Kurosawa/Mizoguchi
New 2K Digital Restoration
Thursday, March 23 | 8 pm
Friday, March 31 | 5:30 pm
Winner of the Golden Lion, the top prize at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, and recipient of an honorary Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Rashomon introduced Western filmgoers to the sensuous and intellectual pleasures of Japanese cinema, and turned forty-year-old Akira Kurosawa into an international sensation. A prescient mediation on the ephemerality of truth and the malleability of memory, Rashomon’s ingenious, multi-layered plot concerns the trial of the notorious bandit Tajōmaru (Toshirō Mifune), who stands accused of murdering a samurai and raping his wife. Over the course of the film, four witnesses testify, each providing a different account of the crime and identifying a different killer. Inspired by the heightened, expressionistic aesthetic of Japanese silent film, Kurosawa makes symbolic use of light and shadow, creating beautiful sun-dappled compositions that serve as a visual corollary to the philosophical ambiguity at the heart of the narrative.
Director Akira Kurosawa 1950 Japan 88 minutes NR 2K DCP
