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Rashomon (1950)
Rashomon is a 1950 Japanese jidaigeki psychological thriller film directed by Akira Kurosawa from a screenplay he co-wrote with Shinobu Hashimoto. Starring Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyō, Masayuki Mori, and Takashi Shimura, it follows various people who describe how a samurai was murdered in a forest. The plot and characters are based upon Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story "In a Grove", with the title and framing…
Directed by Akira Kurosawa · Shot by Kazuo Miyagawa · Cut by Akira Kurosawa · Music by Fumio Hayasaka · 88 min
How it was made
- Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa shot the film in deliberately high-key contrast, using Fujifilm stock rather than the higher-regarded Kodak because its grain produced the strong contrasts he and Kurosawa wanted, giving each location its own tonal register: white for the garden, black for the gate, black-and-white for the forest.
- For the forest scenes, where electric lighting could not be used, Miyagawa reflected sunlight off eight mirrors and rigged a baseball net strung with leaves and branches above the set, adjusting it with a bamboo pole to throw moving shadows across the actors' faces.
- Because the hoses' rain did not read on camera, the crew tinted the water at the gate set with black ink to make it visible on film.
- With only three sets built due to the small budget, Kurosawa often ran several cameras simultaneously on a scene so he would have more footage to cut between freely in the editing room.
Behind the scenes
Elsewhere
More by Akira Kurosawa
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