The final theme of jidai-geki that Kurosawa’s film shatters is that of fidelity, and not only of a wife to her husband. In fact, the most violent infidelity does not occur in Tajomaru’s account of the rape scene, but in the woodcutter’s explanation of the samurai’s curt order for the wife to kill herself. In this time period, it was not uncommon for a woman to commit suicide to retain family honor, however, the man who had destroyed that honor was present in front of the samurai. Her husband would not do the ‘right’ thing, risking is own life to kill Tajomaru before ordering the suicide, instead leaving her behind, calling her a whore, as if he were so much higher than the situation.
It is not only within the actual theme of the story that the tropes of the jidai-geki are visible. Kurosawa’s skillful camerawork, from the very first testimonial sequence, belie the dissonance between the witnesses’ testimonies and their true nature. During the woodcutter’s description of the forest scene, we are given a very extensive look of him walking through the forest and witnessing the various lost items, and then the body itself. However, the camera inconspicuously turns away from the woodcutter for short periods of time to gaze up at the overbearing sun in the sky. On first glance, this seems inconsequential. However, near the end of the film, the vagabond who comes to listen to the story of the murder realizes that the “honest” woodcutter himself left out a very important detail of the story: he never said what had happened to the ornate (and most likely expensive) dagger that the wife carried. During those times when the camera looked at the sun, the viewer looses track of exactly what the woodcutter is doing. It is very likely that he picked up and pocketed the knife at that time.
The act of looking at the sun held two other symbolic purposes. First, it not only broke the conventions of jidai-geki, but all films, as it was “one of the taboos of cinematography” (Kurosawa, 185). People did not simply shoot the sun. However, this act not only was used to obscure what the woodcutter was doing, but remind the viewers that the dark evils of the film took place in broad daylight, on a path to the “world where the human heart loses its way” (Kurosawa, 185). This parallelism in the forest of light and shadow where man becomes beast is symbolism much akin to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
The camera also turned away during one other crucial point- the actual death of the samurai in every witness’s account save the woodcutter’s. Since the only truth the viewer can get about each of those who testified is that they are all lying (and, at the very least, the woodcutter omitted parts from his own story if he did not fabricate the truth, too), the act of the camera never capturing the fatal act may serve to mimic the gaps in the suspect’s stories. In stories like the woodcutter, the viewer does see the samurai get stabbed, but one never actually sees him die. Another thing to differenciate the stories is the angle and location one sees the samurai last- he is never shown in the same final position, or from the same angle in any of the testimonies, to separate each one from the next.
Rashómon, in being told in a ‘classical’ style, works to both break and redefine its own genre’s conventions, using the audience’s understanding of jidai-geki to create, and then break, their preconceptions on how the archetype characters should act and how it should be filmed. Kurosawa’s use of theme and camerawork do this perfectly.
Bibliography
Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like an Autobiography. New York, 1982.
Rashómon. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Prod. Jingo Minuro. DVD. 1950.
Richie, Donald. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos. New York: Kodansha International, 2005.
