Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Rashomon
1950 · Akira Kurosawa · Rashomon on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the sun blow out the image through the leaves. (light)
Miyagawa points the camera up into the sun and bounces light off mirrors to hold the exposure. Glare swamps the frame a beat too long. Branches keep crossing between the lens and the faces.
Payoff: The picture goes blind before anyone has told you a story. You watch the grove through a medium that keeps failing.
Notice the witnesses speaking straight into the camera. (staging)
The courtyard scenes are static and frontal. Each witness faces the lens and answers a magistrate you never see or hear. The empty position they are addressing is yours.
Payoff: The film seats you as the judge and then supplies nothing you could rule on. In the reading: the lectosign (readable image). The reading calls this a lectosign: an image that stops being self-evident and has to be read and weighed instead.
Listen for the same short musical figure coming back. (sound)
Hayasaka works a narrow motif that thickens by repetition rather than changing key, from a brief Kurosawa based on Ravel's Bolero. Between accounts the rain at the gate returns as punctuation.
Payoff: The music repeats the way the story does. Same material again, slightly altered, pressing a little harder each time.
Watch how much Mifune moves compared to everyone else. (performance)
Tajomaru rolls in the grass, scratches, laughs at nothing and travels on diagonals while the others hold still. Kurosawa had Mifune study lions. Constant motion is set against static bodies and backgrounds.
Payoff: The energy reads as feral rather than simply lively, which is precisely how his own account wants him seen.
Count how the sword fight changes in each telling. (structure)
In the bandit's version the duel is cut fast and fierce. Told again later it slows, turns clumsy and frightened. Same grove, same men, a different fight every time.
Payoff: Each version flatters whoever is speaking. Watch the fighting style shift with the narrator instead of the facts. In the reading: powers of the false (puissances du faux). The reading calls this the powers of the false: rival versions offered as equally true, with nothing outside them to rank them.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Do not hunt for the liar. Try to catch one shot betraying its own account, and notice that you cannot.