Rashomon Effects

Kurosawa, Rashomon and their legacies

Blair Davis, Robert Anderson, Jan Walls, Blair Davis, Robert Anderson, Jan Walls

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138827097
• eBook ISBN: 9781317574637
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Akira Kurosawa is widely known as the director who opened up Japanese film to Western audiences, and following his death in 1998, a process of reflection has begun about his life's work as a whole and its legacy to cinema. Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon has become one of the best-known Japanese films ever made, and continues to be discussed and imitated more than 60 years after its first screening.

This book examines the cultural and aesthetic impacts of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, as well as the director's larger legacies to cinema, its global audiences and beyond. It demonstrates that these legacies are manifold: not only cinematic and artistic, but also cultural and cognitive. The book moves from an examination of one filmmaker and his immediate social context in Japan, and goes on to explore how an artist's ideas might transcend their cultural origins to ultimately provide global influences. Discussing how Rashomon 's effects began to multiply with the film being re-imagined and repurposed in numerous media forms in the decades that followed its initial release, the book also shows that the film and its ideas have been applied to a wider range of social and cultural phenomena in a variety of institutional contexts. It addresses issues beyond the realm of Rashomon within film studies, extending to the Rashomon effect, which itself has become a widely recognized English term referring to the significantly different interpretations of different eyewitnesses to the same dramatic event.

As the first book on Rashomon since Donald Richie's 1987 anthology, it will be invaluable to students and scholars of film studies, film history, Japanese cinema and communication studies. It will also resonate more broadly with those interested in Japanese culture and society, anthropology and philosophy.

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Introduction

Blair Davis, Robert Anderson and Jan Walls

Since Akira Kurosawa’s death in 1998, a process of reflection has begun about his life’s work as whole and its legacy to the cinema and its global audiences. There are already magisterial books on the works of Kurosawa, including some by authors featured in this volume. Our objective is to explore a core part of Kurosawa’s legacy by using his most famous film, Rashomon, as the primary reference. First screened in August 1950, and winner of the 1951 Venice Film Festival prize, Rashomon has arguably become the best-known Japanese film, ever. After this, his twelfth film, Kurosawa’s reputation was firmly established in international cinema, and Rashomon continues to be discussed and imitated more than sixty years after its first screening. Our bibliography includes the essential sources on cinematic history about Kurosawa, including Donald Richie’s early seminal book in 1972: Focus on Rashomon.

Legacies are not simply intentional: Kurosawa often deflected questions about his intention. Legacies are not necessarily recognizable to those in whose name they emerge, but the legacies discussed here testify to the polyvalence of the work and its creator.

This collection of studies is entitled Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies. We use the plural form intentionally because the essays in this volume address issues beyond the realm of Rashomon within film studies and center around the Rashomon effect, which itself has become a widely recognized English term referring to significantly different perspectives on and interpretations of the same dramatic event by different eyewitnesses. The dual figures of ripples and circles comprise the organizing image and principle of this book. The ripples represent the creative energy caused by each new iteration of the Rashomon principle, namely that any event or process usually involves more than one take, and indeed at times multiple, inconsistent and even conflicting takes. In this book, we describe the continuing and spreading results of an event or action as ripples. Like the ever-expanding ripples moving across water when an object is dropped into it, a ripple effect occurs when there is incremental movement outward from an initial state. This image has also been applied in financial markets to describe the impact of an event and how it circulates through the players in the industry and its effect on stock price and stock coverage. While the movement of the ripples represents the continuing and vibrant influence of Rashomon effects into the twenty-first century, the circles represent specific events, such as the publication of a new script, a particular production or a remake.

The ripples formed by dropping a small object into still water naturally form an expanding system of concentric circles. In our envisioning of the spread of awareness of Rashomon effects, its development has occurred in three significant stages – the boundaries of which we see as three time–space circles. In the innermost circle lies the origins of Kurosawa’s Rashomon narrative, its literary archaeology from the seminal version found in the centuries-old Konjaku Monogatari, through Akutagawa’s 1922 Yabu no naka to Hashimoto and Kurosawa’s final screenplay entitled Rashomon in 1950. Then appears the larger middle circle, involving the production, circulation, translations and receptions (domestic and international) of the finished film. Third, we envision an outer circle that includes all of Rashomon’s subsequent transcultural, transdisciplinary and cross-media influences, all of which generate ripples that influence other iterations.

This fluid pattern of expanding ripples and geo-cultural circles describes the organization and structure of the book. In the twentieth century, light was discovered to consist of both particles and waves, and the tension between those two interpretations of the same phenomenon led to enormous creativity in science. Similarly, it is the vibrant and creative interaction between the kinetic energy of the ripples moving ever outward and the limits of each circle that this collection of essays captures.

Thus, this concentric and interactive structure of ripples and circles explains why different perspectives occur throughout this work. While there may be reasons to take a more unitary and singular approach to this complex phenomenon, we, on the contrary, feel that the strength and reach of this book lies in highlighting and emphasizing the number of possible interpretations of Rashomon effects, thus confirming and applying our underlying thesis, and producing our very own Rashomon effect.

All of us are limited by our different takes or spins on what we perceive to be reality or truth. The Rashomon effect is quite likely to have a permanent role in culture because it provides the perfect name for something that we cannot easily put a name to, because the film dramatizes and contains so much of our common experience. The appearance of a film’s title in the language of our everyday life, for example, is consistent with our experience. It is quite common to hear people describe an intense sight, event or experience as like in a movie. Millions around the world have sat spellbound in darkness seeing films, thus establishing a cognitive link from cultures to the real world. Even the huge everyday presence of the movie industry, its stars, hype and money, does not diminish the cinema’s effect in our imaginative worlds. Some describe even their most unusual experience as ‘just like in a movie’ – and this includes witness accounts of the sight of the airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center towers in New York in September 2001. In part this infusion might derive from the representation on screen of things not seen previously, where the screen foreshadows in imagination something that comes later in life. Also in part this infusion constitutes a natural cognitive bridge. Given this dual power of the cinema in our ordinary and imaginative worlds, is the cinema not also bound to appear in language?

But we are suggesting that the relation of Rashomon and life is a little different from the common description. Spellbound by Kurosawa’s art, viewers widely report that Rashomon represents and frames common everyday experience. They find a powerful connection between the way the film does not explain or close in on itself, and their own remembered and perplexing experience. They know intimately the ambiguity that Rashomon leaves in a new audience, because it is their ambiguity too. Therefore saying ‘like in Rashomon’ is consistent with the appearance of film in the language of everyday life, but moves it away from unusual experience and in the direction of usual experience. This is why it makes sense to speak of the Rashomon effect. Moreover, films seem at first glance to be easier than other media to understand, after all we see the same images, so brilliant in the darkness, therefore the experience must be shared. But is this so? Is it true, as D.P. Martinez asks in Remaking Kurosawa, that films are seen and believed to be fundamentally translatable as visual texts, that humans share a way of seeing? She also suggests audiences take for granted that the experience of being in the world is somehow shared. Is this true or is it an important fallacy (Martinez 2009:15)? This book tests the responses to Rashomon against that question.

This circular path – from an assessment of the work of an individual filmmaker who began in a restrictive working environment, through a consideration of his impact during his long life and then to the legacy of his films far beyond his country and language – takes us back to Kurosawa as an individual genius. This circular path engages us in the inner life of an individual artist and his immediate social context in Japan, constantly enlarging the context along with Kurosawa’s effort, so that from its furthest circumference, we must continue to put the artist and his legacy near the center. We become curious about something that has reached us by transcending its origins – how could this be achieved, we wonder? – and we are taken back to Kurosawa’s original circumstances. Mindful of these origins, each author in this book adds something for a new generation so that it may more deeply appreciate Kurosawa’s exceptional contributions and influence. The contributions glide from the early work of an individual artist (and viewers of his films) at the center of this enlarging circle to its furthest circumference – the legacies, the implications, the enduring puzzles. There are a variety of approaches to our subject that befit Kurosawa and Rashomon.

Much ink has been spilt on the issue of the non-Japaneseness of Rashomon, regardless of the surface manifestations of traditional Japanese setting, costume, architecture and language. This only became an issue after the film began winning prizes overseas, and the implication of the criticism clearly was that Kurosawa had intentionally pandered to Western audiences, thus exceeding the boundaries that define a Japanese film. In the field of boundary studies, a crucial distinction is made between people whose identity is marked by thick boundaries and those marked by thin boundaries. What we are calling circles in this book could also be called boundaries; particularly the circle that divides Japanese ripples from international ripples.

You will find here concise summaries of information on Rashomon from different authors, presented from different scholarly and critical perspectives. This is in keeping with the spirit of the film in that each variation presented is given its own distinct consideration, but without creating the conflicting representations that give rise to the Rashomon effect. There is also an unspoken intent in this book, and that is the wish of contributors not to subtract from the unique experience that first-time viewers have with Rashomon. Instead we think that when new audiences encounter this film and others by Kurosawa, there is a great satisfaction and reward in de-constructing their rich potential. As a young Canadian wrote recently, ‘You avoided telling me why you asked me to see this film. Having seen Rashomon I find it now comes back to me, again and again. I cannot avoid the Rashomon effect. It was there all the time’ (personal communication, November 2012).

Not only does Kurosawa’s influence pertain to the cinematic imagery of future generations of filmmakers, but through films such as Rashomon the director has succeeded in overcoming essentialist notions of how cultural products are to be understood. That Rashomon has acquired its international reputation is testament to how the film simultaneously communicates with both Japanese and world audiences. Kurosawa himself writes: ‘I decided to use the Akutagawa, In a Grove story, which goes into the depths of the human heart as if with a surgeon’s scalpel, laying bare its dark complexities and bizarre twists’ (1983: 135). He also writes that ‘… the human animal suffers from the trait of instinctive self-aggrandizement’ (1983: 140). Both of these statements reflect his concern, not with Japanese characteristics, but with human characteristics. Kurosawa and screenwriter Hashimoto had steeped themselves in the literary, cinematic and artistic traditions around them, and in so doing were in a position to innovate. Rashomon was also subject, however, to specific challenges during its creation, as well as subsequent opportunities after its release, and these small details must be remembered when considering if and how an artistic creation is able to transcend its origins. Kurosawa’s legacies are multifold: not only cinematic and artistic, but also cultural and cognitive, which the following chapters demonstrate from different perspectives.

Outline of the chapters

This book asks broad historic questions, namely: What were the literary antecedents of the screenplay that began with Hashimoto’s first effort to rewrite Akutagawa’s short story into a feature film; where did Akutagawa get the idea of presenting three irreconcilable self-exonerating testimonies recounting the circumstances of a death; how did the details of his biography influence the paths taken by the director; how did he seize creative opportunities and fuse them into a work of enduring value; was he much influenced by the work of other filmmakers; how does Rashomon fit into his view of his own work; what was the evolution of the characteristic Kurosawa aesthetic; how was Rashomon received critically at the time; how did Rashomon make its way to the Venice International Film Festival without the director himself even knowing about the submission; and as the ripples expanded, what did this film mean to others far removed in space and time from its origin?

In Chapter 2, Jan Walls explores the literary genealogy of the plot in which mutually irreconcilable self-exonerating testimonies are presented by participants in or observers of a dramatic incident. This is essential information for the full appreciation of the film, but should be absorbed only after the viewer has first seen it. This contextual information was part of Kurosawa’s own socially and culturally embedded awareness, but may need to be made explicit for a non-Japanese viewer.

Teruyo Nogami was twenty-two years old when she was handed the screenplay of Rashomon and told that she would work as the director’s assistant. Chapter 3 recounts that experience, distilled much later through her memory of working with Kurosawa firsthand.

Donald Richie reflects on the production history of the film in Chapter 4, offering insights into the aesthetic and thematic reasons for Kurosawa’s creative choices on the set while filming in Nara and Kyoto.

In Chapter 5, Andrew Horvat investigates the circumstances that led from the first screening in Tokyo at the Imperial Theater to being short-listed and ultimately chosen for the top prize at the Venice International Film Festival in 1951. The way the choice was made by the jury, and reverberations in the Tokyo film and critical communities are remarkable for their diversity and disagreement.

In Chapter 6, Janice Matsumura examines some of the historical origins of attitudes and behavioral standards depicted in the film. She discusses their significance in light of Kurosawa’s belief that historical authenticity must be maintained in pictures made entirely for a contemporary audience. Matsumura discusses the Rashomon effect as an allegorical critique on human behavior in light of the (then) recent war crime trials in postwar occupied Japan.

Beginning the part of the book that focuses on the third circle of ripples, outward beyond Japan and beyond cinema, Robert Anderson explores in Chapter 7 what the Rashomon effect is, and what it is not. He identifies a more complex constellation of elements, a new paradigm that constitutes the Rashomon effect as found in many disciplines (including the courts). He contrasts this complex paradigm with the simplified convenience of the popular understanding of it being about differences in perspective.

In Chapter 8, Nur Yalman explores the role of the Rashomon effect in anthropological thinking – where anthropologists have to understand the purposes and intentions of the actors yet recognize that due to their privacy and cultural complexity these intentions are not easily known. The Rashomon effect thus challenges the work of all social scientists, and so demands a high degree of self-awareness. Doing existential anthropology requires us to contain or even suspend our selves, and Yalman suggests that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology
• Front cover image
• 1 Introduction
• 2 From Konjaku and Bierce to Akutagawa to Kurosawa: Ripples and the evolution of Rashomon
• 3 ‘Smiled on by Lady Luck: Rashomon’ (2006) [Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa (English translation by Juliet Carpenter)]
• 4 The production history of Rashomon
• 5 Rashomon perceived: The challenge of forging a transnationally shared view of Kurosawa’s legacy
• 6 Rashomon as a twelfth-century period picture and Occupation period social critique
• 7 What is the Rashomon effect?
• 8 The Rashomon effect: Considerations of existential anthropology
• 9 Screening truths: Rashomon and cinematic negotiation
• 10 Reflections on Rashomon, Kurosawa and the Japanese audience
• 11 Kurosawa’s international legacy
• 12 Dialogue on Kurosawa: Nationality, technique, lifework
• 13 Conclusion: Ripples and effects
• Appendix I: The Rashomon effect in the social sciences
• Appendix II: Rashomon’s media legacies
• Bibliography
• Index