After the screening of "Rashomon", an audience member asked which year was the film? I replied that it was 1950, and she was surprised.
I have always believed that unlike science, economics, history and other purely rational sciences and knowledge categories based on experience accumulation, humanities and arts, especially art, are largely not linear progress. The development of humanities and arts is often cyclical, with peaks and valleys, and even many artistic peaks are gone forever. It is often the emergence of geniuses that changes the overall height of art. Of course, geniuses may be isolated cases, or they may appear in groups.
The audience's surprise actually verified what I said above. I often feel that "the art of cinema is indeed declining", of course, this is my personal judgment. In the face of works like Akira Kurosawa, commenting on his works "advanced" actually seems a bit arrogant of contemporary people.
The first feeling after watching "Rashomon" this time is that Akira Kurosawa is actually a combination of Shakespeare and Tolstoy.
George Steiner in his famous "Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky" regards Tolstoy as the true successor of Homer. He asserted that Western civilization had no real "epic temperament" since Homer, and it was not until the emergence of Tolstoy that it truly inherited Homer's grand vision of the world and raised the realm of human literature to a new height.
Just like the widely praised but slightly biased comment: Tolstoy represents the breadth of Russian literature, and Dostoevsky represents the depth of Russian literature. Akira Kurosawa inherited the breadth of Tolstoy. As for Dostoevsky, we will mention it later.
Tracing back to the source, let’s talk about Homer first.
In The Iliad, or Poem of Power, Simone Weil writes: "The real protagonist, the real theme, and the center of the Iliad is power. In the face of power, the human body shrinks again and again. In the poem, the human soul is constantly changing due to its relationship with power. The soul thinks that it has power, but is restrained and blinded by power, and is forced by the power it has experienced. Submission. Those who dream of progress making power henceforth belong only to the past may well consider this poem an archive; those who recognize power, both then and now, at the center of human history, will see it as A mirror of the most beautiful and purest form."
It was this "sense of power" that Tolstoy inherited, and this "sense of power" also continued in Akira Kurosawa's works. Different from Yasujiro Ozu's "stillness", Akira Kurosawa's works are full of "movement", and this "movement" is manifested at all levels. After the screening, some readers said, "I was sitting in the front row at first, but then I felt that the energy was too strong, so I moved to the back row." Yasujiro Ozu will hide all conflicts, even when he is crying, he turns around and weeps while covering his face, not to mention the shots, the famously long shots and still shots, the characters are mostly soft-spoken and slow-moving. On the other hand, Akira Kurosawa is the complete opposite. He will try his best to visualize and audibly show the "conflict" to the audience, so he is the real mentor of Hollywood blockbuster directors. The scene scheduling is extremely gorgeous. The camera rarely stops, but keeps moving. Even when the camera is still, the characters in the picture are constantly moving, including actions, expressions, and even sounds. Shouting, and now many film grammars that have been learned by filmmakers all over the world and become the norm of our contemporary films, especially Hollywood films, are actually original by Akira Kurosawa. Moviegoers will feel the "sense of movement" and "sense of power" carefully created by Akira Kurosawa from the movie.
In addition, Akira Kurosawa's "epic temperament" is more in his "blockbusters", such as "Seven Samurai", "Ran", "Shadow Dancer". This is the other side of his succession to Tolstoy.
As for Shakespeare, Akira Kurosawa inherited his "psychological drama", Akira Kurosawa even directly adapted his "Othello" into "The Spider's Nest", and in the eyes of a famous critic, "The Spider's Nest" City" is the most successful Shakespeare adaptation of the vast sea, no matter how Japanese it may seem, but this is another similarity between Akira Kurosawa and Tolstoy: they are both cosmopolitans, true humanitarian flag-bearers . Yasujiro Ozu is to Akira Kurosawa, just like Dostoyevsky is to Tolstoy. The former is actually the most ethnic, and the latter is the most cosmopolitan. The characters in Yasujiro Ozu's films use "Japanese" No matter how many elements of Japanese culture Kurosawa uses (and how well they use them), the characters in his films are acting on the cultural principles and perspectives that are common to the world.
Shakespeare excavated people's "subconscious mind" earlier than Freud, and the so-called "the part of the iceberg under the water is far greater than the part exposed on the surface", the theme of "Rashomon" is about people's "selfishness" and "facts". Bewildering and confusing", from the point of view of a single person, the real thoughts in his heart are very different from what he thinks he looks like and what others see him. A simple theory can be based on Freud's "self" , "id" and "superego", just as Freud was actually Shakespeare's commentator, not the other way around, the complexity of the human nature that Kurosawa showed in "Rashomon" is not a sentence Simple Freudian theory can be generalized.
One reader suggested that "Everyone in the film thinks he knows what he wants, but when what he wants is really in front of him, he hesitates, wondering if he really wants it. , this kind of hesitation will even make him choose to destroy this thing", which is simply a rewrite of "to be or not to be". When Hamlet faced his uncle who killed his father and married his mother, his first reaction "should" be nothing. Kill him without hesitation, but he hesitated, and this hesitation was directly transferred to the work "Rashomon". This is what Kurosawa inherited from Shakespeare in excavating the depth of human nature.
The selfishness and hesitation of such inexplicable people can also be seen in Dostoevsky's works, but what Kurosawa learned most from Dostoevsky is actually is the "perspective".
Bakhtin summarized the characteristics of Dostoevsky's works as "polyphonic narrative", that is to say, a novel may or may not have a protagonist, and even if there is, it is only in form. There is not only one philosophy, one thought, and one perspective. The multiple characters in the works represent various ways of looking at the world and philosophies of existence. This structure of Rashomon is even more obvious, and even the perspective is changed in order to take care of the audience. It was clearly divided into four people. Dostoevsky will objectively present the various philosophies of many people, but more or less project his own thoughts on a certain person. Akira Kurosawa's projection and identification in this work are actually external With this story, that is, the woodcutter's perspective. During the post-screening discussion, many people asked, "If everyone in the film is not believable, is there no such thing as believable?" My response was that the story told by the woodcutter at the end was actually "true. "Because he is different from the other three people, first of all, he tells the story under the real "Rashomon", there is no need to lie to defend himself, and he has his own selfishness but there are actually moments of repentance. He and the monk are the two roles played by Akira Kurosawa in the film. One is the doubtful self, and the other is the selfish self. In the end, both doubt and selfishness ushered in a sunny day after the heavy rain.
This is the spirit that Kurosawa inherited from all the people mentioned above - Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky - respect for humanism, pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty. In the final analysis, I still believe, and I believe Kurosawa has always believed that Kant said, "In this world, there are two things that we should look up to all our lives: one is the bright starry sky above us. moral law."
When I watched it a few times before, I didn't pay attention to the last point of view, which is the story in the eyes of the woodcutter. What I remembered was Toshiro Mifune's bravery and wildness, the beauty and sincerity of women, and the grotesqueness of her husband being lied to by a witch. I didn't remember that these would be exposed later. Looking back now, what impressed me the most was this "real" version, where two self-righteous men said in front of women that "women are weak", and after she exposed the false "manliness" of both of them , saying "You are the weak", this is almost a typical feminist discourse like a slogan, redefining the word "strength", the real strength is not force, but the tenacious life force in people's heart, and kindness, The power of compassion. This is actually the true meaning of Kurosawa's "Rashomon", the "poem of power".
View more about Rashomon reviews
