Rashomon
Rashomon | |
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Directed by | Akira Kurosawa |
Screenplay by |
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Based on | "In a Grove" by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa |
Produced by | Minoru Jingo |
Starring |
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Cinematography | Kazuo Miyagawa |
Edited by | Akira Kurosawa |
Music by | Fumio Hayasaka |
Production company | Daiei Film |
Distributed by | Daiei Film |
Release date |
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Running time | 88 minutes |
Country | Japan |
Language | Japanese |
Budget | $250,000 |
Box office | $96,568 (US)[1] |
Rashomon (Japanese: 羅生門, Hepburn: Rashōmon) is a 1950 Jidaigeki psychological thriller/crime film directed by Akira Kurosawa, working in close collaboration with cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa.[2] Starring Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyō, Masayuki Mori, and Takashi Shimura as various people who describe how a samurai was murdered in a forest, the plot and characters are based upon Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story "In a Grove", with the title and framing story being based on "Rashomon", another short story by Akutagawa. Every element is largely identical, from the murdered samurai speaking through a Shinto psychic to the bandit in the forest, the monk, the rape of the wife, and the dishonest retelling of the events in which everyone shows his or her ideal self by lying.[3]
The film is known for a plot device that involves various characters providing subjective, alternative, self-serving, and contradictory versions of the same incident. Rashomon was the first Japanese film to receive a significant international reception;[4][5] it won several awards, including the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, and an Academy Honorary Award at the 24th Academy Awards in 1952, and is considered one of the greatest films ever made. The Rashomon effect is named after the film.
Plot[]
Prologue[]
A woodcutter and a priest are sitting beneath the Rashōmon city gate to stay dry in a downpour when a commoner (Kichijiro Ueda) joins them and they begin recounting a very disturbing story. The woodcutter claims he found the body of a murdered samurai three days earlier while looking for wood in the forest. As he testifies he first found a woman's hat (which belonged to the wife), then a samurai cap (which belonged to the husband), then cut rope (which had bound the husband), then an amulet, and finally he came upon the body upon which he fled to notify the authorities. The priest says he saw the samurai with his wife traveling the same day the murder happened. Both men are then summoned to testify in court, where a fellow witness presents a captured bandit, who claims to have followed the couple after coveting the woman when he glimpsed her in the forest.
The bandit's story[]
The bandit, a notorious outlaw, claims that he tricked the samurai to step off the mountain trail with him and look at a cache of ancient swords he discovered. In the grove, he tied the samurai to a tree, then brought his wife there. She initially tried to defend herself with a dagger but was eventually seduced by the bandit. The wife, ashamed, begged him to duel to the death with her husband, to save her from the guilt and shame of having two men know her dishonor. Tajōmaru honorably set the samurai free and dueled with him. In Tajōmaru's recollection, they fought skillfully and fiercely, with Tajōmaru praising the samurai's swordsmanship. In the end, Tajōmaru killed the samurai and the wife ran away after the fight. At the end of his testimony, he is asked about an expensive dagger owned by the samurai's wife. He says that, in the confusion, he forgot all about it, and that the dagger's pearl inlay would have made it very valuable. He laments leaving it behind.
The wife's story[]
The wife tells a different story to court. She claims that after Tajōmaru left after raping her, she begged her husband to forgive her, but he simply looked at her coldly. She then freed him and begged him to kill her so that she would be at peace but he continued to stare at her with loathing. His expression disturbed her so much that she fainted with the dagger in her hand. She awoke to find her husband dead with the dagger in his chest. She attempted to kill herself but failed.
The samurai's story[]
The court then hears the story of the samurai told through a medium. The samurai claims that, after raping his wife, Tajōmaru asked her to travel with him. She accepted and asked Tajōmaru to kill her husband so that she would not feel the guilt of belonging to two men. Shocked, Tajōmaru grabbed her and gave the samurai a choice of letting the woman go or killing her. "For these words alone", the dead samurai recounted, "I was ready to pardon his crime". The woman fled, and Tajōmaru, after attempting to recapture her, gave up and set the samurai free. The samurai then killed himself with his wife's dagger. Later, someone removed the dagger from his chest, but it is not yet revealed who it was.
The woodcutter's story[]
Back at Rashōmon (after the trial), the woodcutter states to the commoner that all three stories were falsehoods. The woodcutter says he witnessed the rape and murder but he declined the opportunity to testify because he did not want to get involved. According to the woodcutter's story, Tajōmaru begged the samurai's wife to marry him but the woman instead freed her husband. The husband was initially unwilling to fight Tajōmaru, saying he would not risk his life for a spoiled woman, but the woman then criticized both him and Tajōmaru, saying they were not real men and that a real man would fight for a woman's love. She urged them to fight one another but then hid her face in fear once they raised swords; the men, too, were visibly afraid as they began fighting. In the woodcutter's recollection, the resulting duel was far more pitiful and clumsy than Tajōmaru had recounted previously; Tajōmaru ultimately won through a stroke of luck and the woman fled. Tajōmaru could not catch her but took the samurai's sword and left the scene limping.
Epilogue[]
At the gate, the woodcutter, priest, and commoner are interrupted from their discussion of the woodcutter's account by the sound of a crying baby. They find the baby abandoned in a basket and the commoner takes a kimono and an amulet that has been left for the baby. The woodcutter reproaches the commoner for stealing from the abandoned baby, but the commoner chastises him. Having deduced that the reason the woodcutter did not speak up at the trial was that he was the one who stole the dagger from the scene of the murder, the commoner mocks him as "a bandit calling another a bandit". The commoner leaves Rashōmon, claiming that all men are motivated only by self-interest.
These deceptions and lies shake the priest's faith in humanity. He claims it is restored when the woodcutter reaches for the baby in his arms. The priest is suspicious at first but the woodcutter explains that he intends to take care of the baby along with his own six children. This simple revelation recasts the woodcutter's story and the subsequent theft of the dagger in a new light. The priest gives the baby to the woodcutter, saying that the woodcutter has given him a reason to continue having hope in humanity. As the woodcutter takes the baby home, the rain stops and the clouds have parted, revealing the sun.
Cast[]
- Takashi Shimura as Kikori, the woodcutter
- Minoru Chiaki as Tabi Hōshi, the priest
- Kichijiro Ueda as the listener, a common person
- Toshiro Mifune as Tajōmaru, the bandit
- Machiko Kyō as the Samurai's wife
- Masayuki Mori as the Samurai, the husband
- Noriko Honma as Miko, the medium
- Daisuke Katō as Houben, the policeman
Production[]
The name of the film refers to the enormous, former city gate "between modern-day Kyoto and Nara", on Suzaka Avenue's end to the south.[6]
Development[]
Kurosawa felt that sound cinema multiplies the complexity of a film: "Cinematic sound is never merely accompaniment, never merely what the sound machine caught while you took the scene. Real sound does not merely add to the images, it multiplies it." Regarding Rashomon, Kurosawa said, "I like silent pictures and I always have... I wanted to restore some of this beauty. I thought of it, I remember in this way: one of the techniques of modern art is simplification, and that I must therefore simplify this film."[7]
Accordingly, there are only three settings in the film: Rashōmon gate, the woods, and the courtyard. The gate and the courtyard are very simply constructed and the woodland is real. This is partly due to the low budget that Kurosawa gained from Daiei.
Casting[]
When Kurosawa shot Rashomon, the actors and the staff lived together, a system Kurosawa found beneficial. He recalls, "We were a very small group and it was as though I was directing Rashomon every minute of the day and night. At times like this, you can talk everything over and get very close indeed".[8]
Filming[]
The cinematographer, Kazuo Miyagawa, contributed numerous ideas, technical skill, and expertise in support for what would be an experimental and influential approach to cinematography. For example, in one sequence, there is a series of single close-ups of the bandit, then the wife, and then the husband, which then repeats to emphasize the triangular relationship between them.[9]
The use of contrasting shots is another example of the film techniques used in Rashomon. According to Donald Richie, the length of time of the shots of the wife and of the bandit are the same when the bandit is acting barbarically and the wife is hysterically crazy.[10]
Rashomon had camera shots that were directly into the sun. Kurosawa wanted to use natural light, but it was too weak; they solved the problem by using a mirror to reflect the natural light. The result makes the strong sunlight look as though it has traveled through the branches, hitting the actors. The rain in the scenes at the gate had to be tinted with black ink because camera lenses could not capture the water pumped through the hoses.[11]
Lighting[]
Robert Altman compliments Kurosawa's use of "dappled" light throughout the film, which gives the characters and settings further ambiguity.[12] In his essay "Rashomon", Tadao Sato suggests that the film (unusually) uses sunlight to symbolize evil and sin in the film, arguing that the wife gives in to the bandit's desires when she sees the sun. However, Professor Keiko I. McDonald opposes Sato's idea in her essay "The Dialectic of Light and Darkness in Kurosawa's Rashomon". McDonald says the film conventionally uses light to symbolize "good" or "reason" and darkness to symbolize "bad" or "impulse". She interprets the scene mentioned by Sato differently, pointing out that the wife gives herself to the bandit when the sun slowly fades out. McDonald also reveals that Kurosawa was waiting for a big cloud to appear over Rashomon gate to shoot the final scene in which the woodcutter takes the abandoned baby home; Kurosawa wanted to show that there might be another dark rain any time soon, even though the sky is clear at this moment. Unfortunately, the final scene appears optimistic because it was too sunny and clear to produce the effects of an overcast sky.
Editing[]
Stanley Kauffmann writes in The Impact of Rashomon that Kurosawa often shot a scene with several cameras at the same time, so that he could "cut the film freely and splice together the pieces which have caught the action forcefully as if flying from one piece to another." Despite this, he also used short shots edited together that trick the audience into seeing one shot; Donald Richie says in his essay that "there are 407 separate shots in the body of the film ... This is more than twice the number in the usual film, and yet these shots never call attention to themselves".
Music[]
The film was scored by Fumio Hayasaka, who is among the most respected of Japanese composers.[13] At the director's request, he included an adaptation of "Boléro" by Maurice Ravel, especially during the woman's story.[14]
Due to setbacks and some lost audio, the crew took the urgent step of bringing Mifune back to the studio after filming to record another line. Recording engineer Iwao Ōtani added it to the film along with the music, using a different microphone.[15]
Allegorical and symbolic content[]
The film depicts the rape of a woman and the murder of her samurai husband through the widely differing accounts of four witnesses, including the bandit-rapist, the wife, the dead man (speaking through a medium), and lastly the woodcutter, the one witness who seems the most objective and least biased. The stories are mutually contradictory and even the final version may be seen as motivated by factors of ego and saving face. The actors kept approaching Kurosawa wanting to know the truth, and he claimed the point of the film was to be an exploration of multiple realities rather than an exposition of a particular truth. Later film and television use of the "Rashomon effect" focuses on revealing "the truth" in a now conventional technique that presents the final version of a story as the truth, an approach that only matches Kurosawa's film on the surface.
Due to its emphasis on the subjectivity of truth and the uncertainty of factual accuracy, Rashomon has been read by some as an allegory of the defeat of Japan at the end of World War II. James F. Davidson's article, "Memory of Defeat in Japan: A Reappraisal of Rashomon" in the December 1954 issue of the Antioch Review, is an early analysis of the World War II defeat elements.[16] Another allegorical interpretation of the film is mentioned briefly in a 1995 article, "Japan: An Ambivalent Nation, an Ambivalent Cinema" by David M. Desser.[17] Here, the film is seen as an allegory of the atomic bomb and Japanese defeat. It also briefly mentions James Goodwin's view on the influence of post-war events on the film. However, "In a Grove" (the short story by Akutagawa that the film is based on) was published already in 1922, so any postwar allegory would have been the result of Kurosawa's editing rather than the story about the conflicting accounts.
Symbolism runs rampant throughout the film and much has been written on the subject. Bucking tradition,[clarification needed] Miyagawa directly filmed the sun through the leaves of the trees, as if to show the light of truth becoming obscured.
Release[]
Theatrical[]
Rashomon was released in Japan on August 24, 1950.[18] It was released theatrically in the United States by RKO Radio Pictures with English subtitles on December 26, 1951.[18]
Home media[]
Rashomon has been released multiple times on DVD. The Criterion Collection issued a Blu-ray edition of the film based on the 2008 restoration, accompanied by a number of additional features. Criterion also released a DVD edition with the same special features[19]
Reception and legacy[]
Japanese critical responses[]
Although it won two Japanese awards and performed well at the domestic box-office,[20] most Japanese critics did not like the film. When it received positive responses in the West, Japanese critics were baffled; some decided that it was only admired there because it was "exotic", others thought that it succeeded because it was more "Western" than most Japanese films.[21]
In a collection of interpretations of Rashomon, Donald Richie writes that "the confines of 'Japanese' thought could not contain the director, who thereby joined the world at large".[22] He also quotes Kurosawa criticizing the way the "Japanese think too little of our own [Japanese] things".
International responses[]
The film appeared at the 1951 Venice Film Festival at the behest of an Italian language teacher, Giuliana Stramigioli, who had recommended it to Italian film promotion agency Unitalia Film seeking a Japanese film to screen at the festival. However, Daiei Motion Picture Company (a producer of popular features at the time) and the Japanese government had disagreed with the choice of Kurosawa's work on the grounds that it was "not [representative enough] of the Japanese movie industry" and felt that a work of Yasujirō Ozu would have been more illustrative of excellence in Japanese cinema. Despite these reservations, the film was screened at the festival and won both the Italian Critics Award and the Golden Lion award—introducing Western audiences, including Western directors, more noticeably to both Kurosawa's films and techniques, such as shooting directly into the sun and using mirrors to reflect sunlight onto the actor's faces.
The film was released in the United States on December 26, 1951, by RKO Radio Pictures in both subtitled and dubbed versions, and it won an Academy Honorary Award in 1952 for being "the most outstanding foreign language film released in the United States during 1951" (the current Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film wasn't introduced until 1956). The following year, when it was eligible for consideration in other Academy Award categories, it was nominated for Best Art Direction for a Black-and-White Film. Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 98% of 52 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; with an average rating of 9.3/10. The site's consensus reads: "One of legendary director Akira Kurosawa's most acclaimed films, Rashomon features an innovative narrative structure, brilliant acting, and a thoughtful exploration of reality versus perception."[23] In Time Out New York, Andrew Johnston wrote: "Rashomon is probably familiar even to those who haven't seen it, since in movie jargon, the film's title has become synonymous with its chief narrative conceit: a story told multiple times from various points of view. There's much more than that to the film, of course. For example, the way Kurosawa uses his camera...takes this fascinating meditation on human nature closer to the style of silent film than almost anything made after the introduction of sound."[24] Film Critic Roger Ebert gave the film four stars out of four and included it in his Great Movies list.[25]
Preservation[]
In 2008, the film was restored by the Academy Film Archive, the National Film Center of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and Kadokawa Pictures, Inc., with funding provided by the Kadokawa Culture Promotion Foundation and The Film Foundation.[26]
Awards and honors[]
- Blue Ribbon Awards (1951) – Best Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa and Shinobu Hashimoto
- Mainichi Film Concours (1951) – Best Actress: Machiko Kyō
- Venice Film Festival (1951) – Golden Lion: Akira Kurosawa
- National Board of Review USA (1951) – Best Director: Akira Kurosawa and Best Foreign Film: Japan
- 24th Academy Awards, USA (1952) – Honorary Award for "most outstanding foreign language film"
Top lists[]
The film appeared on many critics' top lists of the best films.
- 5th – Top ten list in 1950, Kinema Junpo
- 10th – Directors' Top Ten Poll in 1992, Sight & Sound[27]
- 10th - 100 Greatest Films list in 2000 The Village Voice [28]
- 9th – Directors' Top Ten Poll in 2002, Sight & Sound[29]
- 13th - Critics' poll in 2002, Sight & Sound[30][31]
- 290th – The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time in 2008, Empire[32]
- 50 Klassiker, Film by Nicolaus Schröder in 2002[33]
- 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die by Steven Jay Schneider in 2003[34]
- 7th – Kinema Junpo's The Greatest Japanese Films of All Time in 2009.[35]
- 22nd – Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010.[36]
- 26th - Critics top ten poll, 100 Greatest Films of All Time, Sight & Sound magazine (2012)
- 18th - Director's top ten poll, 100 Greatest Films of All Time, Sight & Sound magazine (2012)
- Woody Allen included it among his top ten films.[37]
- 4th - BBC's list of "100 greatest foreign language films" in 2018.[38]
See also[]
- "The Moonlit Road", a short story that may have served as inspiration for Rashomon[39][a]
- The Outrage, a 1964 remake starring Paul Newman
- Ulidavaru Kandanthe, a 2014 Kannada-language film partially inspired by some plot elements
- Tombstone Rashomon, a 2017 film that tells the story of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in the style of Rashomon
- Kishōtenketsu
- Nonlinear narrative
- Unreliable narrator
- Valerie (film) (1957)
- Vantage Point, a 2008 film with a similar plot elements focuses on an assassination attempt on the President of the United States
- Police Story 2013, a 2013 film partially inspired by some plot elements
- Talvar, a 2015 film narrates the story of a double murder through multiple contradictory viewpoints.
- The Rashomon job, an episode of the series Leverage telling the story of a heist from five points of view (S03E11)
- The Handmaiden, a 2016 Korean erotic psychological thriller told in 3 parts through multiple views.[41]
- List of films considered the best
Notes[]
- ^ The other one being The Woman in Question (1950).[40]
References[]
- ^ "Rashomon". The Numbers. Retrieved August 2, 2020.
- ^ "Rashomon". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved November 21, 2018.
- ^ "Akira Kurosawa Rashomon". www.cinematoday.jp (in Japanese). Retrieved June 11, 2020.
- ^ Wheeler Winston Dixon, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: A Short History of Film. Rutgers University Press, 2008, ISBN 9780813544755, p. 203
- ^ Catherine Russell: Classical Japanese Cinema Revisited. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011, ISBN 9781441107770, chapter 4 The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa
- ^ Richie, Rashomon, p 113.
- ^ Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa.
- ^ Qtd. in Richie, Films.
- ^ The World of Kazuo Miyagawa (original title: The Camera Also Acts: Movie Cameraman Miyagawa Kazuo) director unknown. NHK, year unknown. Television/Criterion blu-ray
- ^ Richie, Films.
- ^ Akira Kurosawa. "Akira Kurosawa on Rashomon". Retrieved December 21, 2012.
when the camera was aimed upward at the cloudy sky over the gate, the sprinkle of the rain couldn’t be seen against it, so we made rainfall with black ink in it.
- ^ Altman, Robert. One typical example from the movie which shows the ambiguity of the characters is when the bandit and the wife talk to each other in the woods, the light falls on the person who is not talking and shows the amused expressions, this represents the ambiguity present. "Altman Introduction to Rashomon", Criterion Collection DVD, Rashomon.
- ^ "Hayasaka, Fumio – Dictionary definition of Hayasaka, Fumio | Encyclopedia.com: FREE online dictionary". Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
- ^ "Akira Kurosawa on Rashomon — From the Current — The Criterion Collection". Criterion.com. February 25, 2002. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
- ^ Teruyo Nogami, Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa, Stone Bridge Press, Inc., 1 September 2006, p. 90, ISBN 1933330090.
- ^ The article has since appeared in some subsequent Rashomon anthologies, including Focus on Rashomon [1] in 1972 and Rashomon (Rutgers Film in Print) [2] in 1987. Davidson's article is referred to in other sources, in support of various ideas. These sources include: The Fifty-Year War: Rashomon, After Life, and Japanese Film Narratives of Remembering a 2003 article by Mike Sugimoto in Japan Studies Review Volume 7 [3], Japanese Cinema: Kurosawa's Ronin by G. Sham "Archived copy". Archived from the original on January 15, 2006. Retrieved November 16, 2005.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link), Critical Reception of Rashomon in the West by Greg M. Smith, Asian Cinema 13.2 (Fall/Winter 2002) 115-28 [4], Rashomon vs. Optimistic Rationalism Concerning the Existence of "True Facts" [5][permanent dead link], Persistent Ambiguity and Moral Responsibility in Rashomon by Robert van Es [6] and Judgment by Film: Socio-Legal Functions of Rashomon by Orit Kamir [7] Archived 2015-09-15 at the Wayback Machine.
- ^ "Hiroshima: A Retrospective". illinois.edu. Archived from the original on October 22, 2011.
- ^ Jump up to: a b Galbraith IV 1994, p. 309.
- ^ "Rashomon". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved May 15, 2020.
- ^ Richie, Donald (2001). A Hundred Years of Japanese Film. A Concise History. Tokyo: Kodansha International. p. 139.
- ^ Tatara, Paul (December 25, 1997). "Rashomon". Tcm.com. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
- ^ (Richie, 80)
- ^ "Rashomon". Rotten Tomatoes. Flixster. Retrieved January 6, 2019.
- ^ Johnston, Andrew (February 26, 1998). "Rashomon". Time Out New York.
- ^ "Rashomon". Roger Ebert.com.
- ^ "Rashomon Blu-ray - Toshirô Mifune". www.dvdbeaver.com. Retrieved May 15, 2020.
- ^ "Sight & Sound top 10 poll 1992". BFI. Archived from the original on June 18, 2012. Retrieved February 17, 2015.
- ^ Hoberman, J. (January 4, 2000). "100 Best Films of the 20th Century". New York: Village Voice Media, Inc. Archived from the original on March 31, 2014. Retrieved December 14, 2014.
- ^ "Sight & Sound Top Ten Poll 2002 The Rest of Director's List". old.bfi.org.uk.
- ^ "Sight & Sound 2002 Critics' Greatest Films poll". listal.com.
- ^ "Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time 2002". bfi.org.
- ^ "Empire Features". Empireonline.com. December 5, 2006. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
- ^ Schröder, Nicolaus. (2002). 50 Klassiker, Film. Gerstenberg. ISBN 978-3-8067-2509-4.
- ^ "1001 Series". 1001beforeyoudie.com. July 22, 2002. Archived from the original on January 10, 2014. Retrieved October 21, 2011.
- ^ "Greatest Japanese films by magazine Kinema Junpo (2009 version)". Archived from the original on July 11, 2012. Retrieved December 26, 2011.
- ^ "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema – 22. Rashomon". Empire.
- ^ "Read Sight & Sound Top 10 Lists from Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright, Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro, Woody Allen and More". Collider. August 24, 2012.
- ^ "100 greatest foreign language films". bbc.com published 27 October 2018. Retrieved October 27, 2020.
- ^ "How Kurosawa inspired Tamil films". The Times of India. Retrieved March 13, 2016.
- ^ "Andha Naal 1954". The Hindu. December 12, 2008. Archived from the original on December 18, 2008. Retrieved March 13, 2016.
- ^ Northup, Brent. "Film Review: The Handmaiden". Independent Record. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
Bibliography[]
- Davidson, James F. (1987) "Memory of Defeat in Japan: A Reappraisal of Rashomon" in Richie, Donald (ed.). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 159–166.
- Erens, Patricia (1979) Akira Kurosawa: a guide to references and resources. Boston: G.K.Hall.
- Galbraith IV, Stuart (1994). Japanese Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films. McFarland. ISBN 0-89950-853-7.
- Heider, Karl G. (March 1988). "The Rashomon Effect: When Ethnographers Disagree". American Anthropologist. 90 (1): 73–81. doi:10.1525/aa.1988.90.1.02a00050.
- Kauffman, Stanley (1987) "The Impact of Rashomon" in Richie, Donald (ed.) Rashomon. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 173–177.
- McDonald, Keiko I. (1987) "The Dialectic of Light and Darkness in Kurosawa's Rashomon" in Richie, Donald (ed.) Rashomon. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 183–192.
- Naas, Michael B. (1997) "Rashomon and the Sharing of Voices Between East and West." in Sheppard, Darren, et al., (eds.) On Jean-Luc Nancy: The Sense of Philosophy. New York: Routledge, pp. 63–90.
- Richie, Donald (1987) "Rashomon" in Richie, Donald (ed.) Rashomon. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 1–21.
- Richie, Donald (1984) The Films of Akira Kurosawa. (2nd ed.) Berkeley, California: University of California Press
- Sato, Tadao (1987) "Rashomon" in Richie, Donald (ed.) Rashomon New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 167–172.
- Tyler, Parker. "Rashomon as Modern Art" (1987) in Richie, Donald (ed.) Rashomon. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 149–158.
External links[]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Rashomon. |
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Rashomon (film) |
- Rashomon at IMDb
- Rashomon at AllMovie
- Rashomon at the TCM Movie Database
- Rashomon at Rotten Tomatoes
- Rashomon at Box Office Mojo
- "The Rashomon Effect", an essay by Stephen Prince at the Criterion Collection
- 1950 films
- Japanese-language films
- 1950 crime drama films
- 1950s crime thriller films
- 1950s psychological thriller films
- Adultery in films
- Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award winners
- Japanese black-and-white films
- Daiei Film films
- Existentialist works
- Fiction with unreliable narrators
- Films scored by Fumio Hayasaka
- Films set in the 8th century
- Films awarded an Academy Honorary Award
- Films based on short fiction
- Films directed by Akira Kurosawa
- Films produced by Masaichi Nagata
- Films set in Kyoto
- 8th century in Japan
- Japanese films
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- Japanese crime drama films
- Japanese crime thriller films
- Jidaigeki films
- Golden Lion winners
- Japanese nonlinear narrative films
- Japanese psychological thriller films
- Films about rape
- Films based on works by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
- Films with screenplays by Akira Kurosawa
- Films with screenplays by Shinobu Hashimoto
- Rashōmon