:40,830 --> 00:02:42,920 In fact, there are many film buffs, and especially 47 00:02:42,920 --> 00:02:46,320 specialists in Japanese film, who 48 00:02:46,320 --> 00:02:49,850 are somewhat resentful of Kurosawa's eminence, 49 00:02:49,850 --> 00:02:52,650 even though no one denies that he is an eminent 50 00:02:52,650 --> 00:02:55,730 director, because there are other directors. 51 00:02:55,730 --> 00:02:59,420 The two I've listed under item 2 in our outline 52 00:02:59,420 --> 00:03:03,470 are the most dramatic examples, Mizoguchi and Ozu, 53 00:03:03,470 --> 00:03:06,250 who are often thought to be his superior, even greater 54 00:03:06,250 --> 00:03:07,750 directors than Kurosawa. 55 00:03:07,750 --> 00:03:10,400 This is a debate of nuances. 56 00:03:10,400 --> 00:03:13,730 All three of these directors are major artists. 57 00:03:13,730 --> 00:03:17,350 But it is true, I think, and it is widely recognized 58 00:03:17,350 --> 00:03:23,520 that Kurosawa was the director who crossed that barrier more 59 00:03:23,520 --> 00:03:26,170 immediately, more dramatically than any other, 60 00:03:26,170 --> 00:03:29,250 and opened the world, not just to Japanese cinema, 61 00:03:29,250 --> 00:03:32,190 in some degree, but opened the world in some longer 62 00:03:32,190 --> 00:03:34,670 sense to Asian cinema more generally, 63 00:03:34,670 --> 00:03:37,190 that the so-called Western world, 64 00:03:37,190 --> 00:03:41,830 the European and American cinema universes 65 00:03:41,830 --> 00:03:44,260 had been fairly oblivious to Asian cinema 66 00:03:44,260 --> 00:03:48,200 and certainly to Japanese cinema prior to this. 67 00:03:48,200 --> 00:03:55,280 And the appearance of Rashomon, its enormous impact in 1951, 68 00:03:55,280 --> 00:03:57,820 began to change that. 69 00:03:57,820 --> 00:04:01,820 So that what was demonstrated in moment when Rashomon 70 00:04:01,820 --> 00:04:05,300 won this reward, won The Golden Lion at the Venice Film 71 00:04:05,300 --> 00:04:07,950 Festival, was a reinforcement of a principle 72 00:04:07,950 --> 00:04:10,580 I've been discussing throughout the semester, the notion 73 00:04:10,580 --> 00:04:14,860 of film as an international medium, the notion 74 00:04:14,860 --> 00:04:18,110 that directors from different national cinemas 75 00:04:18,110 --> 00:04:21,040 were now being deeply influenced by directors 76 00:04:21,040 --> 00:04:24,910 from other nations, and that film itself 77 00:04:24,910 --> 00:04:28,840 was in some deep way, a global phenomenon, even 78 00:04:28,840 --> 00:04:31,270 an international form. 79 00:04:31,270 --> 00:04:35,230 And I think it was in the '50s and early '60s 80 00:04:35,230 --> 00:04:40,130 that this idea began to become more widely embraced 81 00:04:40,130 --> 00:04:43,190 by film goers in the United States and in Europe, 82 00:04:43,190 --> 00:04:45,240 but perhaps especially in the United States. 83 00:04:45,240 --> 00:04:49,860 And one mark of this, the emergence 84 00:04:49,860 --> 00:04:54,530 of cinema as a fully recognized independent art form. 85 00:04:54,530 --> 00:04:56,310 Obviously people had thought this, 86 00:04:56,310 --> 00:04:59,010 and many directors had achieved artistic distinction 87 00:04:59,010 --> 00:04:59,760 before this. 88 00:04:59,760 --> 00:05:02,850 But I'm talking about the public understanding of movies, 89 00:05:02,850 --> 00:05:05,900 the way people in different cultures actually recognized 90 00:05:05,900 --> 00:05:08,000 and thought about movies. 91 00:05:08,000 --> 00:05:11,370 It was as if this is the moment in which movies were understood 92 00:05:11,370 --> 00:05:13,090 to enter the museum in a certain way, 93 00:05:13,090 --> 00:05:18,450 to earn in a public sense, the status 94 00:05:18,450 --> 00:05:20,480 that more traditional art forms had had. 95 00:05:20,480 --> 00:05:25,105 And one of the explanations for why this would have been so, 96 00:05:25,105 --> 00:05:27,230 why it would have had such a powerful impact-- now, 97 00:05:27,230 --> 00:05:30,110 I think I mentioned last time that this insight was 98 00:05:30,110 --> 00:05:31,930 partial in the United States-- especially, 99 00:05:31,930 --> 00:05:34,200 that is to say, in the '50s and early '60s, 100 00:05:34,200 --> 00:05:39,280 it began to dawn on movie critics and scholars 101 00:05:39,280 --> 00:05:42,510 of whom there were only a few at that time and then movie 102 00:05:42,510 --> 00:05:47,240 audiences that European films and Asian films, especially 103 00:05:47,240 --> 00:05:50,270 Japanese films, might have great artistic value. 104 00:05:50,270 --> 00:05:52,730 But it was a longer time before Americans 105 00:05:52,730 --> 00:05:56,540 began to realize that their own native forms of films 106 00:05:56,540 --> 00:05:59,310 had had a similar kind of authority. 107 00:05:59,310 --> 00:06:02,350 So this moment, in the early 1950s, 108 00:06:02,350 --> 00:06:04,320 was a deeply significant one. 109 00:06:04,320 --> 00:06:07,889 Let's remember historically what it represented in Europe 110 00:06:07,889 --> 00:06:08,930 and in the United States. 111 00:06:08,930 --> 00:06:12,610 It's the moment of the emergence of Italian neorealism, which 112 00:06:12,610 --> 00:06:16,620 itself begins to establish a kind of very powerful claim 113 00:06:16,620 --> 00:06:18,960 on people's attention. 114 00:06:18,960 --> 00:06:21,150 One irony of Rashomon's success was 115 00:06:21,150 --> 00:06:23,440 that it was not very successful in Japan 116 00:06:23,440 --> 00:06:25,380 when it was released in 1950. 117 00:06:25,380 --> 00:06:27,600 And the producer, the production company 118 00:06:27,600 --> 00:06:30,360 responsible for the film was very dubious about entering it 119 00:06:30,360 --> 00:06:36,220 in the competition, didn't think it was a significant film, even 120 00:06:36,220 --> 00:06:38,720 though it transformed Kurosawa's career 121 00:06:38,720 --> 00:06:41,150 because of the immense recognition it finally got. 122 00:06:41,150 --> 00:06:43,060 And Kurosawa himself recognized-- 123 00:06:43,060 --> 00:06:45,640 he'd been making films for almost a decade before that, 124 00:06:45,640 --> 00:06:49,550 but Rashomon was his most ambitious film to that point, 125 00:06:49,550 --> 00:06:52,310 and it also incorporated more innovative strategy, 126 00:06:52,310 --> 00:06:56,175 visual strategies than any he had tried before. 127 00:06:56,175 --> 00:06:59,240 It established him as an international director. 128 00:06:59,240 --> 00:07:02,410 And I mentioned the names of two other directors 129 00:07:02,410 --> 00:07:05,230 just from different traditions as a way 130 00:07:05,230 --> 00:07:09,240 of reminding you of another feature of this phenomenon, 131 00:07:09,240 --> 00:07:12,390 another reason, as I began to say earlier, 132 00:07:12,390 --> 00:07:15,440 for why this moment was such a significant one. 133 00:07:15,440 --> 00:07:18,910 And the term I use here is modernism, modernist cinema. 134 00:07:18,910 --> 00:07:21,450 Remember, one of the ways to understand this idea 135 00:07:21,450 --> 00:07:24,380 is to recognize that a great revolution in the arts 136 00:07:24,380 --> 00:07:27,210 had occurred at the turn of the 20th century, 137 00:07:27,210 --> 00:07:30,187 the end of the 19th, and at the turn of the 20th century. 138 00:07:30,187 --> 00:07:31,520 We've talked about this earlier. 139 00:07:31,520 --> 00:07:33,960 It's the movement we call modernism. 140 00:07:33,960 --> 00:07:35,620 It's the moment of Picasso. 141 00:07:35,620 --> 00:07:39,070 It's the moment of James Joyce, and it 142 00:07:39,070 --> 00:07:43,820 was a kind of revolution in both visual art, literature, 143 00:07:43,820 --> 00:07:46,480 music took place in this period. 144 00:07:46,480 --> 00:07:51,340 And among the characteristics of this modernist 145 00:07:51,340 --> 00:07:58,100 movement was a newly complicated and self-conscious attitude 146 00:07:58,100 --> 00:08:01,080 toward narrative itself, toward storytelling. 147 00:08:01,080 --> 00:08:05,110 So modernism in literature and in art involved, 148 00:08:05,110 --> 00:08:11,690 among other things if not a hostility or antagonism, 149 00:08:11,690 --> 00:08:13,840 at least a kind of skepticism about 150 00:08:13,840 --> 00:08:17,670 inherited traditional categories and ways of doing things. 151 00:08:17,670 --> 00:08:19,370 And one form this took in narrative 152 00:08:19,370 --> 00:08:24,030 was to dislocate or disorient the narrative line. 153 00:08:24,030 --> 00:08:27,640 Instead of telling a story in a chronological sequence, 154 00:08:27,640 --> 00:08:33,289 a lot of the great works of fiction of the modernist era, 155 00:08:33,289 --> 00:08:37,700 books by writers like Joseph Conrad, or Proust, 156 00:08:37,700 --> 00:08:39,780 the great French novelist who was so 157 00:08:39,780 --> 00:08:42,340 preoccupied by memory and human subjectivity, 158 00:08:42,340 --> 00:08:46,640 or the great German novelist, Thomas Mann, 159 00:08:46,640 --> 00:08:49,790 a number of other great figures that we could mention 160 00:08:49,790 --> 00:08:55,110 began to construct stories in which chronological order was 161 00:08:55,110 --> 00:08:56,610 profoundly disrupted. 162 00:08:56,610 --> 00:08:59,870 And they also began to create stories in which there 163 00:08:59,870 --> 00:09:01,870 were multiple narrators. 164 00:09:01,870 --> 00:09:04,020 And the effect of multiple narrators 165 00:09:04,020 --> 00:09:08,910 begins-- even if you do nothing more than have 166 00:09:08,910 --> 00:09:11,670 multiple narrators, you begin to raise questions 167 00:09:11,670 --> 00:09:14,360 about the veracity, the truthfulness 168 00:09:14,360 --> 00:09:16,940 of any single perspective. 169 00:09:16,940 --> 00:09:19,760 And you will understand when you look at Rashomon 170 00:09:19,760 --> 00:09:23,630 why this movie embodies many of these same modernist 171 00:09:23,630 --> 00:09:24,290 principles. 172 00:09:24,290 --> 00:09:29,130 But the point is that cinema, as a narrative form, 173 00:09:29,130 --> 00:09:31,650 lag behind these more traditional arts. 174 00:09:31,650 --> 00:09:34,940 And it really wasn't until the 1950s, 175 00:09:34,940 --> 00:09:37,730 and partly because of films like Rashomon, 176 00:09:37,730 --> 00:09:41,360 that it began to be recognized that the movies too 177 00:09:41,360 --> 00:09:45,170 could embrace and embody the principles of modernism. 178 00:09:45,170 --> 00:09:49,840 So one way to understand what happened in the 1950s 179 00:09:49,840 --> 00:09:53,970 is to recognize that directors like Kurosawa and Ingmar 180 00:09:53,970 --> 00:09:55,920 Bergman, the great Swedish director, 181 00:09:55,920 --> 00:09:57,950 and Fellini, the great Italian director, 182 00:09:57,950 --> 00:10:02,310 and the inheritor and expander of the neorealist tradition, 183 00:10:02,310 --> 00:10:05,090 going far beyond a narrow realism, 184 00:10:05,090 --> 00:10:09,080 that directors like that began to create films 185 00:10:09,080 --> 00:10:13,420 that in a formal sense, in a structural sense, 186 00:10:13,420 --> 00:10:15,780 and also in terms of their content 187 00:10:15,780 --> 00:10:19,840 had the kind of complexity, nuance, and skepticism, 188 00:10:19,840 --> 00:10:23,510 and even the philosophic self-awareness 189 00:10:23,510 --> 00:10:26,530 that was characteristic of high modernism 190 00:10:26,530 --> 00:10:28,404 at the turn of the 20th century. 191 00:10:28,404 --> 00:10:30,320 So it's as if what was going on was the movies 192 00:10:30,320 --> 00:10:34,810 themselves were now asserting themselves as a modernist art. 193 00:10:34,810 --> 00:10:36,750 I don't mean as a contemporary art. 194 00:10:36,750 --> 00:10:39,320 I'm referring specifically to the modernist movement, 195 00:10:39,320 --> 00:10:46,420 and to the dislocated, and much more demanding 196 00:10:46,420 --> 00:10:48,750 kinds of narrative strategies that 197 00:10:48,750 --> 00:10:51,330 are characteristic of the modernist movement. 198 00:10:51,330 --> 00:10:54,000 So Rashomon played a fundamental role 199 00:10:54,000 --> 00:10:56,040 in this sort of transformation of what 200 00:10:56,040 --> 00:10:58,800 we might call the cultural understanding of movies 201 00:10:58,800 --> 00:11:02,040 among ordinary people, as well as among scholars, critics, 202 00:11:02,040 --> 00:11:03,690 and other filmmakers. 203 00:11:03,690 --> 00:11:05,935 I want to mention one other point. 204 00:11:05,935 --> 00:11:10,400 I'll give you a kind of note to clarify 205 00:11:10,400 --> 00:11:13,390 some of what I've been implying, some 206 00:11:13,390 --> 00:11:18,370 of what I implied when I talked about Mizoguchi and Ozu 207 00:11:18,370 --> 00:11:21,250 as directors who were often even more highly 208 00:11:21,250 --> 00:11:22,840 regarded than Kurosawa. 209 00:11:22,840 --> 00:11:26,850 I'll leave that to each individual film goer. 210 00:11:26,850 --> 00:11:29,680 All three directors are astonishing and remarkable. 211 00:11:29,680 --> 00:11:32,310 But it wouldn't be appropriate to talk, even 212 00:11:32,310 --> 00:11:34,200 about this single film, Rashomon, 213 00:11:34,200 --> 00:11:38,090 without paying respects to those two great directors whose 214 00:11:38,090 --> 00:11:43,430 dates I've put on your outline. 215 00:11:43,430 --> 00:11:46,380 I won't talk about individual films by these directors, 216 00:11:46,380 --> 00:11:49,750 but I urge you all to look them up, read about them 217 00:11:49,750 --> 00:11:51,770 in David Cook's history of narrative film, 218 00:11:51,770 --> 00:11:54,770 and think about experimenting by extending 219 00:11:54,770 --> 00:11:56,680 your knowledge of Japanese cinema 220 00:11:56,680 --> 00:12:00,650 by trying films by these two remarkable directors. 221 00:12:00,650 --> 00:12:03,110 One of the things that's characteristic of all three 222 00:12:03,110 --> 00:12:05,910 of these directors, of Kurosawa, even more fully 223 00:12:05,910 --> 00:12:10,310 of Mizoguchi and Ozu, Ozu most fundamentally of all, 224 00:12:10,310 --> 00:12:13,940 is that their films are marked by a kind of impulse 225 00:12:13,940 --> 00:12:19,650 toward stylization, toward fabular, fable-like equations 226 00:12:19,650 --> 00:12:21,360 that distinguish them in some ways 227 00:12:21,360 --> 00:12:24,980 from Western, from European, and American films. 228 00:12:24,980 --> 00:12:28,030 And I think that one explanation for this 229 00:12:28,030 --> 00:12:32,390 has to do with the longer artistic traditions 230 00:12:32,390 --> 00:12:34,300 of Japanese society. 231 00:12:34,300 --> 00:12:37,460 Japanese film grows out of theatrical traditions, 232 00:12:37,460 --> 00:12:40,930 like kabuki theater, or Noh drama, 233 00:12:40,930 --> 00:12:45,560 N-O-H drama, both of which have profoundly stylized and fable 234 00:12:45,560 --> 00:12:46,910 like qualities. 235 00:12:46,910 --> 00:12:48,710 They're anti-narrative, in some sense, 236 00:12:48,710 --> 00:12:52,110 and any of you who have ever had even a minimal experience 237 00:12:52,110 --> 00:12:55,290 with either of these two theatrical traditions 238 00:12:55,290 --> 00:12:58,230 will understand what I'm discussing. 239 00:12:58,230 --> 00:13:03,970 These are theaters of gesture and of very decisive, 240 00:13:03,970 --> 00:13:05,223 symbolic representation. 241 00:13:09,030 --> 00:13:12,880 What we would think of as sort of realistic characters 242 00:13:12,880 --> 00:13:16,260 or realistic stories are not a part 243 00:13:16,260 --> 00:13:18,410 of these very ancient traditions. 244 00:13:18,410 --> 00:13:20,830 These theatrical traditions go back hundreds, even 245 00:13:20,830 --> 00:13:22,170 thousands of years. 246 00:13:22,170 --> 00:13:25,830 So there's a tradition in Japan of a kind of stylized, 247 00:13:25,830 --> 00:13:28,980 of symbolic representation. 248 00:13:28,980 --> 00:13:33,670 And you'll see, I think, how in Russia, 249 00:13:33,670 --> 00:13:40,040 how powerfully this principle operates in Rashomon. 250 00:13:40,040 --> 00:13:45,200 Even when film itself emerged in Japan in the silent era, 251 00:13:45,200 --> 00:13:47,150 it emerged in a slightly different way. 252 00:13:47,150 --> 00:13:51,440 And one of the most interesting features of silent film 253 00:13:51,440 --> 00:13:55,870 tradition in Japan was the appearance of a character who 254 00:13:55,870 --> 00:13:58,320 has no counterpart in Western cinema, 255 00:13:58,320 --> 00:14:00,930 a character called a benshi, B-E-N-S-H-I. 256 00:14:00,930 --> 00:14:02,260 Any of you heard of it? 257 00:14:02,260 --> 00:14:02,890 None. 258 00:14:02,890 --> 00:14:05,910 Well, he essentially was a narrator and explainer, 259 00:14:05,910 --> 00:14:09,600 and he stood next to the movies in a way and gave explanations. 260 00:14:09,600 --> 00:14:11,670 He said now, we will introduce the villain. 261 00:14:11,670 --> 00:14:15,060 Now, we will introduce-- he was like a kind of intermediary, 262 00:14:15,060 --> 00:14:20,050 a narrator or a concierge who mediated 263 00:14:20,050 --> 00:14:22,770 between the audience and the text, who gave the audience 264 00:14:22,770 --> 00:14:23,270 information. 265 00:14:23,270 --> 00:14:25,920 Again in one sense, we might think of it 266 00:14:25,920 --> 00:14:29,850 as an anti-narrative tradition, as a tradition in which things 267 00:14:29,850 --> 00:14:35,010 are presented or spoken rather than literally acted out, 268 00:14:35,010 --> 00:14:38,540 and certainly one in which the details of a story 269 00:14:38,540 --> 00:14:42,650 are less important than its general outline. 270 00:14:42,650 --> 00:14:44,519 So when we talk about stylization, 271 00:14:44,519 --> 00:14:46,060 one of the things we're talking about 272 00:14:46,060 --> 00:14:47,960 is an impulse toward what we might 273 00:14:47,960 --> 00:14:53,770 think of as generalized argument instead of specific argument, 274 00:14:53,770 --> 00:14:57,390 an impulse to have one moment stand symbolically 275 00:14:57,390 --> 00:14:59,710 for many other moments, and what we 276 00:14:59,710 --> 00:15:01,700 might think of as a simplification 277 00:15:01,700 --> 00:15:08,350 or a distillation of reality into certain symbolic moments 278 00:15:08,350 --> 00:15:12,000 that are thought to be emblematic in certain ways, 279 00:15:12,000 --> 00:15:14,770 but don't necessarily have a realistic feel. 280 00:15:14,770 --> 00:15:17,650 And you'll see almost instantly when this film begins, 281 00:15:17,650 --> 00:15:20,640 there's a kind of prologue. 282 00:15:20,640 --> 00:15:22,860 And then when the film makes a transition 283 00:15:22,860 --> 00:15:25,590 into the first sequence that takes place in the forest, 284 00:15:25,590 --> 00:15:29,130 you'll begin to see what I mean when I say that the film seems 285 00:15:29,130 --> 00:15:32,230 to enter into a kind of symbolic realm 286 00:15:32,230 --> 00:15:39,620 in which your sense of reality is in some sense undermined, 287 00:15:39,620 --> 00:15:43,250 as if you're entering into a dream or a symbolic space. 288 00:15:43,250 --> 00:15:48,340 Kurosawa, talking about that astonishing sequence 289 00:15:48,340 --> 00:15:50,540 at the beginning of Rashomon, said 290 00:15:50,540 --> 00:15:55,830 that camera's complex movements and the movements 291 00:15:55,830 --> 00:15:58,530 of a character himself-- everything 292 00:15:58,530 --> 00:16:02,630 is in motion in that remarkable opening sequence. 293 00:16:02,630 --> 00:16:05,790 Some people have called it the most visually poetic sequence 294 00:16:05,790 --> 00:16:08,060 in the history of movies. 295 00:16:08,060 --> 00:16:10,640 Kurosawa called this moment a moment 296 00:16:10,640 --> 00:16:15,550 in which the camera was shown to be penetrating into a space 297 00:16:15,550 --> 00:16:19,260 where the heart loses its way, as if you're penetrating 298 00:16:19,260 --> 00:16:25,250 into an ancestral space, into a space that's 299 00:16:25,250 --> 00:16:28,280 dreamlike in fundamental ways. 300 00:16:28,280 --> 00:16:31,070 So the very opening of the film, or almost 301 00:16:31,070 --> 00:16:33,020 the very opening of the film establishes 302 00:16:33,020 --> 00:16:35,956 this kind of complexity. 303 00:16:35,956 --> 00:16:37,830 I don't want to exactly call it an ambiguity, 304 00:16:37,830 --> 00:16:42,816 but this complexity about the nature of the reality 305 00:16:42,816 --> 00:16:43,690 that you're watching. 306 00:16:43,690 --> 00:16:46,730 And this is even before the film proceeds 307 00:16:46,730 --> 00:16:49,130 to present essentially four different accounts 308 00:16:49,130 --> 00:16:51,690 of the same event, these four different accounts 309 00:16:51,690 --> 00:16:55,710 conflicting with each other in a variety of ways. 310 00:16:55,710 --> 00:16:59,840 So these abstracting, or symbolizing, 311 00:16:59,840 --> 00:17:03,570 or stylizing narrative and dramatic traditions 312 00:17:03,570 --> 00:17:07,960 lie behind and shape the movies in Japan, even movies 313 00:17:07,960 --> 00:17:12,579 like Kurosawa's, which embrace the camera's freedom 314 00:17:12,579 --> 00:17:15,930 in a way that's much more characteristic 315 00:17:15,930 --> 00:17:20,786 of Western directors than of Eastern ones. 316 00:17:20,786 --> 00:17:25,000 Ozu, the second of the two directors 317 00:17:25,000 --> 00:17:27,510 I've listed on your outline, is especially 318 00:17:27,510 --> 00:17:30,020 famous for holding his camera almost stationary 319 00:17:30,020 --> 00:17:32,660 for a tremendously long time. 320 00:17:32,660 --> 00:17:37,960 And in fact, he's sometimes called a director 321 00:17:37,960 --> 00:17:41,180 who tries to create a zen aesthetic, 322 00:17:41,180 --> 00:17:44,350 because the camera is so quiet, and so stationary, 323 00:17:44,350 --> 00:17:47,540 and relatively inactive. 324 00:17:47,540 --> 00:17:50,400 It's a style that lays tremendous emphasis 325 00:17:50,400 --> 00:17:56,820 on the nuances of facial expression and vocal tone. 326 00:17:56,820 --> 00:17:59,950 And both Mizoguchi and Ozu do, in some sense, 327 00:17:59,950 --> 00:18:02,450 have an even greater sense of stylization 328 00:18:02,450 --> 00:18:06,036 in many of their films than Kurosawa does. 329 00:18:06,036 --> 00:18:07,410 But I don't want to oversimplify, 330 00:18:07,410 --> 00:18:11,360 because they are also capable of very great, realistic moments, 331 00:18:11,360 --> 00:18:14,230 and they have a moral realism that's 332 00:18:14,230 --> 00:18:18,560 at least as powerful in their films as Kurosawa himself. 333 00:18:18,560 --> 00:18:21,900 Kurosawa's career is a very remarkable one. 334 00:18:21,900 --> 00:18:25,520 And I wish I had time to talk about it in detail. 335 00:18:25,520 --> 00:18:29,060 Organizational structure of Japanese cinema 336 00:18:29,060 --> 00:18:32,110 was not unlike the structures that 337 00:18:32,110 --> 00:18:34,950 developed in Western societies in the United States 338 00:18:34,950 --> 00:18:36,290 or in France. 339 00:18:36,290 --> 00:18:40,140 There were essentially monopolies 340 00:18:40,140 --> 00:18:44,700 of not a small number, but a relatively larger number 341 00:18:44,700 --> 00:18:49,270 of film production companies operating at different levels 342 00:18:49,270 --> 00:18:50,150 of significance. 343 00:18:50,150 --> 00:18:52,050 So they were second rate, and then they 344 00:18:52,050 --> 00:18:55,040 were second level and third level production companies, 345 00:18:55,040 --> 00:18:55,600 as well. 346 00:18:55,600 --> 00:18:58,170 But all of them operated in a similar way. 347 00:18:58,170 --> 00:19:01,620 The director was a more dominant than major figure 348 00:19:01,620 --> 00:19:05,540 in this system, and surrounding each director 349 00:19:05,540 --> 00:19:09,470 were a group of workers and a group of creative people, 350 00:19:09,470 --> 00:19:14,070 including usually performers who went with a director from film 351 00:19:14,070 --> 00:19:17,960 to film, as well as his technical people. 352 00:19:17,960 --> 00:19:20,890 They would often use the same people to write their music, 353 00:19:20,890 --> 00:19:24,970 and the same crew to work on the film-- if they could succeed, 354 00:19:24,970 --> 00:19:26,440 get the same cinematographer. 355 00:19:26,440 --> 00:19:32,230 And Kurosawa's-- so Kurosawa's group was called the Kurosawa 356 00:19:32,230 --> 00:19:36,350 gumi, G-U-M-I. It means the group, or cadre. 357 00:19:36,350 --> 00:19:40,290 The Kurosawa group worked on a series of films. 358 00:19:40,290 --> 00:19:41,840 I don't mean it was always identical. 359 00:19:41,840 --> 00:19:45,220 There were changes, but it was a stable group 360 00:19:45,220 --> 00:19:50,700 unified especially by Kurosawa's vision and supervision. 361 00:19:50,700 --> 00:19:54,960 And I've listed here a few of his most famous and fundamental 362 00:19:54,960 --> 00:19:57,420 films besides Rashomon. 363 00:19:57,420 --> 00:20:00,580 Ikiru, maybe his greatest film, a realistic film 364 00:20:00,580 --> 00:20:02,080 set in the modern world. 365 00:20:02,080 --> 00:20:04,460 The title means to live, and it's 366 00:20:04,460 --> 00:20:07,310 about a man who discovers that he has only a few months 367 00:20:07,310 --> 00:20:07,810 to live. 368 00:20:07,810 --> 00:20:12,880 And it stars the actor Takashi Shimura, 369 00:20:12,880 --> 00:20:16,640 who plays the woodcutter in Rashomon. 370 00:20:16,640 --> 00:20:20,470 The other actor that you'll see in Rashomon 371 00:20:20,470 --> 00:20:24,890 that is one of Kurosawa's favorites 372 00:20:24,890 --> 00:20:27,810 and appears again and again in Kurosawa's films 373 00:20:27,810 --> 00:20:31,520 is the actor Toshiro Mifuni. 374 00:20:31,520 --> 00:20:33,240 Rashomon, he plays the bandit. 375 00:20:33,240 --> 00:20:36,070 You'll see what a remarkable figure he is. 376 00:20:36,070 --> 00:20:38,220 So I've only listed a few of his films here, 377 00:20:38,220 --> 00:20:41,250 but among his most important, Rashomon, Ikiru, 378 00:20:41,250 --> 00:20:42,970 Seven Samurai-- many people would 379 00:20:42,970 --> 00:20:44,780 say the greatest of all samurai movies, 380 00:20:44,780 --> 00:20:47,770 and probably the greatest of all Western movies, 381 00:20:47,770 --> 00:20:51,330 because it puts most American Westerns to shame. 382 00:20:51,330 --> 00:20:53,770 It's influenced by American Westerns, 383 00:20:53,770 --> 00:20:56,180 as Kurosawa himself acknowledged. 384 00:20:56,180 --> 00:20:59,770 And it was itself, that film, made in 1954, 385 00:20:59,770 --> 00:21:04,670 remade as an American film some years later under the title, 386 00:21:04,670 --> 00:21:06,080 The Magnificent Seven. 387 00:21:06,080 --> 00:21:09,290 And it was so successful that a sequel 388 00:21:09,290 --> 00:21:12,730 was made, something like The Magnificent Seven Return. 389 00:21:12,730 --> 00:21:15,520 And in fact, one of the deep features of Kurosawa's work 390 00:21:15,520 --> 00:21:17,530 is that many of his films have been 391 00:21:17,530 --> 00:21:20,420 remade by other directors, both American 392 00:21:20,420 --> 00:21:21,920 and European directors. 393 00:21:21,920 --> 00:21:24,490 Rashomon was made 14 years later, 394 00:21:24,490 --> 00:21:28,990 remade 14 years later, with Kurosawa given screenplay 395 00:21:28,990 --> 00:21:33,750 credit in a film directed by Martin Ritt in the United 396 00:21:33,750 --> 00:21:35,120 States called The Outrage. 397 00:21:35,120 --> 00:21:39,470 And it retells the story that's at the heart of Kurosawa's 398 00:21:39,470 --> 00:21:40,510 film. 399 00:21:40,510 --> 00:21:44,420 It starred Paul Newman among others, and Edward G. Robinson, 400 00:21:44,420 --> 00:21:47,490 among other significant American actors. 401 00:21:47,490 --> 00:21:50,120 Throne of Blood I mentioned, because many people see it 402 00:21:50,120 --> 00:21:53,570 as the most successful of all adaptations of Shakespeare. 403 00:21:53,570 --> 00:22:00,110 It's a Japanese kabuki-ized version of Macbeth starring 404 00:22:00,110 --> 00:22:01,149 Toshiro Mifune. 405 00:22:01,149 --> 00:22:02,940 And many people think of it as the greatest 406 00:22:02,940 --> 00:22:05,490 of all Shakespearean adaptations. 407 00:22:05,490 --> 00:22:09,460 Yojimbo is a samurai film, a much more straightforward 408 00:22:09,460 --> 00:22:12,730 samurai film in many ways than Seven Samurai, 409 00:22:12,730 --> 00:22:16,040 also stars Mifune, and it has brilliant, brilliant sword 410 00:22:16,040 --> 00:22:20,110 fight sequences in it that anticipate the kind of thing 411 00:22:20,110 --> 00:22:24,710 that is now common in Asian cinema, but much less trivially 412 00:22:24,710 --> 00:22:28,640 done in Kurosawa's than in many of these later films that 413 00:22:28,640 --> 00:22:31,690 merely seem to want to entertain us by their sword 414 00:22:31,690 --> 00:22:36,190 play and the physical grace of their actors, 415 00:22:36,190 --> 00:22:38,180 but don't connect nearly so powerfully 416 00:22:38,180 --> 00:22:42,380 as Kurosawa's films do to a profound and serious historical 417 00:22:42,380 --> 00:22:45,280 setting and story. 418 00:22:45,280 --> 00:22:48,940 Yojimbo was also made into an American movie called Last Man 419 00:22:48,940 --> 00:22:52,600 Standing, in 1966. 420 00:22:52,600 --> 00:22:55,750 I mentioned Kagemusha, only because it's a later film, 421 00:22:55,750 --> 00:23:00,190 and many people admire it, because it 422 00:23:00,190 --> 00:23:04,490 shows that Kurosawa was working effectively, even in old age. 423 00:23:04,490 --> 00:23:07,660 He made another film in 1985, one of his final films 424 00:23:07,660 --> 00:23:11,890 called Ran, R-A-N, which is a remake of King Lear. 425 00:23:11,890 --> 00:23:16,820 And these two older films, later films, Kagamusha and Ran, 426 00:23:16,820 --> 00:23:22,510 show Kurosawa's visual sense, visual imagination to great 427 00:23:22,510 --> 00:23:25,380 effect, but they feel stylized in the way that 428 00:23:25,380 --> 00:23:27,340 they're-- stylized may not be the right word. 429 00:23:27,340 --> 00:23:32,970 They feel abstract in a way that earlier, Kurosawa's films 430 00:23:32,970 --> 00:23:33,470 do not. 431 00:23:33,470 --> 00:23:35,630 They are extraordinary spectacles, 432 00:23:35,630 --> 00:23:38,740 but they don't have the same interest in character, 433 00:23:38,740 --> 00:23:41,470 the same focus on character that his earlier 434 00:23:41,470 --> 00:23:45,750 films, despite their stylisation, seem to do. 435 00:23:45,750 --> 00:23:50,870 I've saved most of my time to talk about Rashomon itself, 436 00:23:50,870 --> 00:23:54,160 because it's such a central and significant film. 437 00:23:54,160 --> 00:24:00,900 And I hope when you watch it, you'll not be impatient, 438 00:24:00,900 --> 00:24:04,350 and especially that you watch for the ways 439 00:24:04,350 --> 00:24:07,280 in which from sequence to sequence, 440 00:24:07,280 --> 00:24:09,510 the visual style alters. 441 00:24:09,510 --> 00:24:12,910 It's a very demanding film, in that sense. 442 00:24:12,910 --> 00:24:17,170 Let's begin by talking a little bit about the problem of rape 443 00:24:17,170 --> 00:24:19,810 in cultural stories, because I think 444 00:24:19,810 --> 00:24:23,200 that one of the problems with responding fully to Rashomon 445 00:24:23,200 --> 00:24:29,770 is that we, especially in the Western world, 446 00:24:29,770 --> 00:24:35,910 are newly struggling with notions of gender identity 447 00:24:35,910 --> 00:24:45,080 and of the legacy of patriarchy that 448 00:24:45,080 --> 00:24:48,160 put us in a fraught and complex position in relation 449 00:24:48,160 --> 00:24:49,880 to stories like that of this film. 450 00:24:49,880 --> 00:24:54,410 And I want to confront it right in the beginning. 451 00:24:54,410 --> 00:24:57,160 As some of you may know, the story of Rashomon 452 00:24:57,160 --> 00:24:59,160 is the story of a rape. 453 00:24:59,160 --> 00:25:01,240 There are four different-- a rape occurs 454 00:25:01,240 --> 00:25:03,560 at the center of the film, and there 455 00:25:03,560 --> 00:25:06,180 are four different accounts of what happened, 456 00:25:06,180 --> 00:25:07,330 of how the rape occurred. 457 00:25:07,330 --> 00:25:08,830 And the film is partly a meditation 458 00:25:08,830 --> 00:25:13,070 on what motives do the different tellers have 459 00:25:13,070 --> 00:25:17,130 for putting this particular spin on the story? 460 00:25:17,130 --> 00:25:20,460 And part of what's subtle and disturbing about the movie 461 00:25:20,460 --> 00:25:23,170 is that when the first testimony is given, 462 00:25:23,170 --> 00:25:26,090 it's not fully clear yet to us that we should 463 00:25:26,090 --> 00:25:27,960 be skeptical of the testimony. 464 00:25:27,960 --> 00:25:33,276 And I think the first time-- one of the people whose testimony 465 00:25:33,276 --> 00:25:34,650 we heard is the murderer himself, 466 00:25:34,650 --> 00:25:38,550 or the rapist himself, the Mifune character. 467 00:25:38,550 --> 00:25:40,070 He's the first one to testify. 468 00:25:40,070 --> 00:25:42,570 And as he's testifying, it begins 469 00:25:42,570 --> 00:25:46,456 to dawn on an attentive viewer that maybe his testimony 470 00:25:46,456 --> 00:25:48,330 is self-serving in certain ways, that there's 471 00:25:48,330 --> 00:25:51,470 certain things he's saying that maybe we shouldn't fully 472 00:25:51,470 --> 00:25:52,530 accept. 473 00:25:52,530 --> 00:25:57,180 And then, when the next account comes, our sense of skepticism 474 00:25:57,180 --> 00:26:00,490 is reinforced and fortified. 475 00:26:00,490 --> 00:26:03,420 We begin to worry. 476 00:26:03,420 --> 00:26:06,600 And then the film itself reminds us of the fact 477 00:26:06,600 --> 00:26:09,760 that these tales are problematic, because the film's 478 00:26:09,760 --> 00:26:12,750 structure is so interesting. 479 00:26:12,750 --> 00:26:14,740 Roughly every 10 minutes or so, I've 480 00:26:14,740 --> 00:26:18,250 timed most of them-- a little less than 10 minutes 481 00:26:18,250 --> 00:26:21,160 in some cases, a little longer than some-- 482 00:26:21,160 --> 00:26:24,200 you'll have an extended narrative sequence which 483 00:26:24,200 --> 00:26:25,580 will last about 10 minutes. 484 00:26:25,580 --> 00:26:29,010 Usually it's the testimony of one 485 00:26:29,010 --> 00:26:34,050 of the people appearing before the court. 486 00:26:34,050 --> 00:26:39,360 And then after that happens, the film sort of 487 00:26:39,360 --> 00:26:41,820 shifts into another mode. 488 00:26:41,820 --> 00:26:44,510 And the way you can tell is that it shifts back 489 00:26:44,510 --> 00:26:46,790 to the scene with which the film opens. 490 00:26:46,790 --> 00:26:49,180 All the way through the scene, it's marked by this. 491 00:26:49,180 --> 00:26:50,740 The structure of the film is marked 492 00:26:50,740 --> 00:26:55,240 by this return to a scene at Rashomon gate, 493 00:26:55,240 --> 00:26:58,270 which I'll explain in a moment. 494 00:26:58,270 --> 00:27:02,710 So one point that I'm trying to get to here 495 00:27:02,710 --> 00:27:08,670 is the idea that as we watched the film 496 00:27:08,670 --> 00:27:11,640 and we begin to weigh the accounts that different people 497 00:27:11,640 --> 00:27:14,920 give of this rape, many of us are 498 00:27:14,920 --> 00:27:17,520 likely to feel uneasy and disturbed, 499 00:27:17,520 --> 00:27:20,090 because one of the things that disturbs me in the film 500 00:27:20,090 --> 00:27:22,220 is the woman's reaction to her rape. 501 00:27:22,220 --> 00:27:23,870 She feels terrible shame. 502 00:27:23,870 --> 00:27:27,220 It's as if she felt-- and there seems 503 00:27:27,220 --> 00:27:29,720 to be an impulse in the film that certainly some people have 504 00:27:29,720 --> 00:27:31,426 certainly gotten there. 505 00:27:31,426 --> 00:27:32,800 At least they perceive an impulse 506 00:27:32,800 --> 00:27:38,690 in the film or an impulse in the narrative to blame the victim. 507 00:27:38,690 --> 00:27:40,260 In some sense, what I'm suggesting 508 00:27:40,260 --> 00:27:44,290 is not that that response is inappropriate, 509 00:27:44,290 --> 00:27:49,170 but that it's a little bit off key, off center, because if you 510 00:27:49,170 --> 00:27:52,230 recall the idea that the film is deeply stylized, 511 00:27:52,230 --> 00:28:01,540 and it's set in an ancestral past, in a medieval Japan, 512 00:28:01,540 --> 00:28:07,320 in a moment of terrible social breakdown in which 513 00:28:07,320 --> 00:28:12,080 vestigial or ancestral attitudes towards sexuality and gender 514 00:28:12,080 --> 00:28:16,580 are being mobilized or awakened. 515 00:28:16,580 --> 00:28:18,880 And if we understand it in that way, 516 00:28:18,880 --> 00:28:21,600 we can begin to recognize that our own discomfort 517 00:28:21,600 --> 00:28:26,210 with the subject matter is a discomfort that the film itself 518 00:28:26,210 --> 00:28:29,300 may even be aware of and may even be encouraging. 519 00:28:29,300 --> 00:28:33,590 And as you're watching the film, watch how, in some sense, 520 00:28:33,590 --> 00:28:37,780 especially in one moment where the victim of rape 521 00:28:37,780 --> 00:28:39,450 makes an appeal to her husband right 522 00:28:39,450 --> 00:28:41,320 after-- there's a sequence where we 523 00:28:41,320 --> 00:28:44,580 see her embracing her husband and looking into his face. 524 00:28:44,580 --> 00:28:46,930 Now the problem is she's giving this testimony, 525 00:28:46,930 --> 00:28:48,370 and there's some reason. 526 00:28:48,370 --> 00:28:50,300 It's after the fact, and there's some reason 527 00:28:50,300 --> 00:28:53,870 to doubt what she's saying, especially as the film goes on. 528 00:28:53,870 --> 00:28:57,640 Nonetheless, it's a moment of great power. 529 00:28:57,640 --> 00:29:02,710 And that moment at least mobilizes a sympathy 530 00:29:02,710 --> 00:29:05,930 for the victim of rape. 531 00:29:05,930 --> 00:29:10,020 That is very significant, because you hear so little 532 00:29:10,020 --> 00:29:12,140 of it elsewhere in the film. 533 00:29:12,140 --> 00:29:16,020 Not that the woman is treated badly, 534 00:29:16,020 --> 00:29:18,560 but she's subjected to the same suspicions 535 00:29:18,560 --> 00:29:21,280 as the other central characters. 536 00:29:21,280 --> 00:29:23,190 But there's a larger thing to think about, 537 00:29:23,190 --> 00:29:27,320 a larger way in which we can accommodate ourselves 538 00:29:27,320 --> 00:29:29,740 to the slight discomfort we might feel 539 00:29:29,740 --> 00:29:33,410 at turning a story of rape into a philosophic discourse 540 00:29:33,410 --> 00:29:34,530 as this film does. 541 00:29:34,530 --> 00:29:37,380 And here's how we might do that. 542 00:29:37,380 --> 00:29:40,320 Let me just remind you that stories about rape 543 00:29:40,320 --> 00:29:42,720 are at the heart of many cultures. 544 00:29:42,720 --> 00:29:44,500 How many of you have heard of the story 545 00:29:44,500 --> 00:29:46,220 of The Rape of Europa? 546 00:29:46,220 --> 00:29:47,380 It's a Greek myth. 547 00:29:47,380 --> 00:29:48,260 None of you? 548 00:29:48,260 --> 00:29:51,720 In many ways, it's the story of the foundation of Europe. 549 00:29:51,720 --> 00:29:55,960 Zeus disguised as a white bull, the great Greek god, 550 00:29:55,960 --> 00:29:57,480 the god of all gods. 551 00:29:57,480 --> 00:30:01,850 One of Zeus's best habits or the most remarkable habits 552 00:30:01,850 --> 00:30:05,680 in these mythological stories is that when 553 00:30:05,680 --> 00:30:08,520 he gets a yen for a human female, 554 00:30:08,520 --> 00:30:11,880 he will disguise himself as a creature of the earth 555 00:30:11,880 --> 00:30:14,050 and go down and rape her. 556 00:30:14,050 --> 00:30:15,720 And he does this with Europa. 557 00:30:15,720 --> 00:30:19,240 The rape of Europa is a kind of symbolic story 558 00:30:19,240 --> 00:30:23,460 which later Europeans actually took 559 00:30:23,460 --> 00:30:27,890 as one of the founding tails of how Europe itself was founded. 560 00:30:27,890 --> 00:30:30,910 Can you think of another story in which Zeus was a rapist? 561 00:30:30,910 --> 00:30:32,840 How many of you know the story of Leda 562 00:30:32,840 --> 00:30:38,310 and the Swan, about which Yeats wrote such beautiful poems? 563 00:30:38,310 --> 00:30:41,250 Again, Zeus, the god of gods, disguises himself 564 00:30:41,250 --> 00:30:45,840 as a great spawn and swoops down on lead of this beautiful woman 565 00:30:45,840 --> 00:30:49,080 and rapes her in the guise of a swan. 566 00:30:49,080 --> 00:30:52,410 And there's a brilliant, almost pornographically powerful poem 567 00:30:52,410 --> 00:30:55,440 by W. B. Yeats in which he describes 568 00:30:55,440 --> 00:30:57,030 this terrible moment of rape. 569 00:30:57,030 --> 00:30:59,960 It's one of the great poems of the Western world, 570 00:30:59,960 --> 00:31:02,410 and it's about this rape. 571 00:31:02,410 --> 00:31:06,000 So what I'm reminding you of is that the misogyny, 572 00:31:06,000 --> 00:31:08,560 that you may sense there is a misogyny that's 573 00:31:08,560 --> 00:31:09,840 embedded in culture. 574 00:31:09,840 --> 00:31:14,620 It's a misogyny that's embedded in all the stories 575 00:31:14,620 --> 00:31:17,370 that human beings tell, in many of the stories 576 00:31:17,370 --> 00:31:21,300 that human beings tell themselves about the world, 577 00:31:21,300 --> 00:31:23,210 about the relations of men and women, 578 00:31:23,210 --> 00:31:26,740 and often, especially about the foundations of society, 579 00:31:26,740 --> 00:31:36,050 so that this meditation on human frailty 580 00:31:36,050 --> 00:31:43,170 and human deceit focused on a rape from that perspective 581 00:31:43,170 --> 00:31:44,910 is one of many such stories. 582 00:31:44,910 --> 00:31:46,580 Not a unique object at all. 583 00:31:46,580 --> 00:31:51,350 And it seems to me that that's one 584 00:31:51,350 --> 00:31:56,060 of the ways in which we can recognize that what Kurosawa 585 00:31:56,060 --> 00:31:58,980 is doing is part of a long, and complex, 586 00:31:58,980 --> 00:32:06,600 and in many ways, very disturbing habit of mind 587 00:32:06,600 --> 00:32:11,000 that many, many cultures share. 588 00:32:11,000 --> 00:32:12,890 The title-- Rashomon. 589 00:32:12,890 --> 00:32:16,430 Western students are often puzzled by it. 590 00:32:16,430 --> 00:32:18,970 It's a reference to the name of the gate, 591 00:32:18,970 --> 00:32:20,547 but the word gate is complicated too, 592 00:32:20,547 --> 00:32:22,130 because it's not an American gate that 593 00:32:22,130 --> 00:32:23,450 just opens and closes. 594 00:32:23,450 --> 00:32:27,690 It's a great, massive entrance to the city of Kyoto 595 00:32:27,690 --> 00:32:30,450 in the southern part of Japan in the late 11th 596 00:32:30,450 --> 00:32:31,890 or early 12th century. 597 00:32:31,890 --> 00:32:35,460 It's a period of complete disillusion 598 00:32:35,460 --> 00:32:40,700 and destructive poverty, political chaos. 599 00:32:40,700 --> 00:32:43,110 And the broken down condition of the gate, 600 00:32:43,110 --> 00:32:47,537 which you get long shots of, you see this massive structure. 601 00:32:47,537 --> 00:32:49,120 There's a terrible rainstorm going on, 602 00:32:49,120 --> 00:32:52,120 under which certain people come to get shelter from the rain. 603 00:32:52,120 --> 00:32:54,840 And that is Rashomon gate. 604 00:32:54,840 --> 00:32:58,070 And it's broken down condition symbolizes 605 00:32:58,070 --> 00:33:00,790 the broken down condition politically 606 00:33:00,790 --> 00:33:05,670 and socially of the society that is represented there. 607 00:33:05,670 --> 00:33:07,520 And again and again, the characters 608 00:33:07,520 --> 00:33:10,850 gathered beneath the gate to protect themselves 609 00:33:10,850 --> 00:33:13,300 from the weather and gauge in conversation 610 00:33:13,300 --> 00:33:17,080 about human nature. 611 00:33:17,080 --> 00:33:19,260 Are human beings innately evil? 612 00:33:19,260 --> 00:33:20,480 Do they always lie? 613 00:33:20,480 --> 00:33:21,740 Can we never trust them? 614 00:33:21,740 --> 00:33:25,280 And one of the characters who carries on this discourse 615 00:33:25,280 --> 00:33:30,710 is a priest who has an idealizing tendency, which 616 00:33:30,710 --> 00:33:32,570 another of the character's a commoner. 617 00:33:32,570 --> 00:33:33,640 He's called the commoner. 618 00:33:33,640 --> 00:33:37,540 He's an ordinary man is constantly mocking and arguing 619 00:33:37,540 --> 00:33:38,160 against. 620 00:33:38,160 --> 00:33:39,720 It's almost a kind of argument that 621 00:33:39,720 --> 00:33:42,530 reminds me in some ways of the argument between spirit 622 00:33:42,530 --> 00:33:46,360 and flesh in Cervante's Don Quixote, 623 00:33:46,360 --> 00:33:48,160 in which Sancho Panza is constantly 624 00:33:48,160 --> 00:33:51,770 reminding the idealizing Quixote of the miserable 625 00:33:51,770 --> 00:33:53,260 actuality of the world. 626 00:33:53,260 --> 00:33:55,200 Look, when you get stabbed, you bleed. 627 00:33:55,200 --> 00:33:57,940 When you haven't eaten, you're hungry. 628 00:33:57,940 --> 00:34:04,860 The world is real in a way and miserable in some respects 629 00:34:04,860 --> 00:34:06,510 in a way that idealists don't like. 630 00:34:06,510 --> 00:34:08,250 And so that's a kind of argument that 631 00:34:08,250 --> 00:34:13,060 runs through these interludes as the film goes on. 632 00:34:13,060 --> 00:34:16,170 So the title refers to the Rashomon Gate, 633 00:34:16,170 --> 00:34:18,800 and Rashomon Gate is itself a massive symbol 634 00:34:18,800 --> 00:34:23,850 for the breakdown of order for the miserable circumstances 635 00:34:23,850 --> 00:34:25,350 that individuals find themselves in. 636 00:34:25,350 --> 00:34:27,731 And one of the things you'll see is that it's chilly. 637 00:34:27,731 --> 00:34:28,230 It's cold. 638 00:34:28,230 --> 00:34:30,719 It's raining like mad, a tremendous torrent, 639 00:34:30,719 --> 00:34:34,179 a downpour incidentally created partly by fire trucks. 640 00:34:34,179 --> 00:34:36,570 In his autobiography, Kurosawa talks 641 00:34:36,570 --> 00:34:39,090 about how difficult it was to create 642 00:34:39,090 --> 00:34:41,350 this sense of an immense ongoing, 643 00:34:41,350 --> 00:34:44,139 almost a tsunami of rain, and he talked 644 00:34:44,139 --> 00:34:47,969 about the technical difficulties of doing so. 645 00:34:47,969 --> 00:34:51,500 Very impressive rain, the most impressive rainstorm 646 00:34:51,500 --> 00:34:54,480 in the history of movies, I think. 647 00:34:54,480 --> 00:35:00,030 So these people are gathered beneath the gate in order 648 00:35:00,030 --> 00:35:03,040 to protect themselves, and the gate's symbolic significance 649 00:35:03,040 --> 00:35:05,950 is important. 650 00:35:05,950 --> 00:35:07,740 We will notice that one of the things they 651 00:35:07,740 --> 00:35:09,300 do when they get cold is they go over 652 00:35:09,300 --> 00:35:11,110 to certain parts of the building. 653 00:35:11,110 --> 00:35:15,820 It's a wooden structure already half broken down and in decay. 654 00:35:15,820 --> 00:35:18,530 And they'll break off banisters or other pieces of wood, 655 00:35:18,530 --> 00:35:21,360 and break them up, and burn them up. 656 00:35:21,360 --> 00:35:23,540 And the implication is if things go on like this, 657 00:35:23,540 --> 00:35:25,300 pretty soon the whole gate will have 658 00:35:25,300 --> 00:35:29,060 been consumed by people who have tried to take shelter under it. 659 00:35:29,060 --> 00:35:33,500 So it's a symbol of the breakdown of social order 660 00:35:33,500 --> 00:35:39,120 and of the society. 661 00:35:39,120 --> 00:35:41,300 I've already mentioned the medium. 662 00:35:41,300 --> 00:35:43,280 The Japanese word is miko. 663 00:35:43,280 --> 00:35:45,320 And I mentioned it here, just because I 664 00:35:45,320 --> 00:35:50,130 wanted to be sure all of you understood 665 00:35:50,130 --> 00:35:51,420 what was going on there. 666 00:35:51,420 --> 00:35:55,750 The husband is dead when the testimony begins. 667 00:35:55,750 --> 00:36:02,860 He's a samurai who was the husband of the rape victim. 668 00:36:02,860 --> 00:36:07,000 And as the story unfolds, you'll get the basic facts, 669 00:36:07,000 --> 00:36:09,490 but even when the film is over, there 670 00:36:09,490 --> 00:36:12,690 are many fundamental things you won't be able to have decided. 671 00:36:12,690 --> 00:36:16,640 And I think that's certainly part of Kurosawa's point. 672 00:36:16,640 --> 00:36:24,720 So the medium is just this clairvoyant type apparently 673 00:36:24,720 --> 00:36:29,450 real characters believed in and socially recognizable 674 00:36:29,450 --> 00:36:32,510 in late medieval Japan, a character 675 00:36:32,510 --> 00:36:34,960 who claims to have access to the words 676 00:36:34,960 --> 00:36:36,620 and beliefs of dead people. 677 00:36:36,620 --> 00:36:38,310 So the dead man testifies. 678 00:36:38,310 --> 00:36:40,200 And another way of reminding you that we're 679 00:36:40,200 --> 00:36:43,660 looking at a very stylised, a story that 680 00:36:43,660 --> 00:36:47,920 isn't in a narrow sense, realistic at all. 681 00:36:47,920 --> 00:36:50,290 The visual style of a film is especially 682 00:36:50,290 --> 00:36:54,070 remarkable and astounding, in some ways. 683 00:36:54,070 --> 00:36:59,720 It's almost as if each form of testimony has its own style. 684 00:36:59,720 --> 00:37:05,390 And you might want to watch the way in which Kurosawa builds 685 00:37:05,390 --> 00:37:13,970 his eclectic and dynamic way in which Kurosawa's editing 686 00:37:13,970 --> 00:37:18,980 camerawork use of music combine to a kind of almost 687 00:37:18,980 --> 00:37:20,670 constant visual excitement. 688 00:37:20,670 --> 00:37:22,750 One of the most remarkable things about the film 689 00:37:22,750 --> 00:37:27,090 is how many sequences in it are without dialogue-- extended, 690 00:37:27,090 --> 00:37:31,450 wordless sequences, truly entirely cinematic. 691 00:37:31,450 --> 00:37:34,450 The opening sequence-- almost the opening sequence-- 692 00:37:34,450 --> 00:37:37,770 the first extended sequence in a forest, which 693 00:37:37,770 --> 00:37:41,230 comes after the sort of introduction, which I've 694 00:37:41,230 --> 00:37:44,170 described earlier, is a magnificently 695 00:37:44,170 --> 00:37:46,780 clear example of that process. 696 00:37:46,780 --> 00:37:51,080 And one of the things that you may notice in that sequence 697 00:37:51,080 --> 00:37:55,180 especially is the way in which you become increasingly 698 00:37:55,180 --> 00:37:58,100 disoriented about the direction in which the woodcutter is 699 00:37:58,100 --> 00:37:59,300 going. 700 00:37:59,300 --> 00:38:02,160 He's apparently narrating the story, and his narration sort 701 00:38:02,160 --> 00:38:04,276 of segues into a visual experience, 702 00:38:04,276 --> 00:38:05,900 as happens again and again in the film. 703 00:38:05,900 --> 00:38:07,274 And the visual experience we have 704 00:38:07,274 --> 00:38:10,270 shows him going into the woods, walking, and then discovering 705 00:38:10,270 --> 00:38:13,390 first the woman's hat, and then discovering other things, 706 00:38:13,390 --> 00:38:16,610 and discovering a body, and then running away in fear. 707 00:38:16,610 --> 00:38:19,390 And as he penetrates into the woods, 708 00:38:19,390 --> 00:38:22,470 one of the things that happens is the camera is always moving. 709 00:38:22,470 --> 00:38:25,850 And the camera becomes as interested in the forest 710 00:38:25,850 --> 00:38:28,195 itself, in this densely wooded forest 711 00:38:28,195 --> 00:38:30,910 and in the play of light and dark, 712 00:38:30,910 --> 00:38:35,200 because the sunlight comes through the wooded canopy 713 00:38:35,200 --> 00:38:42,120 in odd and profoundly visually powerful ways. 714 00:38:42,120 --> 00:38:45,310 You begin to have a sense that the camera is at least as 715 00:38:45,310 --> 00:38:47,580 interested in the woods and in the play of sunlight 716 00:38:47,580 --> 00:38:50,400 as it is in the motions of the woodcutter. 717 00:38:50,400 --> 00:38:52,450 And the whole sequence has a kind 718 00:38:52,450 --> 00:38:55,910 of profoundly lyrical, but also in some degree, 719 00:38:55,910 --> 00:38:58,910 disorienting sense that as Kurosawa said, 720 00:38:58,910 --> 00:39:05,840 you're entering a space that's dreamlike, that's dangerous, 721 00:39:05,840 --> 00:39:10,380 a place where the heart will lose its way, as if you're 722 00:39:10,380 --> 00:39:13,950 entering a symbolic space, not a realistic space-- 723 00:39:13,950 --> 00:39:19,600 a stylized space in some deep way. 724 00:39:19,600 --> 00:39:22,440 And there are a couple of specific strategies 725 00:39:22,440 --> 00:39:27,940 that Kurosawa uses in the film to reinforce, I think, 726 00:39:27,940 --> 00:39:33,010 our sense that he's engaging every element 727 00:39:33,010 --> 00:39:37,480 of his cinematic palate in order to create his effects. 728 00:39:37,480 --> 00:39:40,970 One thing he does, he violate certain rules, especially 729 00:39:40,970 --> 00:39:42,470 at the time where it would have been 730 00:39:42,470 --> 00:39:45,170 tremendously shocking to professional directors. 731 00:39:45,170 --> 00:39:47,210 One thing he does in the film was he 732 00:39:47,210 --> 00:39:51,240 points the camera at the sun, and he creates sun effects. 733 00:39:51,240 --> 00:39:52,110 That was a no-no. 734 00:39:52,110 --> 00:39:54,920 It was a sort of a rule that directors should never do that. 735 00:39:54,920 --> 00:39:56,180 Kurosawa does it. 736 00:39:56,180 --> 00:39:57,533 And you watch how he does it. 737 00:39:57,533 --> 00:39:59,420 It's very powerful. 738 00:39:59,420 --> 00:40:01,940 It also has a disorienting effect, 739 00:40:01,940 --> 00:40:04,470 the effect of making us understand more deeply what 740 00:40:04,470 --> 00:40:08,170 it's like to work our way through the incredible dense 741 00:40:08,170 --> 00:40:13,350 forest in which the crime occurs, 742 00:40:13,350 --> 00:40:17,830 as if the forest itself is a space so complex and so 743 00:40:17,830 --> 00:40:22,800 private, so cut off from the outer world 744 00:40:22,800 --> 00:40:24,880 that almost anything could happen there-- 745 00:40:24,880 --> 00:40:27,280 a space of dream, a space of terror, 746 00:40:27,280 --> 00:40:30,130 a space of symbolic fable. 747 00:40:30,130 --> 00:40:33,392 And there are a couple of other things 748 00:40:33,392 --> 00:40:35,600 I wanted to mention about the way his camera behaved. 749 00:40:35,600 --> 00:40:39,880 One is that Kurosawa uses here a device at certain points 750 00:40:39,880 --> 00:40:43,080 in the film, a very interesting device. 751 00:40:43,080 --> 00:40:46,110 The official name for it, the fancy name for it, 752 00:40:46,110 --> 00:40:49,130 the technical name for it is he makes what is called an axial 753 00:40:49,130 --> 00:40:53,030 cut, A-X-I-A-L. It's really a form of a jump cut-- 754 00:40:53,030 --> 00:40:56,980 that is to say, an abrupt edit which you're not fully prepared 755 00:40:56,980 --> 00:40:59,580 for. 756 00:40:59,580 --> 00:41:02,950 A jump card, as you know, breaks the action 757 00:41:02,950 --> 00:41:05,650 in mid-stride, or in mid-action, and then jumps 758 00:41:05,650 --> 00:41:08,000 to something else in a way that's slightly 759 00:41:08,000 --> 00:41:10,330 disorienting that eliminates. 760 00:41:10,330 --> 00:41:11,070 It's elliptical. 761 00:41:11,070 --> 00:41:15,520 It eliminates connection or transitions. 762 00:41:15,520 --> 00:41:18,020 But the axial cut does this in a very dramatic way 763 00:41:18,020 --> 00:41:21,840 that also calls attention to the apparatus of the movies. 764 00:41:21,840 --> 00:41:24,320 The most dramatic places in which this occurs in the film 765 00:41:24,320 --> 00:41:28,930 are certain scenes in which you see the samurai husband tied 766 00:41:28,930 --> 00:41:31,820 up, sitting on the ground, tied up like this, 767 00:41:31,820 --> 00:41:32,980 kneeling on the ground. 768 00:41:32,980 --> 00:41:35,060 And the camera's at some distance from him 769 00:41:35,060 --> 00:41:37,910 and moved toward him, but it doesn't move toward him 770 00:41:37,910 --> 00:41:45,240 in a smooth trucking motion characteristic of most films. 771 00:41:45,240 --> 00:41:47,190 What it does is it moves forward, 772 00:41:47,190 --> 00:41:48,660 and it stops, and then it jumps. 773 00:41:48,660 --> 00:41:49,380 It moves forward. 774 00:41:49,380 --> 00:41:52,122 And what you feel is it leaps forward. 775 00:41:52,122 --> 00:41:53,580 And what's happening, of course, is 776 00:41:53,580 --> 00:41:55,500 that he stops the cameras forward movement, 777 00:41:55,500 --> 00:41:58,422 moves it further, makes a cut. 778 00:41:58,422 --> 00:41:59,880 So the effect is the camera moves-- 779 00:41:59,880 --> 00:42:04,240 not that the camera's jerky, but it's 780 00:42:04,240 --> 00:42:07,000 as if it's speeded up in some sense. 781 00:42:07,000 --> 00:42:09,530 We can feel that the camera is becoming elliptical. 782 00:42:09,530 --> 00:42:12,990 So say this fellow in the front is the person I'm focusing on. 783 00:42:12,990 --> 00:42:14,180 I'll be here. 784 00:42:14,180 --> 00:42:16,770 You'll see this shot. 785 00:42:16,770 --> 00:42:20,840 And then you'll see this shot, and the effect is very abrupt. 786 00:42:20,840 --> 00:42:22,110 Watch how it happens. 787 00:42:22,110 --> 00:42:25,670 One effect, one consequence of this kind of a shot 788 00:42:25,670 --> 00:42:29,200 is that watching it, you can feel how mechanical it is. 789 00:42:29,200 --> 00:42:30,790 You begin to think to yourself well, 790 00:42:30,790 --> 00:42:32,164 how could that have been created? 791 00:42:32,164 --> 00:42:34,040 You're aware of its mechanical qualities. 792 00:42:34,040 --> 00:42:36,350 That is to say, you become partly aware 793 00:42:36,350 --> 00:42:38,990 of the apparatus behind the making of the movie. 794 00:42:38,990 --> 00:42:41,040 It's a moment of self-consciousness 795 00:42:41,040 --> 00:42:44,045 that other elements on the film also reinforce. 796 00:42:47,070 --> 00:42:49,020 So the visual style is profoundly 797 00:42:49,020 --> 00:42:52,260 eclectic and dynamic. 798 00:42:52,260 --> 00:42:55,300 I've mentioned the axial code in pointing the camera at the sun. 799 00:42:55,300 --> 00:42:57,770 Maybe I'll mention one other device. 800 00:42:57,770 --> 00:43:03,180 One of the other technically intricate, and at the time, 801 00:43:03,180 --> 00:43:05,990 revolutionary thing that Kurosawa did was he 802 00:43:05,990 --> 00:43:08,870 violates what's called the 180 degree rule. 803 00:43:08,870 --> 00:43:10,800 And the 180 degree rule essentially 804 00:43:10,800 --> 00:43:14,260 has to do with your sense of spatial orientation 805 00:43:14,260 --> 00:43:15,760 within the frame. 806 00:43:15,760 --> 00:43:17,840 Essentially the 180 degree rule holds 807 00:43:17,840 --> 00:43:19,920 that if you're showing characters moving 808 00:43:19,920 --> 00:43:23,790 in this direction, so you're showing a character moving 809 00:43:23,790 --> 00:43:25,910 this way, you won't suddenly, if you're still 810 00:43:25,910 --> 00:43:28,710 going in the same direction, show him walking this way, 811 00:43:28,710 --> 00:43:30,470 because it disorients the viewer. 812 00:43:35,360 --> 00:43:40,200 In our film, in Rashomon, there are certain moments. 813 00:43:40,200 --> 00:43:42,680 There are hints of it in that opening sequence, 814 00:43:42,680 --> 00:43:44,970 that lyrical, first sequence in the forest 815 00:43:44,970 --> 00:43:48,070 that I mentioned in which you can see that the camera's 816 00:43:48,070 --> 00:43:52,290 own movements complicate, and in some sense, 817 00:43:52,290 --> 00:43:55,120 confuse our sense of where the woodcutter is going. 818 00:43:55,120 --> 00:43:59,350 And it's in that sequence and some other places in the film 819 00:43:59,350 --> 00:44:02,150 as well, where the 180 degree rule is violated. 820 00:44:02,150 --> 00:44:05,852 And the effect again is to disorient us, is to feel gee, 821 00:44:05,852 --> 00:44:07,560 I don't know whether I'm coming or going. 822 00:44:07,560 --> 00:44:09,130 This guy doesn't know whether he's coming or going. 823 00:44:09,130 --> 00:44:10,930 What kind of a space is he in? 824 00:44:10,930 --> 00:44:15,160 Again, violating certain conventions of traditional 825 00:44:15,160 --> 00:44:18,070 filmmaking in order to create new effect. 826 00:44:18,070 --> 00:44:22,460 And the consequence of these choices, 827 00:44:22,460 --> 00:44:25,370 the impact of these choices in 1951, 828 00:44:25,370 --> 00:44:27,820 when the film won its prize, was profound. 829 00:44:30,850 --> 00:44:35,300 I want to say one other thing, another aspect of the film's 830 00:44:35,300 --> 00:44:37,600 structure, which I've described him perfectly. 831 00:44:37,600 --> 00:44:40,900 And I apologize for being so tongue tied about it. 832 00:44:40,900 --> 00:44:42,920 But as I tried to describe earlier, 833 00:44:42,920 --> 00:44:45,400 the basic structure of the film becomes fairly clear. 834 00:44:45,400 --> 00:44:47,810 What happens is you get testimony. 835 00:44:47,810 --> 00:44:50,860 Then there are interruptions in which you-- essentially, all 836 00:44:50,860 --> 00:44:54,030 four of the primary pieces of testimony 837 00:44:54,030 --> 00:44:56,990 takes place in the past. 838 00:44:56,990 --> 00:45:00,710 So what we have are flashbacks, but competing flashbacks. 839 00:45:00,710 --> 00:45:05,430 And at various points, the film returns to our scene of reign 840 00:45:05,430 --> 00:45:08,060 at Rashomon Gate in which the people 841 00:45:08,060 --> 00:45:10,640 under the gate, the three people under the gate-- two of them 842 00:45:10,640 --> 00:45:13,230 are actually partial participants. 843 00:45:13,230 --> 00:45:14,950 The third, the commoner, is just a kind 844 00:45:14,950 --> 00:45:18,060 of listener to the story, although a profound commutator 845 00:45:18,060 --> 00:45:19,070 on it. 846 00:45:19,070 --> 00:45:21,600 The Sancho Panza type who says, look. 847 00:45:21,600 --> 00:45:22,660 The world is miserable. 848 00:45:22,660 --> 00:45:24,930 Why should you believe anyone? 849 00:45:24,930 --> 00:45:26,900 And the priest is constantly resisting him. 850 00:45:26,900 --> 00:45:29,230 Well when we return to these moments-- 851 00:45:29,230 --> 00:45:31,890 so we return to Rashomon Gate several times, 852 00:45:31,890 --> 00:45:32,960 many times in the film. 853 00:45:32,960 --> 00:45:35,610 And every time we return to that spot, where are we? 854 00:45:35,610 --> 00:45:37,660 We're in the present time of the film. 855 00:45:37,660 --> 00:45:39,370 So one of the things the film does, 856 00:45:39,370 --> 00:45:42,000 it creates what I call a drama of the telling 857 00:45:42,000 --> 00:45:46,721 of the story in which the conversation that's going on 858 00:45:46,721 --> 00:45:50,080 underneath Rashomon Gate is a kind of metacommentary 859 00:45:50,080 --> 00:45:52,410 on the story that we're watching. 860 00:45:52,410 --> 00:45:55,330 The characters inside the film comment on well, 861 00:45:55,330 --> 00:45:56,240 can we believe her? 862 00:45:56,240 --> 00:45:57,250 Is this credible? 863 00:45:57,250 --> 00:45:58,590 Why did she say this? 864 00:45:58,590 --> 00:46:00,510 And the effect of this metacommentary 865 00:46:00,510 --> 00:46:03,750 is to create essentially a separate story. 866 00:46:03,750 --> 00:46:04,970 What's the separate story? 867 00:46:04,970 --> 00:46:07,310 It's a philosophic topic. 868 00:46:07,310 --> 00:46:09,630 The topic is the telling of stories. 869 00:46:09,630 --> 00:46:11,450 In other words, this interruption 870 00:46:11,450 --> 00:46:15,980 creates a new kind of moral and thematic complexity 871 00:46:15,980 --> 00:46:18,200 in the film, something that's characteristic 872 00:46:18,200 --> 00:46:20,730 of the great novels and fiction works 873 00:46:20,730 --> 00:46:23,240 I mentioned earlier in the lecture that 874 00:46:23,240 --> 00:46:26,350 appeared at the turn of the 20th century. 875 00:46:26,350 --> 00:46:30,000 Not is the principle of unreliable narration being 876 00:46:30,000 --> 00:46:33,700 introduced, and the principle of competing flashbacks being 877 00:46:33,700 --> 00:46:37,200 introduced, and the principle of dislocated chronology being 878 00:46:37,200 --> 00:46:39,450 introduced-- all of those things are operating. 879 00:46:39,450 --> 00:46:41,230 But what is even more important about it 880 00:46:41,230 --> 00:46:44,430 is that these moments of conversation 881 00:46:44,430 --> 00:46:47,880 amongst those three characters at Rashomon Gate 882 00:46:47,880 --> 00:46:51,110 also constitute a kind of philosophic meditation 883 00:46:51,110 --> 00:46:54,930 on the nature of storytelling and the nature of truth. 884 00:46:54,930 --> 00:46:57,450 And they actually say oh, how can you believe a person? 885 00:46:57,450 --> 00:46:58,580 Or what is truth? 886 00:46:58,580 --> 00:47:00,240 How can we believe what anybody says? 887 00:47:00,240 --> 00:47:02,960 So the film calls attention not only 888 00:47:02,960 --> 00:47:06,650 to the profound subjectivity of human responses 889 00:47:06,650 --> 00:47:11,130 and the profoundly unreliable nature of memory, 890 00:47:11,130 --> 00:47:13,910 but also the extent to which individuals themselves 891 00:47:13,910 --> 00:47:17,320 have reasons developing from their egos 892 00:47:17,320 --> 00:47:19,880 to distort and tell stories that are more 893 00:47:19,880 --> 00:47:22,590 flattering to themselves and so that by the time 894 00:47:22,590 --> 00:47:25,240 we come to the end of the film, it isn't clear at all, when 895 00:47:25,240 --> 00:47:28,280 the film is over, whether there is a truth, whether there 896 00:47:28,280 --> 00:47:31,390 is any final truth that we can embrace. 897 00:47:31,390 --> 00:47:33,940 The issues are not finally resolved. 898 00:47:33,940 --> 00:47:37,970 But what is resolved for us is the idea that human reality is 899 00:47:37,970 --> 00:47:40,580 immensely complex, that human beings 900 00:47:40,580 --> 00:47:44,160 are endlessly deceitful, that the stories 901 00:47:44,160 --> 00:47:47,790 they tell about themselves and others may not be trustworthy. 902 00:47:47,790 --> 00:47:50,150 So in other words, the film opens out 903 00:47:50,150 --> 00:47:52,850 into a kind of philosophic profundity 904 00:47:52,850 --> 00:47:55,450 that's partly a function of its structure. 905 00:47:55,450 --> 00:47:59,070 So it's another example, one of the most remarkable examples 906 00:47:59,070 --> 00:48:02,450 that we've seen in our course, of what I call organic form, 907 00:48:02,450 --> 00:48:08,700 of a text whose structure helps us understand what it's about 908 00:48:08,700 --> 00:48:11,260 and whose structure is part of what it means, 909 00:48:11,260 --> 00:48:13,620 whose structure is essential to its meaning. 910 00:48:13,620 --> 00:48:16,290 We couldn't imagine this film as a straightforward, 911 00:48:16,290 --> 00:48:17,990 chronological sequence. 912 00:48:17,990 --> 00:48:20,640 It wouldn't be able to do what it does. 913 00:48:20,640 --> 00:48:24,240 So what I mean by the drama of the telling of the story 914 00:48:24,240 --> 00:48:25,580 is literally that. 915 00:48:25,580 --> 00:48:27,900 That is to say, there's a second story, 916 00:48:27,900 --> 00:48:30,840 a second subject matter in these interludes-- 917 00:48:30,840 --> 00:48:33,720 let's call them interludes in these interruptions in which we 918 00:48:33,720 --> 00:48:36,360 return to the present time, get out of the past. 919 00:48:36,360 --> 00:48:40,940 And those interludes are an extended, philosophic, and 920 00:48:40,940 --> 00:48:44,020 moral conversation about human nature, 921 00:48:44,020 --> 00:48:47,670 about the nature of our human capacity 922 00:48:47,670 --> 00:48:53,260 to understand the world, and our capacity 923 00:48:53,260 --> 00:48:56,680 to talk about it, to narrate it accurately and fully. 924 00:48:56,680 --> 00:48:59,440 So this drama of the telling of the story, this drama 925 00:48:59,440 --> 00:49:02,560 of the screening, this drama of the making of the story 926 00:49:02,560 --> 00:49:07,080 is as important a dimension of the film as its actual story, 927 00:49:07,080 --> 00:49:09,950 as the actual story that it wants to tell. 928 00:49:13,950 --> 00:49:16,700 I have two other points to make about this remarkable film, 929 00:49:16,700 --> 00:49:18,290 and I'll be done. 930 00:49:18,290 --> 00:49:21,160 The first is that one of the things I think you'll notice, 931 00:49:21,160 --> 00:49:24,532 as the story goes on, and as different people give 932 00:49:24,532 --> 00:49:25,990 different accounts of what happened 933 00:49:25,990 --> 00:49:31,300 is that the actual physical conflict between the two 934 00:49:31,300 --> 00:49:35,840 male characters, which one would expect to be grand and heroic, 935 00:49:35,840 --> 00:49:39,880 is almost always clownish and unheroic. 936 00:49:39,880 --> 00:49:43,160 We expect this great-- he's a samurai warrior, after all, 937 00:49:43,160 --> 00:49:44,930 and the man he's doing battle with 938 00:49:44,930 --> 00:49:49,990 is a very famous or infamous bandit, criminal-- so 939 00:49:49,990 --> 00:49:53,570 gifted a criminal that he's famous. 940 00:49:53,570 --> 00:50:00,320 And one realizes in retrospect that when 941 00:50:00,320 --> 00:50:06,170 the criminal, the Toshiro Mifune character, gives his testimony. 942 00:50:06,170 --> 00:50:09,630 In the beginning, in the early part of the film, 943 00:50:09,630 --> 00:50:12,920 he's exaggerating his own martial genius. 944 00:50:12,920 --> 00:50:15,370 Although we don't fully realize that at first, 945 00:50:15,370 --> 00:50:17,300 but it becomes clearer and clearer to us 946 00:50:17,300 --> 00:50:19,080 as the film goes on that he has a motive 947 00:50:19,080 --> 00:50:22,640 to exaggerate his heroic stature, and his strength, 948 00:50:22,640 --> 00:50:23,510 and so forth. 949 00:50:23,510 --> 00:50:26,540 Not to mention, a motive to exaggerate and maybe 950 00:50:26,540 --> 00:50:28,890 to lie about the woman's reaction 951 00:50:28,890 --> 00:50:31,526 to his forced attentions. 952 00:50:36,300 --> 00:50:45,490 So all of that is an essential part of our understanding 953 00:50:45,490 --> 00:50:51,270 of what is at stake, I guess, when 954 00:50:51,270 --> 00:50:55,630 we think about the various subject 955 00:50:55,630 --> 00:50:59,120 that Rashomon gestures toward. 956 00:50:59,120 --> 00:51:05,549 So the clownish, unheroic behavior of these fighters 957 00:51:05,549 --> 00:51:07,090 is something to note, because there's 958 00:51:07,090 --> 00:51:09,960 a deep skepticism in the film itself 959 00:51:09,960 --> 00:51:15,450 about all forms of human aggrandizement. 960 00:51:15,450 --> 00:51:19,520 There's a skepticism that the film shares with the commoner 961 00:51:19,520 --> 00:51:24,050 who maybe is too negative about human nature, who thinks 962 00:51:24,050 --> 00:51:25,800 human beings are completely abject, 963 00:51:25,800 --> 00:51:28,550 and that this is the justification for the most 964 00:51:28,550 --> 00:51:33,400 selfish kind of behavior, because no one can behave well. 965 00:51:33,400 --> 00:51:35,529 I have hardly exhausted the film, 966 00:51:35,529 --> 00:51:37,070 but I hope I've said some things that 967 00:51:37,070 --> 00:51:40,220 will be valuable and useful to you on your first viewing. 968 00:51:40,220 --> 00:51:43,830 But let me end by talking about the ending, because the ending 969 00:51:43,830 --> 00:51:47,250 of Rashomon presents us with a problem similar to the problem 970 00:51:47,250 --> 00:51:51,690 that we confronted in a film like The Last Laugh, Der Letzte 971 00:51:51,690 --> 00:51:54,400 Mann, in which there seems to be a kind 972 00:51:54,400 --> 00:52:01,020 of optimistic or reassuring ending to this film. 973 00:52:01,020 --> 00:52:02,710 The film has been very dark and rainy. 974 00:52:02,710 --> 00:52:04,220 And in fact, one of the ways you can 975 00:52:04,220 --> 00:52:06,380 tell that the film has changed registers 976 00:52:06,380 --> 00:52:09,480 is that the rain finally disappears. 977 00:52:09,480 --> 00:52:12,590 Well as you're watching the ending, which 978 00:52:12,590 --> 00:52:15,940 is quite explicit, even heavy handed about its attempt 979 00:52:15,940 --> 00:52:19,680 to return us to a sort of more hopeful view of mankind, 980 00:52:19,680 --> 00:52:23,610 you should ask yourself, does it deserve to be deleted? 981 00:52:23,610 --> 00:52:25,920 All through the '40s, when Kurosawa was first 982 00:52:25,920 --> 00:52:29,190 learning his trade, he began to direct early in the '40s. 983 00:52:29,190 --> 00:52:35,710 And this film in 1950 is his first real masterwork. 984 00:52:35,710 --> 00:52:37,910 He's become more and more confident and ambitious 985 00:52:37,910 --> 00:52:40,280 as a director during this period, 986 00:52:40,280 --> 00:52:44,500 but he hadn't displayed his full capacities as a director 987 00:52:44,500 --> 00:52:49,640 until this point, most accounts of his career suggest. 988 00:52:49,640 --> 00:52:54,020 But during this period, in the 1940s, 989 00:52:54,020 --> 00:52:56,870 Kurosawa took up part of himself what 990 00:52:56,870 --> 00:52:59,140 he regarded as a social project, which 991 00:52:59,140 --> 00:53:02,720 was to try to help renovate Japan after the devastations 992 00:53:02,720 --> 00:53:03,840 of the war. 993 00:53:03,840 --> 00:53:06,510 And his films of the '40s almost always 994 00:53:06,510 --> 00:53:10,900 try to suggest various forms various ways 995 00:53:10,900 --> 00:53:14,740 in which people could behave decently and heroically-- 996 00:53:14,740 --> 00:53:18,430 if not heroically, at least decently in an effort 997 00:53:18,430 --> 00:53:21,770 to renovate and reconstitute a damaged 998 00:53:21,770 --> 00:53:23,540 society, a broken society. 999 00:53:23,540 --> 00:53:29,270 One of the reasons that the breakdown of ancient Japan 1000 00:53:29,270 --> 00:53:33,370 is so powerful in Rashomon, no question, 1001 00:53:33,370 --> 00:53:37,200 is that Kurosawa and his cast believed that in some sense, 1002 00:53:37,200 --> 00:53:41,330 there was a symbolic analogy to be made between conditions 1003 00:53:41,330 --> 00:53:46,150 in Japan, actual Japan in the 1940s and early '50s, 1004 00:53:46,150 --> 00:53:49,730 and the broken, terrifying conditions of society 1005 00:53:49,730 --> 00:53:55,520 in the 11th and 12th centuries in the past parable 1006 00:53:55,520 --> 00:53:57,530 that the narrative is telling us. 1007 00:53:57,530 --> 00:54:01,780 And this film continues that tradition. 1008 00:54:01,780 --> 00:54:05,870 But I think many, many viewers, I among them, 1009 00:54:05,870 --> 00:54:09,840 have the feeling that this is more wish fulfillment 1010 00:54:09,840 --> 00:54:12,270 on Kurosawa's part than reality. 1011 00:54:12,270 --> 00:54:14,650 And one could say from an artistic standpoint then, 1012 00:54:14,650 --> 00:54:17,210 one might conclude that it's a weakness in the film. 1013 00:54:17,210 --> 00:54:19,900 I think I might say that the film might 1014 00:54:19,900 --> 00:54:22,230 be more powerful, more truthful to itself, 1015 00:54:22,230 --> 00:54:28,990 that the ending that's tacked on may undermine its deepest 1016 00:54:28,990 --> 00:54:31,510 energies in disturbing ways. 1017 00:54:31,510 --> 00:54:38,930 So it's another example in which commercial and social 1018 00:54:38,930 --> 00:54:43,970 imperatives may be interfering with the artistic integrity 1019 00:54:43,970 --> 00:54:45,370 of the text. 1020 00:54:45,370 --> 00:54:48,720 But it's significant, important to understand 1021 00:54:48,720 --> 00:54:51,450 that this was a tendency that was present in Kurosawa's 1022 00:54:51,450 --> 00:54:53,760 work all the way through the '40s, 1023 00:54:53,760 --> 00:55:00,910 and that therefore, it's a kind of expression of a moral sense 1024 00:55:00,910 --> 00:55:04,390 that the director had that begins 1025 00:55:04,390 --> 00:55:08,480 to become less powerful after Rashomon, 1026 00:55:08,480 --> 00:55:11,370 although he remains a deeply moral director. 1027 00:55:11,370 --> 00:55:13,190 So the ending is a question, and you 1028 00:55:13,190 --> 00:55:18,490 might want to ask yourself how you would respond 1029 00:55:18,490 --> 00:55:22,770 to the question of the relevance of the ending to the rest 1030 00:55:22,770 --> 00:55:26,020 to the rest of the film. 1031 00:55:26,020 --> 00:55:30,820 Let me end with a reminder about maybe what is, in some ways, 1032 00:55:30,820 --> 00:55:34,910 the most powerful aspect of what happens 1033 00:55:34,910 --> 00:55:36,700 when you're watching Rashomon. 1034 00:55:36,700 --> 00:55:38,200 I've said that you feel that you've 1035 00:55:38,200 --> 00:55:43,570 entered into if not a dream, into a kind of uniquely 1036 00:55:43,570 --> 00:55:45,600 stylized space in which what happens 1037 00:55:45,600 --> 00:55:47,730 resembles what happens in real life, 1038 00:55:47,730 --> 00:55:52,360 but also distills what happens in real life, 1039 00:55:52,360 --> 00:55:56,080 highlights it in a way that isn't true of actuality. 1040 00:55:56,080 --> 00:56:01,830 And I think you feel this mythic tendency 1041 00:56:01,830 --> 00:56:03,540 all the way through the film. 1042 00:56:06,670 --> 00:56:13,820 In a certain sense, one way of capturing what I'm saying 1043 00:56:13,820 --> 00:56:15,480 is to say that there is a tension 1044 00:56:15,480 --> 00:56:18,230 in the film between this impulse to be mythic, 1045 00:56:18,230 --> 00:56:20,190 to tell a story that it understands 1046 00:56:20,190 --> 00:56:24,040 to have a fable-like significance and its sense 1047 00:56:24,040 --> 00:56:29,070 of the complexity and concreteness of actuality. 1048 00:56:29,070 --> 00:56:31,650 That is to say, so there's this wonderful, constant tension 1049 00:56:31,650 --> 00:56:35,640 in the film between the enormous persuasiveness 1050 00:56:35,640 --> 00:56:38,481 of the individual images that you see. 1051 00:56:38,481 --> 00:56:40,480 But you sense also that you're in a world that's 1052 00:56:40,480 --> 00:56:41,960 not totally real. 1053 00:56:41,960 --> 00:56:45,010 So the tension I'm trying to get you to feel, 1054 00:56:45,010 --> 00:56:46,900 you can feel it in the dialogue. 1055 00:56:46,900 --> 00:56:49,650 But especially you can feel it in the visual images, 1056 00:56:49,650 --> 00:56:51,640 in the visual texture of the film. 1057 00:56:51,640 --> 00:56:53,990 You can feel a kind of tension between an impulse 1058 00:56:53,990 --> 00:56:56,290 to mythologize, and to fable-ize, 1059 00:56:56,290 --> 00:57:00,190 and an impulse to show the world in its deepest and most 1060 00:57:00,190 --> 00:57:05,220 concrete elements, in its most authentic actuality. 1061 00:57:05,220 --> 00:57:08,080 And the tension between the two-- gee, this is so real. 1062 00:57:08,080 --> 00:57:09,730 Gee, this is so unreal. 1063 00:57:09,730 --> 00:57:13,420 This is so fable-like, is part of the secret of the movie. 1064 00:57:13,420 --> 00:57:17,650 And one way you can feel it with an immensely intense power 1065 00:57:17,650 --> 00:57:19,870 is sometimes when you see the way the film 1066 00:57:19,870 --> 00:57:22,830 deals with human flesh, there are certain scenes, 1067 00:57:22,830 --> 00:57:26,650 for example, where a woman's hand will be on a man's body-- 1068 00:57:26,650 --> 00:57:30,850 talk about how you can be erotic without offending anyone. 1069 00:57:30,850 --> 00:57:33,100 There's a moment where you can see the woman's fingers 1070 00:57:33,100 --> 00:57:35,720 pressing into the man's flesh. 1071 00:57:35,720 --> 00:57:40,240 It's an immensely erotic and powerfully concretizing moment. 1072 00:57:40,240 --> 00:57:41,860 It reminds you of flesh. 1073 00:57:41,860 --> 00:57:46,210 It reminds you of film's power to capture actuality 1074 00:57:46,210 --> 00:57:50,120 with a vividness that goes far beyond what words can ever do, 1075 00:57:50,120 --> 00:57:51,550 the visual power of movie. 1076 00:57:51,550 --> 00:57:53,630 And that's what I mean when I say that there's 1077 00:57:53,630 --> 00:57:57,910 this constant tension in the film between the mythologizing 1078 00:57:57,910 --> 00:58:01,570 tendencies of the story, and of Kurosawa's imagination, 1079 00:58:01,570 --> 00:58:04,250 and what we might call the breaking tendency, 1080 00:58:04,250 --> 00:58:11,080 the concretizing tendency of the film medium, 1081 00:58:11,080 --> 00:58:14,850 which has this capacity to register 1082 00:58:14,850 --> 00:58:17,800 the gross, concrete reality of our experiences 1083 00:58:17,800 --> 00:58:21,410 with a detail and a power that no other medium can. 1084 00:58:21,410 --> 00:58:24,020 Now this sense of tension between a story that 1085 00:58:24,020 --> 00:58:26,770 wants to be a fable and a story that wants to persuade you 1086 00:58:26,770 --> 00:58:30,060 of its concrete reality is part of what 1087 00:58:30,060 --> 00:58:35,920 makes the film so memorable and so significant.