Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

24 Pages·2009·1.36 MB·German

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Rashomon
(Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
Produktion, Rezeption, Einfluss
• Rashomon der erste japanische Film, der im Westen mit Erfolg gezeigt wurde (Goldener Löwe, Venice
Film Festival 1951; Oscar für besten ausländischen Film 1951)
• Kurosawa galt in Japan als ein eher „westlicher“ Regisseur; man zögerte deshalb zunächst, „Rashomon“
als Beitrag einzureichen
– das japanische Kino war bereits vor dem II. Weltkrieg hoch entwickelt; man eignete sich nicht nur westliche
Filmverfahren an, sondern bediente sich häufig bei japanischen Traditionen ( z.B.: Noh – eine stark stilisierte
dramatische Form)
– andere bekannte japanische Regisseure der 50er Jahre
• Yasujiro Ozu
• Kenji Mizoguchi
• Film geht auf 2 Geschichten von Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) zurück: „In a Grove“ und
„Rashomon“. Akutagawa schrieb unter dem Einfluss der westlichen Moderne. Kurosawa stellte etliche
erzähltechnische und inhaltliche Details um
– aus dem extradiegetischen Erzähler der Geschichte werden zwei diegetische Erzähler
• „Rashomon“ als Film kein allzu großer Erfolg in Japan; wurde wegen „Unverständlichkeit“ kritisiert
• Im Westen bleibt „Rashomon“ der bekannteste japanische Film überhaupt; man spricht vom
„Rashomon-Effekt“ bei sich widersprechenden Zeugenaussagen
• Kurosawa (1910-1998) hatte bereits 12 Filme gedreht; wurde im Laufe der 50er und 60er Jahre zum
„bekanntesten Japaner überhaupt“; gilt als einer der größten Autorenfilmemacher
– insgesamt 30 Filme (Auswahl)
• 1943: Judo Saga –Die Legende vom großen Judo(Sugata Sanshirō)
• 1948: Engel der Verlorenen(Yoidore Tenshi)
• 1949: Das Stumme Duell(Shizukanaru Ketto)
• 1949: Ein streunender Hund(Nora Inu)
• 1950: Skandal(Shubun)
• 1950: Rashomon –Das Lustwäldchen(Rashōmon)
• 1951: Der Idiot(Hakuchi)
• 1952: Einmal wirklich leben(Ikiru)
Produktion, Rezeption, Einfluss
• 1954: Die sieben Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai)
• 1955: Ein Leben in Furcht (Ikimono no Kiroku)
• 1957: Das Schloss im Spinnwebwald (Kumonosu-jō)
• 1957: Nachtasyl (Donzoko)
• 1958: Die verborgene Festung (Kakushi Toride no San-Akunin)
• 1960: Die Bösen schlafen gut (Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru)
• 1961: Yojimbo – Der Leibwächter (Yōjimbō)
• 1962: Sanjuro (Tsubaki Sanjūrō)
• 1963: Zwischen Himmel und Hölle (Tengoku to Jigoku)
• 1965: Rotbart (Akahige)
• 1970: Dodeskaden – Menschen im Abseits (Dodeskaden)
• 1975: Uzala, der Kirgise (Dersu Uzala)
• 1985: Ran (Ran)
– Historische Filme, „jidai-geki“
– „gendai-geki“; Filme über modernes Leben
– Etliche Dostoevskij und Shakespeare-Verfilmungen; Nachtasyl nach Gorkij
• Toshiro Mifune (der Bandit) wurde im Folge des Filmes zum Weltstar
• Kurosawas Werk wirkte stark auf Hollywood zurück; vor allem Regisseure der 70er Jahre (sog.
„Hollywood Brats“: Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola)
– „Krieg der Sterne“ geht z.T. auf Kurosawas „Die verborgene Festung“ zurück
– „Sieben Samurai“ wurde in Hollywood als „The Magnificent Seven“ gedreht
– „Yojimbo“ wurde als Vorlage für Italo-Western benutzt
• Die Musik im Film wurde Ravels „Bolero“ nachempfunden, das in Japan vergleichsweise unbekannt war
(möglicherweise unterschätze Kurosawa das Bekanntheitsgrad des Stückes für das westliche Ohr)
Auszüge aus: Something Like an Autobiography,trans., Audie E. Bock. Translation Copyright ©1982 by
Vintage Books. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House..
Rashomon BY AKIRA KUROSAWA
Since the advent of the talkies in the 1930s, I felt, we had misplaced and forgotten what was so wonderful about the old silentmovies. I was aware of
the aesthetic loss as a constant irritation. I sensed a need to go back to the origins of the motion picture to find this peculiar beauty again; I had to go
back into the past.
In particular, I believed that there was something to be learned from the spirit of the French avant-garde films of the 1920s. Yet in Japan at this time
we had no film library. I had to forage for old films, and try to remember the structure of those I had seen as a boy, ruminating over the aesthetics that
had made them special.
Rashomonwould be my testing ground, the place where I could apply the ideas and wishes growing out of my silent-film research. To provide the
symbolic background atmosphere, I decided to use the Akutagawa ―In a Grove‖ story, which goes into the depths of the human heartas if with a
surgeon’s scalpel, laying bare its dark complexities and bizarre twists. These strange impulses of the human heart would be expressed through the
use of an elaborately fashioned play of light and shadow. In the film, people going astray in the thicket of their hearts would wander into a wider
wilderness, so I moved the setting to a large forest. I selected the virgin forest of the mountains surrounding Nara, and theforest belonging to the
Komyoji temple outside Kyoto.
There were only eight characters, but the story was both complex and deep. The script was done as straightforwardly and briefly as possible, so I felt
I should be able to create a rich and expansive visual image in turning it into a film. Fortunately, I had as cinematographera man I had long wanted to
work with, Miyagawa Kazuo; I had Hayasaka to compose the music and Matsuyama as art director. The cast was Mifune Toshiro, Mori Masayuki,
Kyo Machiko, Shimura Takashi, Chiaki Minoru, Ueda Kichijiro, Kato Daisuke and Honma Fumiko; all were actors whose temperaments Iknew, and I
could not have wished for a better line-up. Moreover, the story was supposed to take place in summer, and we had, ready to hand,the scintillating
midsummer heat of Kyoto and Nara. With all these conditions so neatly met, I could ask nothing more. All that was left was to begin the film.
However, one day just before the shooting was to start, the three assistant directors Daiei had assigned me came to see me at the inn where I was
staying. I wondered what the problem could be. It turned out that they found the script baffling and wanted me to explain it to them. ―Please read it
again more carefully,‖ I told them. ―If you read it diligently, you should be able to understand it because it was written with the intention of being
comprehensible.‖ But they wouldn’t leave. ―We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don’t understand it at all; that’swhy we want you to
explain it to us.‖ For their persistence I gave them this simple explanation:
Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script
portrays such human beings–the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this
sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave—even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through
a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is
unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to
understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I thinkyou will grasp the
point of it.
We set up a parallel schedule for the use of the Komyoji location and open set of the Rashomon gate. On sunny days we filmed atKomyoji; on cloudy
days we filmed the rain scenes at the gate set. Because the gate set was so huge, the job of creating rainfall on it was a majoroperation. We borrowed
fire engines and turned on the studio’s fire hoses to full capacity. But when the camera was aimed upward at the cloudy sky overthe gate, the
sprinkle of the rain couldn’t be seen against it, so we made rainfall with black ink in it. Every day we worked in temperatures of more than 85º
Fahrenheit, but when the wind blew through the wide-open gate with the terrific rainfall pouring down over it, it was enough to chill the skin.
I had to be sure that this huge gate looked huge to the camera. And I had to figure out how to use the sun itself. This was amajor concern because of
the decision to use the light and shadows of the forest as the keynote of the whole film. I determined to solve the problem by actually filming the sun.
These days it is not uncommon to point the camera directly at the sun, but at the time Rashomonwas being made it was still one of the taboos of
cinematography. It was even thought that the sun’s rays shining directly into your lens would burn the film in your camera. But my cameraman,
Miyagawa Kazuo, boldly defied this convention and created superb images. The introductory section in particular, which leads theviewer through the
light and shadow of the forest into a world where the human heart loses its way, was truly magnificent camera work. I feel that this scene, later
praised at the Venice International Film Festival as the first instance of a camera entering the heart of a forest, was not onlyone of Miyagawa’s
masterpieces but a world-class masterpiece of black-and-white cinematography.
And yet, I don’t know what happened to me. Delighted as I was with Miyagawa’s work, it seems I forgot to tell him. When I said to myself,
“Wonderful,” I guess I thought I had said “Wonderful” to him at the same time. I didn’t realize I hadn’t until one day Miyagawa’s old friend Shimura
Takashi (who was playing the woodcutter in Rashomon) came to me and said, “Miyagawa’s very concerned about whether his camera work is
satisfactory to you.” Recognizing my oversight for the first time, I hurriedly shouted “One hundred percent! One hundred for camera work! One
hundred plus!”
There is no end to my recollections of Rashomon. If I tried to write about all of them, I’d never finish, so I’d like to end with one incident that left an
indelible impression on me. It has to do with the music.
As I was writing the script, I heard the rhythms of a bolero in my head over the episode of the woman’s side of the story. I asked Hayasaka to write a
bolero kind of music for the scene. When we came to the dubbing of that scene, Hayasaka sat down next to me and said, “I’ll try it with the music.” In
his face I saw uneasiness and anticipation. My own nervousness and expectancy gave me a painful sensation in my chest. The screen lit up with the
beginning of the scene, and the strains of the bolero music softly counted out the rhythm. As the scene progressed, the musicrose, but the image and
the sound failed to coincide and seemed to be at odds with each other. “Damn it,” I thought. The multiplication of sound and image that I had
calculated in my head had failed, it seemed. It was enough to make me break out in a cold sweat.
We kept going. The bolero music rose yet again, and suddenly picture and sound fell into perfect unison. The mood created waspositively eerie. I felt
an icy chill run down my spine, and unwittingly I turned to Hayasaka. He was looking at me. His face was pale, and I saw thathewas shuddering with
the same eerie emotion I felt. From that point on, sound and image proceeded with incredible speed to surpass even the calculations I had made in
my head. The effect was strange and overwhelming.
• Was macht „Rashomon“ zum Klassiker?
– kinematographische Höhepunkte
• strenge formale Organisation der 3 Schauplätze
• Spiel mit Licht (besonders im Wald); Verwendung eines Spiegels, um Gesichter zu beleuchten
• Aufnahmen in die Sonne hinein
• eindrucksvolle POV-Einstellungen nach oben
• dynamische Kamerafahrten im Wald
• Gebrauch eines Teleobjektivs, das den filmischen Raum verflacht
• Kontrast zwischen dynamischer, „westlicher“ Schnitttechnik und statischer, „japanischer“ Bildhaftigkeit
– z.T. Bruch mit dem klassischen Hollywoodstil, z.T. dessen dynamische Überbietung
– streng durchgeführte erzähltechnische Verschachtelung
• Rahmenerzählung am Tempel (Genette: extradiegetische Erzählung)
– intradiegetische Erzählung (erzähltes Erzählen): das Gerichtsverfahren
» Erzählung in der Erzählung: Erinnerungen der Zeugen (metadiegetische Erzählung)
• Führt die Flashbacktechnik (Analepsen) von „Citizen Kane“ noch einen Schritt weiter
• Ähnlichkeiten mit Neorealismus: nicht alles wird zu Ende erzählt
– Verschärfung der erkenntistheoretischen Problematik, die in „Citizen Kane“ aufgeworfen wurde
• Die Wahrheit wird subjektiviert; jeder hat eine eigene, egoistische Wahrheit
• Die objektivierende Wirkung des Filmes wird drastisch unterwandert durch die paradoxe
Vervielfältigung des Objektivierungsvorgangs; jede individuelle Wahrheit wird filmisch überzeugend
dargestellt
– Das Medium selbst wird stillschweigend zur Botschaft
• Unentscheidbarkeit der Wahrheit wird filmisch vorgeführt (Vorbote der späteren Postmoderne)
– „Die“ Wahrheit gibt es nicht
• Am Ende siegt (noch) der Humanismus (typisch für die 50er Jahre)
– Soziopolitische Aktualität
• „Rashomon“ als Allegorie der japanischen Situation nach dem II. Weltkrieg (Tempelruine symbolisiert
Zustand Japans)
– Spielt in den Wirren des japanischen Mittelalters (9. Jhdt.), die mit der Nachkriegszeit vergleichbar sind
– Notwendigkeit eines humanistisch fundierten Neuanfangs
• Der Film destruiert oder unterminiert die bestehende Ordnung, in der Ehre und Egoismus vorrangig
sind; Emanzipation der Frau auch ein Thema
Die drei Standorte im Film und deren
unterschiedliche Textur
Platzregen (Wasser mit schwarzer Tinte versetzt); vertikale
und diagonale Elemente bestimmen die mise en scène
Vertikales Element schirmt ein Teil des Bildes ab;
Sinnbild der „Abschirmung“ der Wahrheit in
der Handlung
flache, gemälde-artige Einstellung
(mit Teleobjektiv aufgenommen); „eingerahmte― Menschen
Diagonale und vertikale Elemente suggerieren
die Möglichkeit der Überwindung der
„unverständlichen“ Situation