Seven Samurai

When I graduated high school, I naturally received congratulatory checks from friends and family, Baby's First Nest Egg to ease the transition into the adult world (or, to speak more accurately of college, the transition into the transition into the adult world). I saved most of it but took a small amount for a minor spree to celebrate graduating with honors. One of the things I bought was Criterion's re-issue of its Seven Samurai package. To this day, I'm unsure why I spent the money; it was expensive, and I knew not a damn thing about the film. But I wanted to watch the only film then in the top 10 of IMDB's voter poll* that I had not seen. Maybe it was just fate, some inexorable pull that lured me away from the modern, cookie-cutter blockbusters into the grandfather of the action extravaganza. More than any other movie, Seven Samurai is the reason my small but greatly humbling audience is reading this blog right now.


What stood out for me the first time I saw Seven Samurai and continues to stand out today is its subversive element. Made only a decade after the conclusion of World War II, a time when the government coerced filmmakers into making propaganda pictures, many of them jidai-geki movies, Kurosawa Akira's epic slashes the ideal image of the samurai to tatters. The samurai here, collected by poor farmers to defend their village from bandits, fight not for honor nor rank but a bowl of rice a day. That is all the farmers can afford, which is less surprising than the fact that the samurai, even if they won't say it aloud, can expect no better. For a nation told to see itself in the noble tradition of the samurai, Kurosawa offers a cynical bit of reassurance after their grand defeat in the war: "Don't feel so bad, guys," he seems to be saying. "We actually have a long tradition of being downtrodden and defeated."

Kurosawa, who embraced the West as much as Ozu feared its cultural implications, forges Seven Samurai into something of a postwar propaganda piece not on behalf of the occupying American forces but as a means to inspire change in those who felt their entire way of life had been upended. The villagers who face the wrath of marauding bandits come every harvest splinter to protect their own farms, only to be forced into subservience. If they unite, however, they can repel the force. Strange, then, that the most influential of Kurosawa's pictures upon Western filmmaking, and the one most inspired by the Hollywood epic, should be perhaps his most Japanese, both in terms of historical accuracy and its open call for the downtrodden Japanese to set aside their self-pity and stand up for themselves as one people. Patriotism does not necessarily equal nationalism, and just because Japan could not, would not ever attempt to be an imperial power again didn't mean it couldn't at least be its own state.

Of course, this is extrapolation that becomes more plausible with each viewing, and may well be interesting more to myself than others. What is universally appealing about the film is its nearly perfect sense of pacing and editing. Almost exactly one hour and 13 minutes pass from the start of the film to the moment where the belligerent wannabe samurai, Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) enters the central village just behind the real ronin and sounds the alarm, panicking the farmers who treated the arrival of the samurai with fear and disdain, only to run for their help at the false sign of danger. It is that moment that marks the true end of the first act, as it earns Kikuchiyo his place in the fold and completes the titular seven. That first act consists of nothing but character introductions, backstory and setup, yet the hour and change feels no longer than 30 minutes. The next hour, preparation for the upcoming battle, passes as swiftly. And when hell erupts in a rainstorm with gale winds, hell, you stop looking at the clock altogether.

Yet it is precisely the amount of detail that Kurosawa inserts into the frame and the narrative that moves the film so fluidly. Kurosawa neither burdens us with such plot that we lose interest, but he also inserts enough to give the audience, even the characters, an emotional stake in the proceedings. To save time, the director avoids redundancy in the dialogue where his ever-immaculate imagery tells the story, relying on Japanese knowledge of tradition to advance the whole of the first act, knowing damn well his film would play in art houses around the word. The peasants head to a local village to find samurai to recruit, but they have no luck initially. Then, they spot a crowd gathering with hushed awe around an aged ronin, Kambei (Takashi Shimura), who cuts off his topknot and shaves his head to pose as a monk in order to save an abducted child. To lose one's topknot was a grave dishonor, inferring punishment and humiliation. This samurai cuts his hair in plain view of the villagers, who stare at him as if he were possessed. Who could do such a thing? Even for Western audiences utterly unaware of the significance of Kambei's actions, the mise-en-scène and angling of the actors' faces communicates their awe until it becomes ours. To have a character speak of the moment would kill its power, halt the film, but as it is this extraneous bit of information involves the audience more deeply even as it displays several layers of Kambei's personality without him speaking a single word. We see his capacity and cunning as a strategist, as well as a dismissive sense of the honor codes that bind samurai who can no longer even feed themselves. The peasants follow him reverently after the incident to recruit him, but two other samurai tag along as well, and Kambei tries to send them away because he can not even afford to care for himself, much less take an apprentice.

Kambei cannot keep them at bay, however. Kikuchiyo hangs around like an unpopular kid circling the cool table, while young, inexperienced Katsushiro is so reverent there's no hope of getting rid of him. Kambei finds four more warriors for the villagers, silently testing their abilities by having Katsushiro lunge at them unexpectedly. All true samurai will be prepared and move to parry the blow. The way each ronin responds says something about them: the first warrior enters, successfully blocks, but leaves in a combination of personal offense and unwillingness to help farmers. Another, Gorobei, realizes the game simply by looking at the shadow the young samurai casts before he enters. Later, Kambei makes him second-in-command. (Of course, when Kikuchiyo lumbers in to join, he gets smacked square on the head with a log as the others sob with laughter.)

At last assembled, the samurai arrive at the hamlet they are to protect, only to be met with aforementioned disdain and fear. The only samurai farmers have ever dealt with have been as rapacious and thieving as the bandits who ransack them each season -- and at least the bandits work out an arrangement rather than simply tearing the place apart. For their part, the samurai are furious when they discover old battle gear and swords taken from ronin the farmers killed. And just as Kikuchiyo dissolved the farmers' tension upon the samurais' arrival, so too does he cow the pride of the ronin. "Who turned them into such monsters?" he screams. "You did. In war, you burn their village, trample their fields, steal their food, work them like slaves, rape their women and kill any who resist. What do you expect them to do, anyway?"

This interaction becomes the dominant focus of the film, and what I notice more and more with each viewing is how much more invested I become in the characters and the implications of their dynamics than I am by the masterful action. As I have become more acquainted not only with Kurosawa's canon but the works of the other two titans of Japanese cinema, Ozu Yasujiro and Mizoguchi Kenji, I must admit that the director who introduced me into the wider world of cinema does not have the same compositional genius of the peers he greatly outlived. Yet Kurosawa is a master in his own right, and his chief ability as a filmmaker is his capacity for moving through immaculate mise-en-scène faster than anyone without losing the power of the image. That does not make him superior to his more modestly (or in Ozu's case, glacially) paced peers, of course, but in an age in which the audience is denied even a coherent progression of events in action cinema, the evocative compositions of Kurosawa's mise-en-scène are an absolute delight. It is his editing of them, however, that carries the most weight.

Kurosawa understood the power of editing in implanting emotion in an audience, and Seven Samurai is, if nothing else, a masterpiece for its editing. Every cut carries a psychic weight, more so when the action explodes at the end. Each shot holds long enough to give the audience a chance to take in the mise-en-scène, to give us something to care about so when a peasant dies or a hut gets burned, we feel it. The intelligence of the cuts compound even the longer, calmer takes. We are introduced to the master swordsman Kyuzo as spectators to a duel between him and a belligerent ronin. Kurosawa communicates Kyuzo's discipline through long takes that cut only as the agitated samurai gets restless waiting for Kyuzo to make the first move. At last, he lunges and the two connect their wooden practice swords. The one ronin declares it a draw, but Kyuzo correctly notes that his blow would have been lethal while the other fighter's would simply have been an injury. Enraged, the other challenges to a real duel, and the pacing cools further. The camera pulls back and pans between them, holding until the man at last runs at Kyuzo, who moves so fluidly you know the cantankerous ronin made a mistake he won't live to regret.

These touches are brilliant, but the most remarked-upon aspect of Kurosawa's style with the film is his transition to frame-flattening long lenses, which he would use for the rest of his career. Yet he introduces them gradually here, using depth of field in the beginning to emphasize the distance between the samurai and the peasants, and even between the unlinked samurai themselves. As the characters come to trust each other and the stakes raise, the frame tightens, bringing the tragedy closer to the audience. Kambei realizes that if the peasants are to have any shot at fending off the bandits, the outlying houses must be sacrificed to maintain a strong defense of a smaller perimeter. When the bandits set fire to those huts in a rage, Kurosawa frames the blazes in a way that stresses how far away the houses are for anyone to save them yet flattens the composition enough that the arson feels closer. We get inside the peasants watching their homes burn so close, yet so far away. That sense of tragedy pervades the film, from Kikuchiyo, the orphaned farmer-cum-samurai discovering a baby left orphaned by the bandits and seeing himself in the child to a peasant being reunited with his wife, stolen and raped by the bandits, only for the women to throw herself into a fire rather than face her shame.

The director balances this sense of horror with gallows humor. When the village elder sends the handful of peasants to find warriors to defend them, some note that all they have as payment is some rice. "Find hungry samurai," responds the old man without hesitation. The farmers face mass indifference and derision in their quest, but Kurosawa slyly inserts a Fool in the Shakespearean tradition, laughing at the farmers in their cheap living area but shaming the samurai who arrogantly turn them down, pointing out the gruel and millet the peasants eat just to be able to provide rice to the samurai. When the samurai arrive, one farmer cuts his beautiful daughter's hair to make her resemble a man, hoping to prevent a warrior from ravishing his girl. Ironically, the young samurai Katsushiro wrestles Shino to the ground and accidentally rips open her robe because he does mistake her for a man and finds her behavior suspicious. Because of the father's actions, the two young lovers meet and enter into a relationship that provides a light relief in the film's darkest moments. Even the casting suggests a humorous bent: Bokuzen Hidari, the teetotaler comedian who gained fame for his convincing drunken pantomimes, is hilarious as the constantly sobbing old man whose grief and terror is so incessant that at some point you just have to laugh, then you find you never stop laughing.

No one, however, makes as big an impression, comic or severe, as Mifune, who pours the totality of his physical expression into Kikuchiyo. I confess that, Mifune fan that I am, I find aspects of his performance in Rashomon to simply be too much, too broad and farcical for a rapist-murderer. But here, he is something else entirely. The spirit of the film imbues him, uses him as its messenger: his Freudian sword and galloping trot are pure comedy, while the moment of anguish he has over an abandoned baby who's parents just died captures the pain and despair that links these characters. Mifune's tics could make Woody Allen look centered and calm: he scratches restlessly at his beard, randomly rears back and laughs in a booming, fake tone and does not run so much as bound like a bipedal antelope. But his drunken caterwauling has an innate charm, and as much as he might be the clown of the group, it is precisely his goofiness that softens the samurai.

His clothes are always ragged, not frayed and torn but merely left open in animalistic threat. But it also links him to the farmers, who can barely afford the clothes they themselves probably made. When the bandits finally attack, they burn the outlying homes beyond the defensive perimeter. Kikuchiyo finds an abandoned baby by the site, and suddenly sees his own life in this new orphan. "This baby is me!" That barely concealed pain explains Kikuchiyo's erratic behavior and his ability to unify the samurai and the farmers, but Mifune plays that pathos less as psychological backstory than its own competing force for Kikuchiyo's behavior. Mifune excelled at playing characters with extreme confidence (whether they deserved to display it or not), but when a close-up catches his eyes, Mifune communicates a deep insecurity and a desire to please. He laughs and boasts constantly, but when the others have even a light chuckle at his expense, he looks devastated. The tough front dissolves, as does the comic inversion of that front. All we see is the man, a man who runs headlong into any situation to try to outpace his own insecurity. Small wonder, then, that he dies with his bare ass in the air.

Seven Samurai is, without a doubt, a Western, backed up by an epic score filled with pounding drums and brass that makes every shot bombastic. But it also contains some of Kurosawa's more trenchant views of society, as piercing as his more modern films. The use of the musket as a device in the film has a slight anti-Western/technological bent, but Kurosawa goes to great pains to dispel any sense of honor in classical fighting: the peasants, the overwhelming numbers of the army in feudal society (modern society, too, if you check the link between poverty and enlistment), fight savagely with spears, unstoppable monsters being directed by social superiors. But even these noble warriors do not seem so superior to send these people to their deaths: Kambei projects an aura of authority and wisdom, but the sighs in Shimura's line deliveries belie an unspoken pain and defeat. Unlike a typical Western, Kurosawa doesn't eulogize the past, instead using it to show how far we've collectively failed to come since then.

When I finished watching Seven Samurai for the first time, I felt drained. Three and a half hours had passed quickly, too quickly, for me to account for all that had happened, and the ending drained me. It still does, a comedown that's too sobering to bring tears. Some might accuse Kurosawa of having his cake and eating it too by devoting most of the last hour to all out war just to get to a dénouement that denounces meaningless fighting. Yet it's the sort of wisdom that comes from those who've been to the other side and returned. And in the aftermath of World War II, who in the world, especially in Japan, didn't have firsthand experience of what war could do?

The end equalizes the peasants and samurai in death, the flattened image crushing the lower placed peasant mounds just in front of the bigger tributes at the top of the hill. As the three surviving samurai stand before it, Katsushiro slinking away from Kambei and Shichiroji to be with Shino, the old friends find themselves contemplating the sight before them. "Again we are defeated," Kambei sighs, to the confusion of his old lieutenant. Looking out at the farmers merrily planting their rice crop that they will finally enjoy themselves, Kambei sadly notes, "The farmers have won, not us." Kambei is left back where he was, a respected general without a home, even if he makes one with the villagers. A lord goes to war to protect his land, or to expand it. A peasant fights to keep what meager scrap they have. But a samurai? A samurai just fights until he dies, and whether he's serving as a vassal or as the savior of farmers, he's left alone once more when the fighting is done. From that perspective, the end of every battle is a loss, regardless of who is declared the winner.



*I WAS YOUNG, OKAY?!

Ikiru

Akira Kurosawa earned his reputation as the supreme director of action, chiefly within his jidaigeki samurai epics, but he also had a gift with simple, human stories, and of them none can compare to his 1952 masterpiece Ikiru. Firmly entrenched in the upper echelon of the master's films, Ikiru displays just as much camera mastery as his action films, but Kurosawa shrinks the scope down to craft a commentary on the rise of the bureaucracy in Japan and unfulfilled life.

In the very first shot of the film, Kurosawa displays an X-ray of Kenji Watanabe's stomach, revealing a large tumor. A cold, dispassionate voice tells us that Watanabe has less than a year to live, then he goes on to say that Watanabe never really lived anyway. We see him at his desk in a government office, mindlessly shuffling papers and keeping to himself. He returns to his home, where his lives with his son and daughter-in-law, yet he does not communicate with the two. The son and his wife couldn't care less; they just want to make sure they get his inheritance.

Watanabe is played by Takashi Shimura, one of the three big recurring stars in Kurosawa's pictures. Of the three, Shimura is surely the one with the most range, and he puts forward a hell of a performance. Shimura walks through the film hunched over, as if to withdraw from the world. He slacks his jaw a bit to make his face look utterly blank and unnoticeable, yet he stands out all the more for his ability to completely blend in. Compare this sullen, weak man to Shimura's next role for the director, the wise Kambei in Seven Samurai; they're so radically different it's hard to think the same man could go to such extremes.

After experiencing stomach pains, Watanabe goes to the clinic to get checked out. As he waits, another patient strikes up a conversation, and mentions a friend of his who died of stomach cancer. He goes on to describe every symptom that Watanabe experiences, and tells our protagonist that the doctors will tell a person with cancer that they just have an ulcer. "If they say you can eat anything you want, you've got less than a year." Watanabe hears his name, enters for tests, and waits some more. The doctor returns, and tells him he has an ulcer. Kurosawa abruptly cuts to the coat Watanabe drops to the floor, then to his terrified, knowing face. He begs the doctors to tell him the truth, but they all smile and repeat their diagnosis. Watanabe leaves, and one of the physicians questions the wisdom of lying to their patients. "What would you say to a man who has six months to live?" fires back a colleague.

At the start the narrator told us that Watanabe never really lived, and he knows it too. He waits in his son's dark room, and when he and his wife return home they are so surprised and annoyed by it that the old man does not tell his son of his illness. Watanabe decides to have a night out just to do something for once, and runs into a writer who offers to show him a good time out on the town.; he'll be Watanabe's free Mephistopheles for the evening.

The journey though the night clubs is about as close to an action sequence as the film gets. Mephistopheles takes our dying Faust through a hell of debauchery and, though Watanabe smiles as he watches exotic dancers and guzzles sake, by the end of the evening he realizes he's gotten no pleasure out of any of it. While sitting in a club, he requests a sullen song that urges young women to find happiness while they can. This club, initially bustling with life, cows into silence as Watanabe morosely sings the words.

Eventually, Watanabe finds a purpose. He runs into a young woman from work, and her joie de vivre attracts him. But this is not a love story; he's simply awed by someone genuinely happy. When she reveals that her happiness stems from her new job making toys for the children of Japan, he suddenly gets an idea. The first half of the film closes as he runs down the stairs of the restaurant the two are in as a group of children sing "Happy Birthday" to one of their friends, signalling Watanabe's rebirth.

We then cut to Watanabe's funeral, as his colleagues wander aloud what drove him to the actions of the final few months of his life. We then cut back and forth between this scene and Watanabe's final months, and learn of his quest to clean up a park and convert it into a children's playground.

At the start of the film Kurosawa gave us a quickly edited (and highly amusing) series of shots displaying the bureaucracy's unflinching ability to shift any and all responsibility between departments until the people filing requests simply gave up. Now, Watanabe moves between each department with precision, begging his colleagues until they acquiesce in embarrassment. He succeeds through pure determination, and in the final moments we see of him, he sits in a new swing, singing the same song he crooned in the club, only now with a glimmer of hope.

Back at the funeral, his business associates drunkenly pledge to follow Watanabe's example, and to use their "powers" for good. Yet when the mothers of the children who now have a place to play enter and weep at Watanabe's shrine, the workers look uneasy. Sure enough, the next day they all go back to their desks having forgotten those vows in their sobriety. Only one man dares to stand and defy them, but soon he sinks down to his chair, and a mountain of paperwork buries him.

These final moments underline the existential message of the film: life is ultimately meaningless. We go to our jobs, marry, reproduce, then die. One man's life has no effect on the world. However, to that one man, life can have meaning if he does something that gives him fulfillment. The seemingly cynical final shot only reinforces the larger picture; it does not invalidate Watanabe's personal quest.

Though ranking masterpieces is always headache-inducing, trying to decide between this, Seven Samurai, or Rashomon is just impossible. All three broke so much ground it's hard to consider what might have been without them. Ikiru is the director's most personal films; the word itself means "to live," two words that form the basic foundation of the director's work. Kurosawa always walked a fine line between pure cynicism and hope, giving us many fundamentally good characters in a terrible world. Some characters triumph, others die, but they all realize that the world is evil and try to do something about it. In a world of rote and banality, these characters decide to actually live.

Throne of Blood

Akira Kurosawa's Ran, an adaptation of King Lear, was one of the best Shakespeare adaptations I've ever seen (second only to Chimes at Midnight). Its personal impact got me interested in seeing his version of Macbeth, a feeling only strengthened when I look around only and saw numerous people citing it as one of the master's best. So, over the protests of my bank account I added another of Kurosawa's films to my collection, but that tiny inner voice of fiscal responsibility can stow it because it was worth every penny.

What made Ran so interesting was how willing it was to play with Shakespeare's original dialogue, freeing it from the narrow confines that befall literal translations while never not feeling like King Lear. Throne of Blood operates in much the same fashion. The general plot follows the same direction: Macbeth becomes Washizu Taketori (Toshiro Mifune) who, along with his friend Miki (the Banquo substitute), meets a witch who prophesies him to become Master of the Cobweb Castle, while Miki's children will assume the throne following Washizu's death. Eventually it all ends in tears. You know, typical Shakespeare.

But what sets Throne of Blood apart from your average adaptation is how many liberties Kurosawa takes with the material. Even Ran stayed more or less faithful and its only modifications seemed to come from necessity in its transportation across continents, but Throne of Blood makes some bold choices that certainly not make it better Macbeth, but turns it into something almost as rare: unique.

First of all, Kurosawa scales the action waaaaaaaay back. Drawing heavily from the Noh style of Japanese theater, the action of Throne of Blood manifests itself mostly internally. Macbeth certainly dealt with inner madness but the stage tends to run red with blood; Throne of Blood, on the other hand, chiefly implies its action. For example, when Washizu's wife Asaji convinces her husband to kill his master Tsuzuki, Washizu wanders off-screen while Asaji moves in a short series of stylized movements that may look strange but clearly represent nervousness. Later, a soldier brings Washizu, the new master, the head of his friend Miki, but the master refuses to allow the guard to show him.

But the biggest change is how Kurosawa re-shapes the characters to craft an entirely new subtext for the material. Macbeth is about how man's ambition can cause his downfall, but Throne of Blood, created after the fall of royalty, paints a more complete picture of the mindset of feudal and monarchical society. Without a king or queen breathing over his neck, Kurosawa reveals how Washizu's actions merely continue a cycle instead of representing a lone man undone by madness. Tsuzuki gained the throne through bloodshed, so why should anyone be surprised that Washizu does the same? For that reason Throne of Blood is less an adaptation of Macbeth and more what Shakespeare might have wanted to say if he were freed from the constraints of the times. After all, a whole bunch of monarchs die in his plays; who's to say he wouldn't have some harsher words about them if those words wouldn't get him killed?

Even Lady Macbeth gets an overhaul. Isuzu Yamada, who would go on to appear in Kurosawa's version of The Lower Depths and in Yojimbo, brings a subtlety to the role that seems almost alien, both to the original character and to the more exaggerated styles of Japanese acting. Perhaps the most brilliant decision of the entire film was Asaji's pregnancy, as it casts the character into a whole new light. The original Lady Macbeth, despite remaining one of Shakespeare's more memorable characters, fits too neatly into the archetype of the evil woman who leads good men astray. It's been around since the Bible, and I doubt it'll ever go away. But Kurosawa's Lady Macbeth, while still very much sinister, has actual layers and for once we see her ambition rather than bloodlust. These added dimensions make Asaji seem so much more human even though she's far more calculating than her English counterpart; not only does she convince her husband to kill the master, she also arranges for the death of Miki.

I've mentioned that a lot of action takes place off-screen, but that pertains mainly to the psychological aspects of the play. It wouldn't be a Kurosawa samurai film without some great battle scenes, and sure enough there are two action sequences in this film that could shame almost any other director out there, then or now. The final sequence in particular, in which the "forest" comes to the castle, illustrates not only a taut, thrilling action sequence but Kurosawa's use of creative liberties. In Macbeth the lead rebelled against a pure king more or less because his wife manipulated him and sent him spiralling into madness. But there is no higher ideal in Throne of Blood; Washizu is simply another cog in an endless wheel of corruption and violence. He, and his soldiers, are motivated not by religion or greed but by fear. Washizu's soldiers do not fight for their master as Macbeth's troops; when they see the forest "move" they immediately turn on their master and kill him because they are too frightened to face the possibility of such a foe.

Throne of Blood, for me, seemed to work better almost as an afterthought. As I watched it, I couldn't help but feel that Kurosawa took the edge of the emotion with his Noh stylings, and at only 110 minutes the movie felt like it came and went to quickly. Yet the second it ended, and I mean the very second the title card came up, it hit me just how brilliant this film was. If it seems shorter and more personal, it is, but Kurosawa gives us the most claustrophobic version of Macbeth ever made. It simmers with social commentary and actually delves into what drove these people to madness instead of turning them all into little Satans for rebelling against a noble king. The more I think about it the more I'm tempted to separate Throne of Blood from Macbeth entirely; both are masterpiece in their own ways, but each offers radically different subtext. As a Kurosawa film, it's one of the master's finest, but as a Shakespearean adaptation, it surely ranks in the top three alongside his own Ran and Orson Welles be-all, end-all mash-up Chimes at Midnight.

Rashomon

Plenty of films remain in the public consciousness after their release, but how many films are so groundbreaking, so innovative, and so thoroughly singular even after 58 years of worldwide copying that the film itself is used to describe a psychological effect? Rashomon is perhaps not Akira Kurosawa's greatest work (though I could never choose between it Seven Samurai or Ikiru), but it is perhaps his most perennially interesting. Where Seven Samurai, copied virtually note for note not only in remakes but every half-decent action epic since, may not seem as fresh as it did then (I don't think it's aged at all, though), Rashomon forever looks as if it was made yesterday, even though it's been copied just as much as Kurosawa's great action epic. But why? What's its secret for remaining so relevant and singular?

The film opens in a rainstorm, as a woodcutter and a priest rest in a ruined gatehouse to stay dry. A bawdy commoner enters, and to pass the time the woodcutter tells the newcomer of the trial in which he and the priest just testified. We abruptly flash back to the woodcutter's story, in which he discovers a dead samurai whilst wondering through the woods. He runs to get help, and then we flash forward to the trial three days later.

The trial itself is divided by the testimonies of its witnesses and defendants. The woodcutter's establishing story gives way to a testimony by the priest, who says only that he saw the samurai and his wife on the day the man was murdered. Then we get into the real heart of the matter when the officials drag out Tajōmaru (Toshiro Mifune) to testify.

A notorious bandit, Tajōmaru proudly admits to killing the samurai, but another point of contention arises: we learn that the samurai's wife was raped. The bandit claims he decided to kill the samurai the moment he laid eyes on the woman, because he "thought [he] saw a goddess." He tricks the couple, only to tie the husband to a tree and chase down the wife. This leads to one of the most memorable camera tricks in Kurosawa's oeuvre: as the bandit drags the wife along to see her defeated husband, the camera whips around in a frenzy, moving so swiftly that you assume it must be one hell of a dolly shot. Then you notice the slight curve at the edge of the frame and realize that Kurosawa is panning in a circle. I'd hate to have been on that camera as it spun around so quickly.

Kurosawa instructed Mifune to play Tajōmaru like a wild animal, and the actor certainly did just that. Mifune's acting usually seems a bit overstated by Western standards, but he has a knack unlike any other for acting with his entire body, and he practically throws himself into every line. When the wife struggles against his advances you can see a mixture of all sorts of emotions-- from surprise to intrigue and excitement) not only on his face but in every limb.

Following his testimony, we see the wife offer her side of the story, and afterwards a psychic conjures the dead samurai's spirit to recount his own. The real intrigue of the story unfolds when both of those stories touch upon the same basic facts of the events as we know them (samurai killed, wife raped), but they offer up stories that completely contradict the bandit's tale and each other's. Tajōmaru claimed that, after "seducing" the wife, she begged the two men to fight to the death so only one might know her dishonor. The wife, however, claims that she begged for her own death. The samurai himself states that the wife, actually seduced by the brigand, demanded her new lover to kill him.

The brilliance of these segments is to point out man's fundamental inability to tell the truth about himself. Kurosawa gives each person's testimony its own distinctive look and style in order to emphasize our own self-flattery. The bandit's story unfolds with quick, exciting cuts and fast camera movements, backed by a bombastic score that almost makes him out to be some lovable scoundrel, on the level of Robin Hood perhaps. Yet we clearly see him, even in his own story, kill a man in order to rape his wife. The wife's flashback unfolds in close-ups of her frightened face and Mifune's wild abandon; it feels more personal and moving, especially when her husband damns her for being "dishonored." Meanwhile, the samurai presents his story in a refined, proper way that coldly looks upon his wife as a whore, and finally the woodcutter's second testimony plays without music, in matter-of-fact imagery that seems, of all the stories, the most plausible. Of course, we learn that he too lied by the film's end.

Perhaps the most inventive aspect of Kurosawa's direction is his use of light. All of it filters through the trees, breaking up the people and casting everything into doubt. Yet the real trick is his ironic inversion of the symbolism of sunlight. Normally a sign of good and hope, Kurosawa uses sunlight as a sense of foreboding and evil; at times he tilts his camera directly up into the sun, and it's one of the most inexplicably unsettling shots I've ever seen. The director even incorporates this notion into each of the characters' semi-fantasies.

The bandit, proudly self-aware, casts himself in the most sunlight but also bathes the husband, his perverse rival for the affections of the wife, in light to highlight his distaste for the man. All the while he keeps the object of his lust mostly in shadows. The wife herself casts both her and her husband in shadows, choosing to focus all the sunlight onto her rapist, and only lets a small amount of sunlight illuminate her husband when he refuses even to kill her in his rage. Finally, the husband washes both the bandit and his wife in light, his wife more so, actually. It's their way of focusing attention elsewhere (or, in the case of the bandit, firmly on himself), playing with the medium of film, since the officials themselves certainly can't see these flashbacks.

Ultimately we never learn the truth; instead, we get about 60 pieces of a 100-piece puzzle and we have to see what we can make of it. The woodcutter's story, the most pathetic and least self-serving, strikes us as the most plausible, but even his story is cast into doubt. We can guess that perhaps the bandit cannot truly face the real horror of his actions, that the woman may have been more conniving than she lets on (though, at the end of the day, rape is still rape, and some of the condemnations I've seen of her character online make me uneasy), and that the samurai is so rigidly locked in his system of codes that he worries only of his own honor. None of this explains what really happened, but I don't think that's the point; Kurosawa uses the crime itself to teach us a lesson about humanity.

Yet Kurosawa does not leave us in a state of existential despair. The final scene, in which the woodcutter offers to raise an abandoned baby, which casts his own lies and theft in a kinder light. Some complain that this scene is tacked on and undermines the message. What a load of nonsense. It's a film about viewing things from multiple angles; why shouldn't one of them be upbeat?

Rashomon is one of those displays of the director's talent that does not seem obvious at first. While we can see his ability to control monumental action in epics like Seven Samurai and Ran, or in the street hustle of High and Low, films like this and Ikiru showcase his ability to make the mundane seem just as epic as his samurai wars. The film runs only 88 minutes, yet offers hours worth of character depth, story, and thematic exposition. It takes place in three simple locations (the gatehouse, the courtyard where the trial is held, and the scene of the crime), yet feels infinitely larger in scope.

Well, we know the film holds up, but what about the film? Criterion knows how to restore a movie, but their DVD contains a constant hissing and some blemishes in a number of frames. I wouldn't say that it hurts the film, but I am thrilled to know that Criterion is currently working on a new restoration with whatever tools have become available since the 2002 release of the current disc. I believe a Blu-Ray release is planned sometime this year, and it will immediately join that list of films I wish to buy an actual player in order to view.

Rashomon remains a landmark in film history; not only did it expose Kurosawa (and indeed Japanese cinema as a whole) to the international market, it jump-started the burgeoning art-house movement that would come to prominence in the 50s and 60s on the shoulders of Kurosawa and European auteurs like Ingmar Bergman. But even without its historical context, Rashomon can still captivate, even thrill, audiences today with a psychological drama with the pace of an action extravaganza.