silver nitrate notes

Rashomon's Sun and Miyagawa's Mirror

27 may 2021

Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) is the film that opened Japanese cinema to the Western audience. It won the Venice Golden Lion in 1951, the first Japanese film to do so, against what the Venice jury called serious international competition. The Western critical response was partly astonishment at the film itself and partly astonishment that there was a Japanese film industry of this kind that they had somehow not noticed existed.

The astonishment is understandable. What Kurosawa and his cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa (1908-1999) did in Rashomon has few precedents in any cinema. The film tells one story from four different points of view: a bandit's, a murdered husband's (through a medium), his wife's, and a woodcutter who witnessed the scene. The four accounts do not agree. The film never arbitrates between them.

What Miyagawa's camera does in each version of the scene is quietly adjust. The forest in the bandit's telling is photographed with the camera pointing up through the canopy, the sun flaring in the lens, the leaves becoming translucent shapes against bright sky. Miyagawa pointed the camera directly at the sun, which was at the time understood to be a technical error. Kurosawa asked him to do it because the scene was about perception, and light flaring into the lens was, Kurosawa argued, what perception actually looked like. The technique was new in 1950. It became, within a decade, standard.

In the wife's version of the same forest, Miyagawa lowers the camera and shoots the trees as vertical bars blocking the sky. The light becomes diffuse, the leaves heavy. The same forest is a different forest. In the woodcutter's version, the camera tracks with him through the trees, handheld where Kurosawa could not physically get a dolly, and the forest becomes a place of motion rather than a frame of reference.

The courtyard at Rashōmon, the ruined gate where the story is told and retold in the rain, is the film's other great sustained visual. Miyagawa photographed the rain by adding black ink to the water so that it would register on film as dark streaks against the grey wall, which it would not have done in clear water. The rain is a character. The wall behind the rain is another character. The crumbling gate, built full-size on the Daiei lot, is the film's most expensive single set and its entire geography.

Kurosawa wrote in his autobiography that Miyagawa was the cinematographer with whom he most disliked arguing, because Miyagawa was usually right. They worked together on eleven films, including Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962). Rashomon is the one to start with.

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sources
[1] Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like an Autobiography, trans. Audie E. Bock. Knopf, 1982.
[2] Richie, Donald. The Films of Akira Kurosawa. University of California Press, 3rd ed. 1998.
[3] Prince, Stephen. The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa. Princeton UP, rev. ed. 1999.
[4] Miyagawa, Kazuo. Interview in American Cinematographer, January 1981.