Darrell, Davis. “Reigniting Japanese Tradition with Hana-Bi.” Cinema Journal 40.4 (2001): 55-80. 

    This article, published in a cinema journal in 2001, reviews Kitano Takeshi’s 1997 film Hana-Bi, or “Fireworks,” in the context of Takeshi’s use of traditional Japanese icons in a modern, global gangster-film market. Immediately, the other main subject of the article is Akira Kurosawa, as demonstrated in the first sentence. In order to catch the audience’s interest, Takeshi is introduced as the greatest Japanese filmmaker since Akira Kurosawa by generic Western critics. The author, Darrell Davis, interrogates Takeshi’s personal message, however, when he questions whether “Japaneseness” in cinema is merely a marketing ploy by the filmmakers. He points to Takeshi’s meticulous attention to traditional Japanese customs in his films despite his public desire to be disavowed from a primarily Japanese identity. In a New York Times interview, for example, he criticizes Kurosawa’s adherence to stereotypical Japanese representations, while the next day asks for Kurosawa’s particular input and recommendations. Darrell asserts that perhaps Takeshi exploits the icon of Japanese cinema, Kurosawa, to garter a particular image for himself publicly, and then by censuring him plays a keen political tactic. Darrell moves on to the study of Takeshi’s work and Japanese cinema. He uses the three types of Japanese film as described by Kurosawa to structure the remainder of her analysis. According to Kurosawa, the three modes of Japanese film are the reflectionist, dialogic, and contamination models. Darrell ends by commenting on Hana-Bi’s release at the Cannes Film Festival and an ending remark on the work and Takeshi.

This article is useful to my study of Kurosawa’s Rashomon for two main reasons. First, the detailed descriptions of Kurosawa’s labeling of film genres offer a new level of discussion applicable to the film Rashomon. Secondly, the discourse about Kurosawa’s samurai films among the modern industry provides a look into the sustainability of Kurosawa’s films over time, of which his masterpiece Rashomon is included. Particularly, while many articles today celebrate Kurosawa’s work from a Western perspective, it is interesting to see how he is discussed by his Japanese peers.

    Susan. “Confronting Master Narratives: History as Vision in Miyazaki Hayao’s Cinema of De-assurance.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 9.2 (2001): 467-493. 

    Susan Napier’s article discusses the cinematic master narratives in the context of Japanese cinema and the larger global cultural consciousness. Its main subject is Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, though his work is described in view of his contemporaries and influences. Napier begins by discussing the broad ideas of modernization vs. history and the role of cultural identity in art and cinema. She asserts that films have the power to “write history” and “create national identity” on the global stage. She points to the crucial post-WWII period in Japan when Japanese cinema first made its mark. Specfically, she credits Akira Kurosawa and his jidaigeki, “period films,” with their realism and dazzling visual aesthetics, as being the most influential Japanese filmmaker at the time. In his films, Kurosawa both “exploit[ed] and deconstruct[ed] the mythology of samurai.” His films powerfully brought humanity to the Japanese traditions and brought the past into the contemporary discussion of Japanese identity. Similarly, the animator Miyazaki, of the title of the piece, created scenes and characters that while being decidedly Japanese are individual in their personalities and actions. Notably, this characterization can be seen in Miyazaki’s many female protagonists, who stand out from their group-oriented traditional counterparts. The article then focuses on Miyazaki’s film Princess Mononoke, comparing it to the English powerhouse animation counterpart, Disney.

The relevance of this article to my project is found beyond the simple citing of Kurosawa’s influence and works. The real insights came from the comparisons of Miyazaki’s style and that of Kurosawa. Miyazaki is cited as criticizing Kurosawa’s formulaic depictions of good and evil in his samurai films. However, it seems clear in the larger sense that Kurosawa’s humanism did anything but adhere to clichés. He brought life into historical stereotypes. Furthermore, Princess Mononoke is praised as being “history as vision,” or representing in a new light a “historical reality,” recognizable yet distinctly unique. What style could better apply here than that of Kurosawa and his Rashomon-effect. Rashomon deals entirely with the reconstructions of identity through deceit and the power of perspective on redefining historical fact. The two directors offer a great deal of illumination to one another.

    Brion, Denis J. “Pluralism: Rashomon and Contested Conceptions of Criminality.” (2006) Washington & Lee Legal Studies Paper No. 2006-11.

    This paper is a Legal Studies paper written by Washington and Lee student Denis Brion in September 2006. In his paper, he uses the film Rashomon as the basis for his argument about pluralism in human perception carried into the various degrees of criminality. The film depicts four different reports of a violent crime in twelfth century Japan, told by three participators and one witness. These four perspectives are the extended to elaborate on the four modes of criminality and the four levels of individual human consciousness using the California Supreme Court case Taylor vs. Supreme Court as the specific case study. By providing a deep analysis of the aesthetics within the film Rashomon, Brion contends that the United States judicial system works as well by aesthetic acts. He begins by providing a close textual analysis of the four different storytellers in the film: the bandit, the woman, the man, and the witness. In parallel, he then goes on to closely evaluate the Taylor vs. Supreme Court case. Brion then extrapolates his argument into the subject of human nature playing its role in each case. After describing the four levels of consciousness alluded to above, he writes, in a phrase with which Kurosawa would surely agree with, that “perception is a hypothesis; and the reality we perceive is an interpretation.”

Primarily, this paper is extremely useful in a study of Kurosawa’s film Rashomon since it provides a scene by scene close textual analysis of the four different reports shown in the film. Furthermore, it provides a unique insight into the deeper human nature described in the film. Finally, its emphasis on a legal studies perspective in the discussion of the paper provide an important view on the nature of crime in the film, a point that is often overlooked in the greater narrative of perception.

    Thomas, Kevin. “Movies: Kurosawa Retrospective: Films That Won the West.” Los Angeles Times 9 Jan. 1983: T16.

    This article is a retrospective on director Akira Kurosawa’s body of work and appeared in the Los Angeles Times on January 9, 1983. At this point in Kurosawa’s career, he warrants the description in the opening paragraph of the article as “the world’s greatest living director.” The article’s subject relates to the retrospective being exhibited in Kurosawa’s honor at the County Art Museum. The author Kevin Thomas then goes on to enumerate the many unique accomplishments and characteristics of Kurosawa which earned him the title attributed above. He states that above all Kurosawa’s films evoke a powerful, lingering response in the viewer, of any background. The author is clearly well-versed in the language of film, as he sites the specifics of Kurosawa’s mise en scène, camera movement, and overall narrative. He gives interesting insight into Kurosawa’s training, including his frequent family outings to movies in his youth, training as a painter and calligrapher, his work as a narrator for foreign silent, and being an apprentice screenwriter in accord with Japanese tradition. He points out that while Kurosawa brought Japanese cinema to the world stage, he stands out in his own community as a dynamic, and therefore Western, anomaly among traditional Japanese cinematographers.

This article provides a nice summary of the works of Akira Kurosawa, while highlighting with key example the reasons for his critical success in global cinema. The author balances the overall influence of Kurosawa culturally with specifics of technical film analysis. The information on Rashomon is very in depth, seeing as it’s the film which first established Kurosawa and Japanese cinema in the world’s eye. Consequently, the film is given much attention in the article and has some useful analysis passages. The quotes incorporated from Kurosawa himself paint the picture of the man and his work very well and give the reader insight into what drives this innovative man and therefore his work. Overall, he is depicted as human; yet his work makes him immortal.

To start with, the pictorial and cinematic work in Rashomon explores the confines of a single setting, the grove where the death of the samurai character takes place. Kurosawa works within this physical spatial limitation by expanding the dynamic space for his character's emotions and psychology through cinematography and imagery. For example, Prince suggests that the play on light and shadow creates "a kind of spiritual and emotional labyrinth," hinting at the emotional depth Kurosawa bestows upon his characters. Also, camera movement gives depth to the characters as well by panning, shaking -- mimicking their emotional state. Long tracking shots and "sensuous" camera movements follow the woodcutter as he wanders through the forest, whereas jolting and aggressive shots characterize the film after the woodcutter discovers the dead samurai.

Hence, Kurosawa experiments with the narrative by invoking emotional depth in cinematography. Rashomon is quite similar to silent films, where everything is communicated solely through the characters' movements and filming techniques. Kurosawa does not settle for the dialogue as his sole means of narrative, he employs every constituent aspect of the film to this purpose as well.

The dialogue and the cinematography, both as narrative forms, complement each other and interweave to tell the five different accounts in the film. Clearly, as the accounts are conflicting versions of the same story, the dialogue is unreliable and subjective. But, because the imagery is coordinated through the perspective of the first-person, there are richer emotions projected in the film.

Similar to other sources, Richie emphasizes the relativity of truth in Rashomon. But, after a comprehensive analysis of the different versions of the story that are told, Richie comes to a conclusion slightly different from other analyses: "No one - priest, woodcutter, husband, bandit, medium - lied. They all told the truth." In this he says that Kurosawa doesn't question what truth is in the film, he questions reality.

In other words, what can define reality considering that everything is based on the subjective truth perceived by humans? To an individual who is emotionally distraught, reality changes and the line between illusion and reality is blurred.

Not only that, but Richie argues that one of the main points of Rashomon is that sometimes, humans are unable to distinguish real from unreal. It's not that they don't want to, but extenuating circumstances make them incapable of doing so. In the case of the wife, she is traumatized and disconcerted after the bandit takes advantage of her and after she is disowned by her own husband, she is led to believe that she killed her husband. To her, this is the truth, although to the audience it is just a perception of reality. Consequently, Richie attributes this condition to the natural weakness of humans; that they must unconsciously deceive themselves of the truth.

Richie's argument is an extreme one - it relies too much on the weakness of humans as being unable to judge reality. Perhaps he doesn't not want to admit that humans can be deceitful, which could lead the characters to portray the events differently as well. With his argument, reality is an illusion; he avoids the possibility that humans can consciously distort reality (lie) for self-preservation.

every weekend at noon (in new york)

Richie begins his analysis of Ikiru by going over Kanji Watanabe’s, the protagonist’s, actions in the film and explains how they relate to Watanabe’s search for affirmation, for life.  He explains how Watanabe searches for solace in self-pity, family, pleasure, his job and devotion to someone (his female coworker), all of which do not work in giving him solace.  He ends up finding solace and meaning in devotion to something, an idea, which is embodied by the park he wants to build in a poor Tokyo neighborhood.
Richie’s analysis of Ikiru focuses on the translation of the title, Ikiru, which is “to live.”  Richie touches on Kurosawa’s fondness for Dostoevsky, an existentialist, in order to frame Ikiru as a story of a man trying to validate his existence.  As Watanabe “layer after layer peeled away,”  we realize that it is Watanabe’s actions that make him exist both while he is alive and posthumously.  Richie explains how Kurosawa highlights the “irony of the film,”  by splitting the film into two parts: one told by an omniscient narrator while Watanabe is alive and one told by the attendees at his wake.  The men at the wake, mostly Watanabe’s co-workers, misrepresent Watanabe’s actions at first, but when they finally begin to understand what Watanabe accomplished and why, they are too drunk to follow through with anything.  Only one of the office workers takes Watanabe’s actions to heart, but as Kurosawa shows us, after being reprimanded, “he disappears behind his piles of papers as though he were being buried alive.”
An interesting element that Richie brings up in his analysis is the music used in the film.  The classical piece used in the opening, is known as a ricercare, which, Richie explains, “means to search for again, to hunt for, or to follow.”   While Richie acknowledges that there is nothing to suggest whether this was intentional or not, “this, after all, is what the film is about.”   Watanabe’s search for meaning in his life is the impetus behind the action in Ikiru.  Perhaps because of this, Richie’s analysis seems correct, because we all, as humans, search for meaning in our life and hope that our actions can speak for themselves both during our lives and after we are deceased.
    Richie’s final conclusion (which is actually a quote by Richard Brown), that “the meaning of [Watanabe’s] life is what he commits the meaning of his life to be,”  is a very positive take on the film, but the films beauty comes from the fact that it can be read many ways.  Richie harms his argument though, by using lengthy quotations from the film, which are not always completely relevant and ending his analysis with a description of the film by Kurosawa himself which does little to enhance Richie’s argument and only serves to show Kurosawa’s unhappiness with both the film’s creation and the final product.  The negativity of Kurosawa’s own analysis of his film puts a damper on the positive reading by Richie and the sense one gets after seeing the film that he or she has just seen one of the greatest films of all time.

While the text doesn’t make many outright references to Ikiru (there are only two), the story of Kurosawa’s life allows for a deeper understanding of the reasons behind the directorial choices made in Ikiru.  The autobiography is divided up in a few different ways; one of which is a division into “eras” in the life of Kurosawa, such as “Rashomon,” which focuses on the making of the film and the enormous critical success it achieved overseas (it won the Grand Prix at the Venice International Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film).  The autobiography is also interspersed with memories from Kurosawa at from various points in his life, like the chapter, “Calligraphy,” which tells how Kurosawa learned the art from his teacher.  The autobiography ends with his thoughts on Rashomon, so Kurosawa never goes into detail about Ikiru (because Ikiru was filmed after Rashomon), but we get the groundwork for what would cause his interest in the subject matter of the film.
Discussing the film Drunken Angel, Kurosawa recounts, “As background to the characterizations, we decided to create an unsightly drainage pond where people threw their garbage” (156), which is an image that returns in Ikiru, although it has a different allegorical meaning.  Many plot elements and images from Kurosawa’s films were taken straight from his life (a point made by Goodwin in his book ), and Ikiru is no different.  Kurosawa says of the studio he began his career at, “Management theory at P.C.L. regarded the assistant directors as cadets who would later become managers and directors” (95).  The bureaucratic elements in the management system at P.C.L., that Kurosawa criticizes, has echoes in the stagnant and immutable Japanese civil service in Ikiru.
Events from his life also influenced Kurosawa in the existential themes he deals with in Ikiru.  Kurosawa recounts, in the chapter “A Horrifying Event,” an early scene from his childhood, when he and his brother walked around the city looking at the death and destruction caused by the Kato Earthquake.  His brother uncomfortably forces him to look at the hundreds of dead bodies, but when Kurosawa goes to sleep, he does not have any nightmares.  When the young Kurosawa asks why he didn’t have any nightmares, his brother responds, “If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened.  If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of.”   This message has deep significance to Ikiru, because Watanabe is only able to live when he confronts his cancer head on.  When he lies in his bed at home and cries himself to sleep, when he goes with the writer to experience the decadence of modern Tokyo, he is, in effect, trying to ‘shut his eyes’ to the cancer and ignore its existence.  Only when he faces it head on, does he realize that he has the power to give his limited life meaning.  There are many other events in Kurosawa’s life that have relevance to Ikiru, because it is a film about life itself and the search for meaning in life.  Kurosawa’s past offers insight into not only why the author chose to write about this subject, but also why he comes to the conclusions that he does.

Goodwin’s analysis of Ikiru centers on the film’s use of “codes.”  He defines “codes” as “structures that, through their coherence, make a text perceptible and comprehensible to its audience.”   What Goodwin means by this is that Kurosawa uses camera angles, blocking, objects and other cinematic techniques to make arguments in his film and express the themes to the audience.  Goodwin takes specific scenes in the film and analyzes what they convey to the audience.  One example of this is the scene at the end of the film, where Kimura sits down after being reprimanded by the new Section Chief; Goodwin states, “The brief rise and fall of his movement is the film’s final iteration of the visual figure of ascent and descent,”  which he argues is a recurring theme throughout the film.  Goodwin also demonstrates Kurosawa’s use of objects and actions as metaphors, for instance, when Watanabe grabs his chest in response to the writer’s query of whether his stomach hurts, Goodwin sees this as, “an image of emotional and spiritual pain at the heart of humanity.”   Watanabe doesn’t grab his stomach, because the real pain he is feeling is in his heart.  Another object, which has allegorical value in the film, is Watanabe’s hat, which “has become a sign of [Watanabe’s] quest for a new approach to life.”
    Goodwin also shows how Kurosawa uses editing techniques and objects as narrative devices: “the photograph of [Watanabe’s] wife at the center of the altar is the psychological frame through which Watanabe begins to look into his past in narrative flashback.”   In the flashback in which Watanabe and his son are follow his dead wife’s hearse, Goodwin states that, “Metaphorically, the sequence places death as an immediate prospect within life and it suggests the narrative’s own patterns of approach and withdrawal from its protagonist’s death.”   Both of these are examples of scenes and objects that offer a self-reflexive view of the film that acknowledges the techniques of filmmaking.
    Goodwin’s book is different from the other works in the Bibliography, because it analyzes specific images and scenes in Ikiru, searching for allegorical meaning and self-reflexive commentary.  The book definitely takes the position of Kurosawa as an auteur, suggesting that Kurosawa purposefully creates a continuity among the symbols and images in the film, in order give a deeper meaning to the film.

Russell talks about Kurosawa’s entire career and also focuses on his two most oft-used actors, Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, who plays Watanabe in Ikiru.  Russell acknowledges Ikiru as “one of Kurosawa’s finest films,”  but compares it to other Kurosawa films in her analysis.  She writes, “This is a director who was not afraid to use fast motion, slow motion, or extreme high or low angles.  He turns off the soundtrack altogether for a moment in Ikiru, and in High and Low throws a dash of color into a black-and-white film.”   Instead of doing an in-depth analysis of Ikiru, Russell talks about the film in relation to stages in Kurosawa’s career and the career of Takashi Shimura, saying of Shimura, “his starring role in Ikiru is perhaps the most memorable.”   Russell relates the film to other Kurosawa films of around the same time and notes their similarities and differences, in narrative, structure, and themes.  Talking about the two-part structure of the films Seven Samurai and High and Low, Russell explains that, unlike Ikiru, the structure of these films is “exposition followed by action.”   Russell compares Ikiru to Rashomon, saying, “in Ikiru, as in Rashomon, the heroic action is retold by others, and performed in flashback.”
    Russell also shows the similarities in setting among various Kurosawa films.  She writes, “Ikiru is also an important film in Kurosawa’s cinema because it deals directly with the issue of urban development.”   Most of Kurosawa’s non-period films have an urban setting, but the city itself is integral to the plot of Ikiru, because Watanabe’s quest is against Tokyo itself, the stagnant bureaucracy, the icy social interactions, etc. and this is all embodied by the cesspool, which is a product of urban life.  Russell also notices that the “extreme weather conditions […] In city films, they soften the urban setting into a site of humanist compassion, exemplified by the final soft snowfall in Ikiru.”   The urban setting provides a good backdrop to the actions of Kurosawa’s gangster films (“gendai-geki” ), but it provides the impetus behind the action in Ikiru.  Russell’s article separates her discussion of Kurosawa into two parts, his movies about “men with suits” (of which Ikiru is one) and his movies about “men with swords,” which is ironic considering the two-part structure of Ikiru and many other Kurosawa’s other films.  Russell makes some interesting points that are not touched on by other authors, because, like Prince’s book,  she analyzes the film in comparison to other Kurosawa films.

Like Goodwin’s book, Yoshimoto looks for allegorical meaning in Ikiru.  He focuses on different things than Goodwin, asking questions about the narrator and images in the background, which escaped the attention of Goodwin (or they just didn’t relate to his argument).  The first question Yoshimoto raises about the film is the opening image, which provides the starting point for Yoshimoto’s analysis of impossibility and disorientation in Ikiru.  Yoshimoto writes, “the opening x-ray image of Watanabe’s stomach is an “impossible” image whose origin cannot be accounted for diegetically [sic].”   The author then proceeds to explain why the image is “impossible.”
    Yoshimoto follows this with a shot breakdown of the opening scene in Watanabe’s department and surmises from the shots used by Kurosawa that, “Watanabe is consistently denied the subject position of the look; instead he is placed in the position of the other’s look.”   This establishes a theme that Yoshimoto then expands on, the theme of Watanabe as a subject, which is a offshoot of the theme of self-reflexivity.  Another self-reflexive image Yoshimoto recognizes is in the silent scene in which Watanabe leaves the hospital.  “On the wall behind Watanabe are many identical posters, advertisements for “Morinaga Penicillin Ointment.”  The medical reference reminds us of the immediately preceding scene at the hospital, and the word “penicillin” also emphasizes the incurability of Watanabe’s disease.”   Kurosawa also allows for self-reflexivity in the ‘nightlife scenes,’ “Mirrors are sued to disorient our perception of scenes’ spatial unity.”   All of these examples highlight Kurosawa’s use of self-reflexivity in the film, which bring the viewers attention on the process of watching the movie.  Yoshimoto argues that Kurosawa is commenting on the film itself and the audience’s perception of events in the film.  The audience members thus becomes aware that they are watching a film, which succeeds in distancing them from the protagonist, Watanabe, and calling into question the images on the screen (i.e. the ‘stories’ told by the coworkers at the wake).  In relation to this last idea, Yoshimoto writes, “[Ikiru] demonstrates the problematic relation of narration and subjectivity.”
    The most interesting self-reflexive element in the film I found was the actual structure of the film.  Yoshimoto writes, “when the protagonist of Ikiru abruptly disappears about two-thirds of the way through, his death surprises us as something utterly shocking, even though it is totally expected,”  and this is because “We assume that biological death and closure of our lives somehow coincide with each other.  What surprises us is that this is hardly the case.”   Yoshimoto’s argument concerns self-reflexivity in Ikiru and how this aids the goals of the film.  The questions that the two-part structure forces the audience members to ask themselves are just one example of the various techniques Kurosawa employs to force the viewer to change with Watanabe; the movie itself becomes catharsis.

The title of the third chapter in Prince’s book is “Willpower Can Cure,” and its opening paragraphs deal with postwar Japan and its need to cure its ills through sheer willpower (which it did).  The title also has relevance to Ikiru, because it is Watanabe’s willpower that gets the park built and gives meaning to his life (in his own eyes).    Prince begins his analysis of Ikiru talking about the nature of the “heroes of Kurosawa’s films,”  Watanabe included, and how their “lessons in responsible living are filtered through, altered, and sometimes deformed by the social order.”   Prince begins this analysis comparing the heroic character of Ikiru, Watanabe, to characters in other Kurosawa films, but then analyzes the film on its own.  Prince says of Kurosawa, “In Ikiru, he is concerned to contain and to limit the viewer’s empathic response so that it may yield enlightenment rather than catharsis.”   Prince then proves his hypothesis by analyzing various scenes in the film and how Kurosawa’s use of editing creates a narrative style that limits the viewers’ empathy with Watanabe.  Prince explains his theory that “the basic structure of the film” means “Watanabe will be manifest as a textual gap that the narrative tries to fill in and reclaim by inventing hypotheses for his behavior,”  with the term “narrative cavity.”   An example of a narrative cavity is the scene following Watanabe nearly getting hit by a car, where we expect to see Watanabe returning, but instead see his son and wife, which Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto comments on in his book.   Prince tracks the plot sequence of the film and explains various meanings and themes through Kurosawa’s use of camera angles and imagery.  He compares the “office scenes [where] human beings are contained and confined by an overwhelming and alienating environment” to Michelangelo Antonioni’s later films.   Prince frames Ikiru as the culmination of his earlier works, such as Scandal, Drunken Angel, and Stray Dog in its “new and more extensive bounding of the social challenges with which the forms of the earlier films grappled.”

Penntext link. 

Full text not available online, but the journal is available in the library.

Penntext link to article in University of Toronto Quarterly, full text available from EPSCOhost Academic Search Premier.