Japan
1950
88 minutes
Black and White
1.33:1
Japanese
138
Brimming with action while incisively examining the nature of truth, Rashomon is perhaps the finest film ever to investigate the philosophy of justice. Through an ingenious use of camera and flashbacks, Kurosawa reveals the complexities of human nature as four people recount different versions of the story of a man’s murder and the rape of his wife. Toshiro Mifune gives another commanding performance in the eloquent masterwork that revolutionized film language and introduced Japanese cinema to the world.
| The Bandit | Toshiro Mifune |
| The Woman | Machiko Kyo |
| The Man | Masayuki Mori |
| The Woodcutter | Takashi Shimura |
| The Priest | Minoru Chiaki |
| Director | Akira Kurosawa |
| Producer | Jingo Minoura |
| Scenario | Akira Kurosawa and Shinobu Hashimoto |
| Based on two stories by | Ryunosuke Akutagawa |
| Cinematography | Kazuo Miyagawa |
| Art director | So Matsuyama |
| Music | Fumio Hayasaka |
| Lighting | Kenichi Okamoto |
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the forest: a “definitive” new restoration of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will premiere at New York’s Film Forum on May 29, running through June 11. This recently discovered 35 mm print of Kurosawa’s...
In Rashomon, there may be four plausible versions of the murder, but when Academy Film Archive director Michael Pogorzelski began overseeing a brand-new digital restoration of the film, he could locate only two usable prints. In a special NPR podcast, Iris Mann reports on this spiffed-up...
9 August 2008: I go to the neighborhood theater to see Snow Trail (a.k.a. To the End of the Silver Mountains, a.k.a. Ginrei no haté), a 1946 Senkichi Taniguchi film now revived because it was Toshiro Mifune’s second film. Revived now because in these days of falling...
When Akira Kurosawa made Rashomon, he was a forty-year-old director working near the beginning of a career that would last for 50 years, produce some of the greatest films ever made...
[Note: in Japan, it is customary to refer to a person with their last name first. We have retained this practice in the below excerpt from Kurosawa’s text.] The gate was growing larger and larger in my mind’s eye. I was location-scouting in the ancient capital of Kyoto for...
Three men seek shelter from the rain under the ruined gate of the ancient city of Kyoto. There is nothing to do but talk, about a topic which torments two of the wayfarers, who have just been witnesses in a police court inquiry. In the woods a woman was raped, a man killed. A notorious bandit...
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