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DAVID THORBURN: Kurosawa's Rashomon

is a particularly dramatic example

of a film that understands itself

to have the kind of claim on its audience

that the greatest art has always imagined

itself to have on its audience.

So I want to begin by talking very briefly about what

I call the moment of Rashomon.

There's a bit of confusion, or at least

chronological confusion, or inconsistency in the principle

that we end the course with a film that was made and shown

internationally before the last two films

that we've seen in our course.

My reasons for that, as I partly explained in an earlier

lecture, had to do with my desire

to show a certain continuity amongst forms

of European cinema and the link between Jean Renoir,

and the Italian neorealists, and the French nouvelle vague

is so intimate that it seemed to me

important to show you that progression in sequence.

But if we had been going by strict chronological order,

we would have introduced this Kurosawa film a bit earlier,

because it was made in 1950.

And in 1951, it won an important international prize, The Golden

Lion, the highest prize available at the Venice Film

Festival in 1951.

And this had a seismic effect on movies around the world.

The dramatic and powerful subject matter

of Kurosawa's film of course riveted attention.

But even more than that, the freedom and imaginative energy

of his stylistic innovations in the film

had a profound impact on filmmakers around the world.

And when the film was shown at Venice in 1951, another effect

it had when it won the prize was to introduce Japanese cinema

to a wider world.

It was the first significant Japanese film, Kurosawa,

the first important Japanese director

to gain a reputation outside of Japan itself.

In fact, there are many film buffs, and especially

specialists in Japanese film, who

are somewhat resentful of Kurosawa's eminence,

even though no one denies that he is an eminent

director, because there are other directors.

The two I've listed under item 2 in our outline

are the most dramatic examples, Mizoguchi and Ozu,

who are often thought to be his superior, even greater

directors than Kurosawa.

This is a debate of nuances.

All three of these directors are major artists.

But it is true, I think, and it is widely recognized

that Kurosawa was the director who crossed that barrier more

immediately, more dramatically than any other,

and opened the world, not just to Japanese cinema,

in some degree, but opened the world in some longer

sense to Asian cinema more generally,

that the so-called Western world,

the European and American cinema universes

had been fairly oblivious to Asian cinema

and certainly to Japanese cinema prior to this.

And the appearance of Rashomon, its enormous impact in 1951,

began to change that.

So that what was demonstrated in moment when Rashomon

won this reward, won The Golden Lion at the Venice Film

Festival, was a reinforcement of a principle

I've been discussing throughout the semester, the notion

of film as an international medium, the notion

that directors from different national cinemas

were now being deeply influenced by directors

from other nations, and that film itself

was in some deep way, a global phenomenon, even

an international form.

And I think it was in the '50s and early '60s

that this idea began to become more widely embraced

by film goers in the United States and in Europe,

but perhaps especially in the United States.

And one mark of this, the emergence

of cinema as a fully recognized independent art form.

Obviously people had thought this,

and many directors had achieved artistic distinction

before this.

But I'm talking about the public understanding of movies,

the way people in different cultures actually recognized

and thought about movies.

It was as if this is the moment in which movies were understood

to enter the museum in a certain way,

to earn in a public sense, the status

that more traditional art forms had had.

And one of the explanations for why this would have been so,

why it would have had such a powerful impact-- now,

I think I mentioned last time that this insight was

partial in the United States-- especially,

that is to say, in the '50s and early '60s,

it began to dawn on movie critics and scholars

of whom there were only a few at that time and then movie

audiences that European films and Asian films, especially

Japanese films, might have great artistic value.

But it was a longer time before Americans

began to realize that their own native forms of films

had had a similar kind of authority.

So this moment, in the early 1950s,

was a deeply significant one.

Let's remember historically what it represented in Europe

and in the United States.

It's the moment of the emergence of Italian neorealism, which

itself begins to establish a kind of very powerful claim

on people's attention.

One irony of Rashomon's success was

that it was not very successful in Japan

when it was released in 1950.

And the producer, the production company

responsible for the film was very dubious about entering it

in the competition, didn't think it was a significant film, even

though it transformed Kurosawa's career

because of the immense recognition it finally got.

And Kurosawa himself recognized--

he'd been making films for almost a decade before that,

but Rashomon was his most ambitious film to that point,

and it also incorporated more innovative strategy,

visual strategies than any he had tried before.

It established him as an international director.

And I mentioned the names of two other directors

just from different traditions as a way

of reminding you of another feature of this phenomenon,

another reason, as I began to say earlier,

for why this moment was such a significant one.

And the term I use here is modernism, modernist cinema.

Remember, one of the ways to understand this idea

is to recognize that a great revolution in the arts

had occurred at the turn of the 20th century,

the end of the 19th, and at the turn of the 20th century.

We've talked about this earlier.

It's the movement we call modernism.

It's the moment of Picasso.

It's the moment of James Joyce, and it

was a kind of revolution in both visual art, literature,

music took place in this period.

And among the characteristics of this modernist

movement was a newly complicated and self-conscious attitude

toward narrative itself, toward storytelling.

So modernism in literature and in art involved,

among other things if not a hostility or antagonism,

at least a kind of skepticism about

inherited traditional categories and ways of doing things.

And one form this took in narrative

was to dislocate or disorient the narrative line.

Instead of telling a story in a chronological sequence,

a lot of the great works of fiction of the modernist era,

books by writers like Joseph Conrad, or Proust,

the great French novelist who was so

preoccupied by memory and human subjectivity,

or the great German novelist, Thomas Mann,

a number of other great figures that we could mention

began to construct stories in which chronological order was

profoundly disrupted.

And they also began to create stories in which there

were multiple narrators.

And the effect of multiple narrators

begins-- even if you do nothing more than have

multiple narrators, you begin to raise questions

about the veracity, the truthfulness

of any single perspective.

And you will understand when you look at Rashomon

why this movie embodies many of these same modernist

principles.

But the point is that cinema, as a narrative form,

lag behind these more traditional arts.

And it really wasn't until the 1950s,

and partly because of films like Rashomon,

that it began to be recognized that the movies too

could embrace and embody the principles of modernism.

So one way to understand what happened in the 1950s

is to recognize that directors like Kurosawa and Ingmar

Bergman, the great Swedish director,

and Fellini, the great Italian director,

and the inheritor and expander of the neorealist tradition,

going far beyond a narrow realism,

that directors like that began to create films

that in a formal sense, in a structural sense,

and also in terms of their content

had the kind of complexity, nuance, and skepticism,

and even the philosophic self-awareness

that was characteristic of high modernism

at the turn of the 20th century.

So it's as if what was going on was the movies

themselves were now asserting themselves as a modernist art.

I don't mean as a contemporary art.

I'm referring specifically to the modernist movement,

and to the dislocated, and much more demanding

kinds of narrative strategies that

are characteristic of the modernist movement.

So Rashomon played a fundamental role

in this sort of transformation of what

we might call the cultural understanding of movies

among ordinary people, as well as among scholars, critics,

and other filmmakers.

I want to mention one other point.

I'll give you a kind of note to clarify

some of what I've been implying, some

of what I implied when I talked about Mizoguchi and Ozu

as directors who were often even more highly

regarded than Kurosawa.

I'll leave that to each individual film goer.

All three directors are astonishing and remarkable.

But it wouldn't be appropriate to talk, even

about this single film, Rashomon,

without paying respects to those two great directors whose

dates I've put on your outline.

I won't talk about individual films by these directors,

but I urge you all to look them up, read about them

in David Cook's history of narrative film,

and think about experimenting by extending

your knowledge of Japanese cinema

by trying films by these two remarkable directors.

One of the things that's characteristic of all three

of these directors, of Kurosawa, even more fully

of Mizoguchi and Ozu, Ozu most fundamentally of all,

is that their films are marked by a kind of impulse

toward stylization, toward fabular, fable-like equations

that distinguish them in some ways

from Western, from European, and American films.

And I think that one explanation for this

has to do with the longer artistic traditions

of Japanese society.

Japanese film grows out of theatrical traditions,

like kabuki theater, or Noh drama,

N-O-H drama, both of which have profoundly stylized and fable

like qualities.

They're anti-narrative, in some sense,

and any of you who have ever had even a minimal experience

with either of these two theatrical traditions

will understand what I'm discussing.

These are theaters of gesture and of very decisive,

symbolic representation.

What we would think of as sort of realistic characters

or realistic stories are not a part

of these very ancient traditions.

These theatrical traditions go back hundreds, even

thousands of years.

So there's a tradition in Japan of a kind of stylized,

of symbolic representation.

And you'll see, I think, how in Russia,