Rashomon

Often described as “the most European of all Japanese directors,” Akira Kurosawa sparked a fascination with the cinema of the Land of the Rising Sun on the Old Continent. The principal strength of Rashomon lies not so much in its exploration of the relativity of truth (a problem earlier addressed by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane) as in the psychological depth of its characters. Kurosawa convincingly demonstrates that the discrepancies in the accounts given by the protagonists—most memorably the bandit Tajōmaru, played by Toshirō Mifune—stem from their individual motivations and prejudices. 

 Writing at the time of the film’s Polish premiere, delayed by nine years, Alicja Helman observed:     “The ugliness of the events unfolding on screen is contrasted in a striking way with the beauty of the mise-en-scène, the astonishing loveliness of nature, and the painterly composition of the frame. This is not the static beauty of Gabriel Figueroa’s photographic imagery, but a remarkable poem of movement, in which the qualities of colour (black and white) and form, animated by the camera, begin to generate a new value. Film and visual art have united here into a dynamic, living painting—breathing space and light, endowed with a voice, transforming itself before our eyes, surprising us with extraordinary contrasts. (…) A subject which, under the expansion of naturalism on screen, might have seemed the only one suited to such treatment has received the most perfect artistic form imaginable (at the present stage of the development of cinematic art). European art continues to draw boundaries around what it deems appropriate for cinematic depiction, whereas for Japanese artists no such limits seem to exist. The juxtaposition of the cruelty and severity of the subject with the refined beauty of its visual realization has produced a unique artistic effect.”