Rashomon
d. Akira Kurosawa, 1950
Kurosawa's first film to make it to the U.S., Rashomon, turned out to be a more modest picture than I had expected. Having only seen 1980's Kagemusha, I was looking forward to a more lavish picture. Instead, here he gives us a rather simple story told in a more dynamic way. The audience basically gets four different testimonies of what happened one day in the woods. The only fact that all four stories have in common is that a man ends up dead in each of them (through different circumstances). In essence, Kurosawa is talking to the audience about the nature of truth and how each person's point of view distorts events. This same principle would be explored by Sidney Lumet in 1957's 12 Angry Men, and Roshomon's evidence on that film is more than evident. Hugely important, if not as formally astonishing as I would have hoped.
