Rashomon : Between The Story and The Film
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| taken from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/Rashomon |
Rashomon
is a story written by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, one of the most famous writer in
Japan. His writings are cynical and bring up uncommon theme thus
he is said to have strong characteristic in the way of writing. “What he did
was to question the values of his society, dramatize the complexities of human
psychology, and study, with a Zen taste for paradox, the precarious balance of
illusion and reality,” (Kojima, 12). Rashomon itself is the largest gate in
Kyoto when Kyoto was a capital city of Japan. With the decline of West Kyoto,
the gate became a hideout for thieves and robbers and a place for abandoning
unclaimed corpses. The story is about a
discharged servant who saw an old woman on the top of Rashomon is stealing hair
from the corpse left there. The woman said that she was doing this to earn
money for life. Even though at first the servant thought stealing like that was
the worst thing that he had ever seen, in the end he stole the woman’s clothes.
When Akira Kurosawa wanted to adapt Rashomon
into a film, he found a problem that if he wanted to
recreate this story into a film,
the film’s duration would be too short because
the story itself is really condensed. Then
he decided to combine two stories from Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s works, which are Rashomon and In a Groove, into one film. Even though the movie titled Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa only took the
nuance of devastated Kyoto and the ruined gate of Rashomon from the Rashomon story and the rest of the film
is mainly based on the In a Groove story. In a Groove tells a story about the
finding of a dead man body and then followed by seven of various testimonies on
how the man could be killed from different people. In the end, there is no
conclusion which one was true and how each testimony related to each other.
Combining two
stories to make them into one story in Rashomon
film is not enough for Akira Kurosawa because he modified some parts of In a Groove story by adding new
characters in order to make the story fits the film’s plot, and probably it would
make the audiences understand the content of the film easily. The most
significant introducing new character is a man who met the priest and the
woodcutter under the gate. He was there to hear the story which is told by both
the priest and the woodcutter. He asked and gave comments which sound cynical
on all the various versions of the story that he heard. He is the only one who
essentially was uninvolved in the story of the finding of the dead man’s body
thus he had no version to tell. But through his questions actually the film develops.
The second new introducing character is the abandoned baby who is found under
the gate by the priest, the woodcutter, and the unknown man. This abandoned
baby probably appeared to resemble the
original Rashomon story because later
on the unknown man stole the abandoned baby’s clothes and then just went away,
which is similar with the discharged servant who took away the old woman’s
clothes. And the interesting part is when the
woodcutter told the priest that he wanted to adopt the baby. Isn’t it very contrast with the values that shown in
the entire film? The entire film tells us that we cannot determine which one is
good which is bad, because good things and bad things are vague. But in my
opinion what the woodcutter had done is simply because he felt pity with the
baby. He just wanted to do good thing, there were no certain motives at
all. Maybe that’s why in the end the
priest said to the woodcutter that because of the woodcutter’s act, he still
had faith in man.
Akira Kurosawa made this film simple, in terms of
cinematic sounds and place settings. As we usually see in other films,
background sounds often appear to support the scene’s
condition, nuance, or emotion. In Rashomon,
there are background sounds but compared to other films the background sounds
rarely appear. The film shooting also did in only three places; the gate, the
wood, and the courtyard. Based on the story indeed the places are only there
but actually Kurosawa could modify if he wanted to, but he did not. As Kurosawa
said, “I like silent pictures and I always have. They are often so much more
beautiful than sound pictures are. Perhaps they had to be. At any rate I wanted
to restore some of this beauty. I thought of it, I remember in this way: one of
techniques of modern art is simplification, and that I must therefore simplify
this film,” (Richie, 79). And another reason why Kurosawa made Rashomon simple was because of the low
budget for this film.
Although the film is simple as Kurosawa said, actually he
did many implicit ways to deliver the message of the story. For example, he played
with shadow and light during the scenes in the forest. “Again, during the rape
scene, the camera seeks the sky, the sun, the trees, contrasting with the two, wife and
bandit. When the rape is consummated and just before we return to the prison
courtyard for the conclusion of the bandit’s story, the sun comes out from
behind a branch, dazzling, shining directly into the lenses : a metaphor,”
(Richie, 14). This shadow-light effect can be interpreted as human heart that seeks
for the truth. And the sun as the guide in the film can be interpreted as
selfishness or instincts that determine what humans finally choose to do. Another
example is the composition of the casts that often shot in triangular position.
In the very beginning of the film, we can see the priest, the woodcutter, and
the unknown man gather and talk together and this position remains along the development
of the story in the film. The scenes of the main characters; the husband, the
wife, and the bandit are also often taken the same way as the priest and
friends’ scenes which may show the development of the problems and tensions
among them. “ The picture is filled with masterful
triangular compositions, often one following directly after another, the frame
filled with woman, bandit, husband, but always in different compositional
relationship to each other,” (Richie,14).
The last point that the writer wants to discuss here
about the adaption of Rashomon into
the film is the time. There are two kinds of time, one is the ostensible time
and the other one is the psychological time. Ostensible time is usually easily
noticed by the audiences, that Rashomon
is kind of flashback story. But the audiences are not really aware about the
psychological time, the time that each sequence or shot takes. If each shot
takes short time, it creates more sense of real in the film. Richie, written in
his book Rashomon, also had another reason regarding this
matter, “ But another reason for the
extreme brevity of the Rashomon shots
might be that the director knew he was asking his audience to look at the same
material four or more times. He could rely upon the novelty of the pictorial
image to help sustain image.”
As we go through these analyses how Rashomon is adapted into film, we know that there are many
differences between the original story and the film due the practical problems
that the director may face thus the director should modify some parts or do
something so that the film can be more realistic and interesting. Maybe that is
why some people like the original version of the story better than the film, or
vice versa.
References:
1.
Kojima, Takashi. Rashomon and Other Stories (Tokyo:
Charles E.Tuttle Company,1972)
2.
Richie,Donald. Rashomon (The State University, 1987)
3.
Richie,Donald. The Films of Akira Kurosawa ( University
of California Press,1998)
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