RASHOMON in time signatures

Of what’s been said, written and filmed, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon rings a lot more bells than it meant to. It is a simple idea put on an intelligent pedestal by Kurosawa’s character framing and Kazuo Miyagawa’s camera work. As someone once said - the beauty of an idea lies not in itself but how it is executed. Who said this though? The Samurai? His wife? The bandit? The woodcutter? Moreover, how could a simple woodcutter get himself to think of such a well-constructed thought? How could a wounded samurai get himself to think of a thought irrelevant to his predicament? Why would a dying man’s wife think of a good idea when she’s already used one to pit two men against each other? And therein lies the magic that is Rashomon. Mr Kurosawa’s characters aren’t a randomly selected set of professions; for all we know the woodcutter could have easily been a patrol officer. A good film rests on its characters and Kurosawa has smartly weaved his with a strong sense of irony backing each one up. But characters are not what strengthen Rashomon, it’s the way they are framed and it’s the relationship between the camera and what it captures, or rather WHEN and how it captures what it captures.

The film opens up with a series of frames showing the ruins of a structured gate now drenched in rain. The following frames focus on the Rashomon City Gate followed by a slightly zoomed in frame of the same structure. The third scene is a perspective frame of a different side of the gate seen from a third point of view. Now, I’ll be basing this review on the first five scenes of the film that don’t have any titles, as I feel Mr. Kurosawa has slyly established the point of his story in these five scenes.

The first frame shows a zoomed out view of the Rashomon City Gate followed by a slightly zoomed in view of the same gate. Now, to any filmmaker the second scene would seem unnecessary but in my philosophical opinion, Mr Kurosawa has shown the human tendency to focus attention slightly more on something when they fail to comprehend it. The first scene of the gate lasts for 13 seconds and the second scene lasts for 7 seconds. Now imagine a person trying to understand a situation, he looks at it for a certain amount of time and when he fails to understand it completely he zooms in on it, but not for too long before he changes the way he is looking at it. This is where the third scene steps in - this frame shows a different angle of the gate and lasts for 5 seconds. Now I’m not saying that the 13-7-5 distribution of seconds hints at something, it might and it might not. But from my point of view it does. The third frame shows our tendency to look at things from a different point of view. We spend more time focusing on a problem and lesser and lesser time on things we find when we start diving into it until we find something - the fourth frame. Here’s the interesting bit. The fourth frame shows two characters sitting under the gate next to a huge pillar. It is however a zoomed out frame that tells us that we’ve reached somewhere. This frame lasts for about 6 seconds. The fifth scene, however, sets the whole thing on a concrete stage. The fifth scene shows a zoomed in frame of these characters that tells us there is something evil bothering them. Now this frame lasts for 14 seconds. We have now found something that promises to decode the situation - two people who’re willing to tell us what they saw in the woods earlier that day. We now devote more time to understanding it because we now rest in the feeling of being promised something, regardless of its true nature.

Five characters. Five scenes before anyone starts talking. That’s the brilliance Kurosawa exhibits. He takes the very first five frames to explain the whole point of his story. The distribution of time for each frame following a 13-7-5-6-14 seconds curve shows exactly how we start looking at a situation. There are five ways of comprehending a situation without any promises of it being true. That’s the whole point, no matter how close you think you are to deciphering something, there is always something else that, when brought to light, could put a whole new spin to it - a different perspective. Well of course until you find the dagger.

I know it’s an unusual method of reviewing a movie based on the first minute of it, but it is a point of view like any other point of view or the other million possible points of view.

The beauty of Rashomon lies in the fact that Mr Kurosawa succeeded in packaging the essence of his story in the first minute using structures and people. That’s brilliance and simplicity - 66 years back.