Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa is awesome & on YouTube

I was playing Ghost of Tsushima last night and it led to me watching the movie Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa. This turned out to be a great, great act of randomness.

In Ghost of Tsushima, there a mode that switches everything to black and white. This was to mimic classic samurai films, in particular, those made by Kurosawa. As I played and marvelled at how pretty and stylish everything looked, I felt bad (and embarrassed to admit,) I hadn’t seen any of Kurosawa’s films.

I knew Star Wars was based on Hidden Fortress (that was a link to a BBC article that is worth a read if you are interested). So I went to Amazon and bought Hidden Fortress.

Next stop was YouTube to see what people had to say about which Kurosawa films I should watch. That was when I saw that Rashomon was on there. Not a clip or old version. A new fully restored version with subtitles.

Unbelieving that such a thing was true, I started watching it just to check. And holy shit, not only was it a full version but it had English subtitles.

What is Rashomon about?

Good question, voice in my head. I won’t go into too much detail because the film is pretty well known and even has its own effect – the Rashomon effect in fact.

Brief synopsis – there is a crime and there are four witnesses. Each witness, during the course of the film, tells their version of events. The events differ depending on who is telling it. This is because, as in life, everyone twists things around when retelling a tale to make themselves look good.

What’s so good about it?

For most films, the flashback is a way to fill in some gaps. It is a pretty easy thing to do and is often a pretty lazy way to do it. Rashomon introduced the idea of the unreliable narrator to film. It has since been used in, or at least influenced, a ton of films since. Such as The Usual Suspects.

It was the first Japanese film to get noticed by the rest of the world. Which the Japanese found weird as they weren’t too keen on it. This was partly due to the ambiguity and partly because Kurosawa used techniques such as overly emotional acting to get points across. It wasn’t traditional fare.

It is also simply a brilliant story and a great idea. I could go on but if you want more in-depth analysis – there is google. If you want to buy the film to get Bluray or watch on Amazon Prime, click on this handy link.

Or – and this is unlikely to work forever – you can watch the whole thing right now. Here is Rashomon. It is really good. Enjoy.