Rashomon (Kurosawa 1950) 448x336 H264.nfo
Rashomon (Kurosawa 1950) 448x336 H264
Rashomon (1950)
Rashômon (original title)
Unrated | 1h 28min | Crime, Drama | 26 December 1951 (USA)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042876/
Rating: 8.3
A heinous crime and its aftermath are recalled from differing points of view.
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Writers: Ryûnosuke Akutagawa (stories), Akira Kurosawa (screenplay) | 2 more credits »
Stars: Toshirô Mifune, Machiko Kyô, Masayuki Mori
File: MP4
File size: 352 MB
Duration: 1:28:09
Video: H.264/AVC 448 x 336
Audio: AAC mono 96 Kbits
Language: Japanese
Subtitles: English, muxed (switchable); External SRT also incl.
NOTE: Please ignore the spurious second subtitles track.
Review by Jonathan Crow (Allmovie.com)
Rashomon's winning the Golden Lion in the 1951 Venice Film Festival is
one of the key events of world cinema. Not only did it establish
director Akira Kurosawa as one of the masters of the medium, but it
compelled European and American audiences to look seriously at non-
Western cinemas. Without Rashomon, the international critical successes
of Kenji Mizoguchi, Satyajit Ray, and others are difficult to imagine.
The film's structure, which replays the same event though different
characters' eyes, layers ambiguity atop ambiguity. Not only are the
witnesses' testimonies completely incompatible but the reliability of
the film's primary narrator, the woodcutter, is seriously questioned.
If the woodcutter initially lied about his role in this crime, then
what else could he be lying about? The film comes precariously close to
nihilism--the denial of all objective truth and the utter senselessness
of existence. Yet Kurosawa pulls back from the abyss in the film's
final moments. Though most of Rashomon is adapted from two short
stories by famously misanthropic Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa,
Kurosawa himself penned the final sequence, an elegant summation of his
signature humanism. The truth may be inscrutable, even unknowable,
Kurosawa argues, but hope and compassion remain. This vision struck a
chord in European audiences for whom the horrors of war were still
fresh and the existentialist philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and
Albert Camus were gaining popularity. Kurosawa's dynamic editing and
swaggering camerawork seemed vibrant and sophisticated for a national
cinema thought at the time to be second-rate, and the film proved
influential to several generations of filmmakers. Ingmar Bergman
included a sequence in The Virgin Spring (1960) strongly reminiscent of
the film's most memorable sequences--the woodcutter's walk through the
forest--and Alain Resnais acknowledged Rashomon's influence on the bold
plot structure and existential content of his art-house classic Last
Year at Marienbad (1961). In both artistic achievement and historical
importance, Rashomon remains one of the masterpieces of cinema.
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