Rashomon

The duel as evidence

Released in Japan on 26 August 1950, Rashomon was shot under the American occupation, which frowned on sword films and their feudal values. Kurosawa works around the problem: the fight is not a set piece, it is a piece of evidence that every witness distorts. In Tajomaru's account, the two men cross blades with flair and the bandit boasts of holding out for more than twenty exchanges. In the woodcutter's account, the same men shake, stumble, drop their swords and end up on the ground in the undergrowth. The samurai begs before he dies. In 1950 no film had shown so bluntly what a sword duel is worth between two men who are afraid of dying.

Mifune, the bandit's body

Toshiro Mifune, aged 30, plays Tajomaru crouching, leaping, laughing, holding the sword like a tool rather than a symbol. This way of acting a fight with the whole body became a reference for jidai-geki actors. Kurosawa and Mifune went on to make Seven Samurai (1954), Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962), which set the grammar of the katana on screen: a long wait, an explosion, a single decisive cut. Rashomon is where that school begins.

What a practitioner will recognise

There is no codified technique here: loose guards, wide cuts, poorly managed distance, blades catching in branches. That is the point of the film, which sets the fight as told against the fight as lived. A kendo or iaido practitioner will notice the weight of fear, the role of terrain and light, and the gap between a katana in an expert's hands and the same sword in the hands of an ordinary man. Kazuo Miyagawa's cinematography, which points the camera straight at the sun and bounces light into the forest with mirrors, gives the duel its depth.

Reception and legacy

Golden Lion in Venice in September 1951, then an Honorary Academy Award for best foreign film in March 1952: Rashomon was the first Japanese film to break through abroad, and it opened the Western door to samurai cinema. It holds a 98% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes today. Its narrative device gave the language a common expression, the Rashomon effect, for contradictory accounts of a single event. The film runs 88 minutes, in black and white, and is best watched in the original Japanese with subtitles.