22. Kurosawa and Rashomon

MIT 21L.011 The Film Experience, Fall 2013
Instructor: David Thorburn

Kurosawa's Rashomon demonstrates film's emergence as an international medium and fully-recognized art form. The lecture highlights connections to modernism and Japanese theater traditions, and summarizes the film's key stylistic and structural features.

00:00 OCW Intro
00:20 The "moment" of Rashomon
11:03 Japanese Cinema: a note
18:18 Kurosawa's career
23:45 Rashomon

License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

[CeciliaEavesWalkerMEd]

I love the idea of the same crew, same, performers, same musicians, remaining with him and going from film to film. So Ideal. So cohesive.

[rhianna]

I decided to write my coursework on Rashomon after watching this lecture and would just like to say that this lecturer is absolutely brilliant and his ideas really informed by writing and helped me get a first!

[adecakke]

Rashomon already my most favorite movie all the time just by watching this before even watching Rashomon itself because of how happy the lecturer was :D

[teaMmMate]

An amazing lecturer, his passion kept me glued to the video until the end.

[rhianna]

Thanks to this guy for helping me pass my film module more than my own teachers

[jinhaozhang]

Great professor, great passion for teaching

[cinemyscope]

Thank you! Nice! Just a note though about 22:50. Last Man Standing was indeed a remake of Yojimbo but it was done in 1996, not in 1966.

[KeyserTheRedBeard]

astonishing video MIT OpenCourseWare. I broke the thumbs up on your video. Always keep up the high-quality work.

[CeciliaEavesWalkerMEd]

I would love to have seen this in this class at the time of the showing of this film!

[sureshs]

Rashomon has expanded my mind since I watched it in an irreversible and in a humane manner.

[arnablahiri]

His slides include Satyajit Ray, but lecture didn't have any mention about him and his masterpieces of 50s like "Pather Panchali" and "Aporajito" (The second Asian Film after 'Rashomon' to win Golden Lion).

[mobarrett]

I really thought he did it all in one breath

[abhinavgaur]

An OCW lecture on Kurosawa and Roshomon from MIT. However, if you look at the board behind the guy, you might see glimpses of KKT conditions and Gradient Descent from the previous class. Strange things my eyes caught. :)

[eyebrowlook]

Not to take away any of the accurate observations by this lecturer, the mere fact that he even considers whether the ending should be deleted shows that he has not understood the film as a whole. The ending is very essential. As noted by another comment before, "Rashomon" is not a reference to that "gate" and "society's decay" (at least not only and definitely not primarily) but it is a reference to another story, which is the other literary source for the film and in a deep sense equally as important as "In a Grove". Without that ending the viewer is left with the sense of the unsolved mystery, human tragedy and the inability to trust in humanity, because of the egoistic behaviour of each individual that makes it impossible to find out the truth. The ending however makes the most important point that, being it part of our reality, that in many cases we are unable to find out the truth about certain events in the past for various reasons, in the present moment, that becomes irrelevant and the only thing that really matters is doing the right then and there, regardless of your mistakes in the past or your beliefs.

[uma_r]

Yojimbo also remade as Fistful of dollars, but that's sphagetti. Ok

[karlhungus]

I would rather delete the last part of this lecture than the end of Rashomon.

[BicycleFunk]

What's up with the linear algebra in the bg?

[RanBlakePiano]

You often comment you wish you had more time .woukd you consider expand your course ?

[ecritdelajaponographie]

It's really weird to see a professor of film in a prestigious institution of learning like MIT give a one-hour lecture on the film "Rashomon" but completely overlook the background of the work. It's wrong to say the title is a reference to the gate -- it's a reference to the short story by Akutagawa, and the gate sequences were shoe-horned in to the film to justify the title, not the other way around as this lecture presents. The reason for this, as far as I can establish, is that in Japan the story "Rashomon" is (and was) more famous, but Kurosawa wanted to adapt an unrelated story by the same author.

[yorgunkaptaan]

Is there any way to watch Roshman legally? Youtube contents have banned. I cannot buy CD, I need an online free-cheap platform.