Rashomon effect? Why no Kane effect?
Orson Welles got there 10 years earlier.
You are entitled to my opinionshare
Could you clarify?
Let's be bad guys.
Welles told a story of a character from different points of view, layering the plot with each point of view. That was inventive.
All Kurosawa did was translate two short stories to the screen. The idea of one event seen through multiple, conflicting points of views was not his.
Because Citizen Kane did not do what Rashamon did.
Each character in Citizen Kane had a different story about different events in Kane's life.
Rashamon had different points of view about one event.
The two are not interchangeable.
My point is that the short story writer was the innovator, not Kurosawa.
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Wasn't your point about Kane and Welles?
shareWelles told a the story in an original way. Kurosawa didn't. In the case of Rashomon, that kind of plotting was new to a movie, but the idea originated with someone else, the short story writer.
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So why is this post about Kane and Welles and not the author?
shareBecause Kurosawa didn't do anything original with regard to the plot. I was comparing him to Welles to demonstrate that point.
He's a good director, but he's overrated.
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But why compare two films with completely different plots?
Besides, Welles wasn't as original as you'd think.
The Power and the Glory from 1933 has the same plot: friends and family telling a story through flashbacks.
After Many a Summer also tells the story of a Hollywood celebrity, which (like Kane) was also based on William Randolph Hearst's life.
Kurosawa deserves all the praise he's earned. He told great stories visually and in exciting ways which have stood the test of time. That's the mark of a great director.
Let's be bad guys.
Point taken about "Kane."
But, "Rashomon" is still overrated. There is nothing visually exciting about the guts of the story. It's a good movie, but not a great one.
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Disagree. There are some great visuals. The use of shadow. The use of background. Kurosawa laid a lot of the groundwork for future spaghetti westerns.
Let's be bad guys.
The scenes of the ruined rashomon were visually great, but not the core of the movie. The rest was just good.
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The core was also great. The scenes in the glen were beautiful. The scene with the ghost medium was haunting. And of course, each version of the fight was distinct from the others.
Let's be bad guys.
The key to understanding the importance of Rashomon is the fact that all the flashbacks are FALSE flashbacks. The film (even more so than the story "In a Grove" by Akutagawa) is actually questioning the nature of truth and reality itself. Kurosawa added the coda at the end about the woodcutter accepting the abandoned child as his own, somewhat softening the nihilistic nature of the original story (i.e. that there is no objective truth). The false flashback in cinema was considered revolutionary back then, and not just in Japan. Hitchcock used the same technique in Stage Fright (1950) the same year, and the audiences angrily rejected the film for that reason. Hitchcock considered this decision to include a false flashback as one of the biggest mistakes of his career and accepted the audiences judgement that he had made a wrong move. Gradually, false flashbacks are much more commonplace and accepted in film, but back then they were not.
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