Conversations with Ben III

On the agenda: Rashomon

Ben sez:

What are ya gonna do? Sometimes the critics are right. Sometimes the director and cinematographer remember correctly as well. Fifty-five years later all that's left for me to do is confirm that it continues to stand the test of time, job one for great art. The film, plus the Special Feature interviews, plus the little booklet with the original two stories, the excerpt of K's autobio and the historical discussion by Stephen Prince - the whole package was an exceptionally educational experience.

Altman I found especially on the money, his awareness of being a foreigner to all sorts of cultural codes readily comprehensible to the Japanese and even more, his treatment of the ol' "seeing is believing" cognitive rule of thumb. What his treatment implicitly explained is that as an investigation into the subjectivity of truth - this particular investigation could only have been conducted in the medium of film. An approximation might be conducted as live theatre, but this could never be as powerful because nothing can fool the eye like the camera and it is precisely this fooling of the eye which constitutes the technical basis for the philosophic problematic.

And this gives me a chance to beat yet again one of my favorite dead horses. For K the "tricks" of technique, the "play" in form, the matters of style are not considered the stuff of content, the substance of the film. Quite the contrary, they serve the epistemological ambiguity and moral anguish being communicated. Prince comments, "Style for K is not an empty flourish." Damn straight. Hence, Rashomon - much much more indirectly and ultimately with far greater artistic power - delivers the moral mandate for film-making itself that is front and centre in Camera Buff. If you are going to "fool the eye" - you better be doing it to say something worth saying.

One of the things given only cursory mention by Prince that I couldn't stop remembering was that this film was released only half a decade after the atomic bombings. That K could not go over to total despair, that he had to provide an act of redemption to the woodcutter in the final scene, this says a lot about his personal emotional healthiness. After all, nothing of the sort happens in either of the two original stories. Or is it just the 1950's Japanese version of the Hollywood happy ending for commercial considerations? I think not.

I won't go on and on. But I do want to give myself credit - once again - for noticing the technical brilliance of the woodcutter's initial walk into the forest. While watching it I didn't understand it, I didn't know yet that the forest was a metaphor for intellectual confusion (as distinct from the standard metaphor of the forest as amoral non-civilization). The scene seemed so long and pointless. This lapse in my interpretive ability created a space in my technical sensitivity. I began to wonder how in hell they filmed the scene. It was amazing. So I was fascinated by the behind-the-scenes explanation that was provided. Brilliant! It's just fucking stupid how good it is. The whole film. You know the feeling you sometimes get that it is somehow rude that a craftsman crafted something so... perfectly. The guy was definitely visited by The Muse.

Dan respondz:

The element of the exotic is always an interesting one with Kurosawa, because he got in such hot water with his native land for being so in love with the cinema and techniques of the west. Yet, to you and I (and, I suspect, most filmgoers who first came across his work in the 40s and 50s) a film like Rashomon seems like it comes to us from another world. Imagine how exotic he would have seemed had he not been a big fan of John Ford! We westerners probably never would have heard of him.

Rashomon adheres because it is both alien and accessible. The story's setting might as well be a fairy tale for most of us in the west, the characters are so foreign to our experience. And the acting is so far from anything we are familiar and/or comfortable with, particularly the apparent screechy excess of the female victim, that it pushes our sense of other-ness to the seeming breaking point.

BUT, this multi-foliate flower of a tale has much that we recognize as well. The character's flaws are as familiar to us as any in western literature from the time of Chaucer onward, and Kurosawa's many narratives remain clear and distinct despite their contradictions because he edits them together (and keeps them apart) so beautifully that it makes the journey through this confusion nearly effortless for the viewer.

So, yes, style contributes impressively to the thematic substance of the film, as the moral ambiguity and existential crisis that the narratives elicit from the characters and audience are captured in some striking imagery (the sunlight speckling through the woods being K's money shot in that regard). I'm not so sure as you that the happy ending works; it feels kind of forced given the despair we've been witnessing throughout. Then again, at this point in its history, did Japan really need another knee to the gonads? I think not.

Then Ben:

think your treatment is quite dialectical. You are explaining a dynamic interpenetration of opposites. What is more, we are getting beyond film criticism as such and jumping full bore into cultural studies because the issue really is one of the relation between an artistic work and a non-domestic audience reception of it. I didn't want to say a "foreign" audience because it seems to me that much of what you are explaining is the non-foreign reception of what is, dialectally, plainly alien stuff. To simply suggest that the artistic work is therefore "universal" is not incorrect but is analytically crude and ultimately empty. The dialectics you foster deal with the relation between concrete (Japanese) forms and universal (humanist) themes. I like this in and of itself but I also like it as an all-purpose methodology; indeed, I am imposing this methodological paradigm of mine on your treatment. I won't bore you further with my personal intellectual religion. Suffice to finish by suggesting that this dialectic is at the heart of a good relation between form and content as distinct from a one-sided, bad relation. For style is always a concrete thing. Content may or may not be universal but we deem it more worthwhile when it is, we judge the work superior when it is. So the whole problem of style and content - that I refuse to stop talking about - is derivative of a deeper, more abstract matter concerning the dialectics of the concrete and the universal.

And Dan:

All this agreement between us does mess with the dialectic, doesn't it?

Ben [fin]:

Yes it does. We have to earn synthesis.