Rashomon

No authoritative film-history anniversary anchors today's date, so here is a structural one instead.

Rashomon (1950) and The 400 Blows (1959) are nine years apart, East and West — and two halves of the same revolution: both put the act of storytelling itself on screen. Rashomon gives one crime four contradictory testimonies; The 400 Blows lets a Paris boy see the world through his own eyes — and it is semi-autobiographical too.

Each also opened a long partnership: Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune went on to make 16 films together; Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Léaud made five under the name Antoine Doinel. And while shooting The 400 Blows, Truffaut took Léaud every night to watch rushes of Godard's Breathless — a film that entered this archive on 29 September.

Kurosawa, after watching The 400 Blows, called it one of the most beautiful films he had ever seen. Today's pair annotate each other.

京都，雨。竹林里发现一具尸体。

一个樵夫报案，一个盗贼被擒，一个女人失踪，一个武士死了。案子不大，却要审上法庭——因为每个活着的人都说了自己那一版，而四个版本没有一处完全重合。

谁在说谎？谁又在说自己的真相？

（这里不再往下说。）

One crime, four testimonies, zero truths

Rashomon premiered at Tokyo's Imperial Theatre on 25 August 1950. 88 minutes, Japanese, produced and distributed by Daiei. Directed by Akira Kurosawa, co-written with Shinobu Hashimoto; cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa, score by Fumio Hayasaka, editing by Shigeo Nishida.

The screenplay borrows from two Ryūnosuke Akutagawa stories: plot and characters from "In a Bamboo Grove" (1922), the title and frame from "Rashōmon" (1915) — a destitute man sheltering from the rain under a ruined gate, listening to ghost stories.

Four versions

The bandit Tajōmaru (Toshirō Mifune), the samurai's wife (Machiko Kyō), the samurai himself (Masayuki Mori, appearing as a spirit), and the woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) each tell their version of what happened in the grove. Every version is internally consistent; together they demolish one another. The film refuses to judge: it puts the very concept of "truth" on the witness stand.

Technique: the forbidden move

• Shooting directly into the sun — forbidden by Daiei's own cinematography manuals; Kurosawa did it anyway, using Miyagawa's eight-sided mirror rig to bounce natural light into the grove;
• the dappled light in the trees was made by hanging baseball netting in the branches;
• Fuji film stock's contrast pushed to the extreme, lenses from 32 to 75mm, a Mitchell NC camera;
• rain mixed with black ink — plain water is invisible on film.

From unloved to the Golden Lion

Daiei considered the film unrepresentative of Japan and preferred Yasujirō Ozu for Venice. Giuliana Stramigioli of Italifilm championed it after seeing rushes, and it went to the 1951 Venice Film Festival (the 12th edition), winning the Golden Lion and the Italian Film Critics' Award — the first time a Japanese film topped one of the world's three major festivals. At the 24th Academy Awards in 1952 it received an Honorary Award for foreign-language film (then non-competitive); it was later nominated for Best Art Direction (Sō Matsuyama), BAFTA Best Film, and won the Blue Ribbon for best screenplay. RKO released it in the United States on 26 December 1951; overseas earnings were roughly US$800,000.

Reception and legacy

Rotten Tomatoes: 63 reviews, 98%, average 9.2. Metacritic: 98/100 from 18 critics. Roger Ebert gave four stars and admitted it to Great Movies. Sight & Sound 2022: critics' poll 43rd, directors' poll 21st. Kinema Junpo 2009: 7th-greatest Japanese film. BBC 2018: 4th-greatest foreign-language film. Restored in 2008 by the Academy Film Archive, Japan's National Film Center and Kadokawa.

Reception in Japan was divided, and the score courted trouble: Boléro was accused of plagiarizing Ravel, French publishers protested after the release there, and the film was pulled from the 4th Cannes competition in late 1950.

Its deepest legacy is a phrase: the "Rashomon effect" — one event told as different versions by differently placed witnesses. Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects and Hero all descend from it.