The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Akira Kurosawa · a film · 1950 · 88 minutes · scored on the Japanese release, with the desk’s own English renderings · from two stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Mode
Period film made into an argument about knowledge; courtroom testimony, ghost play and moral fable in one structure
Mythos
The court of the self; the dead returning through a medium to tell their story, as in Noh; the foundling in the ruin of the gate
Phase
One downpour at a ruined gate, from its height to its stopping, framing testimony in a courtyard and four versions of one event in a forest
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, Academy ratio, mono sound, 88 minutes, in Japanese; eight speaking parts, three spaces, Fumio Hayasaka’s score
Register
From the bandit’s roaring laughter to a dead man’s voice in a woman’s mouth; sun broken through leaves, flat light in the court, grey rain at the gate
Scale
Eight speakers, one death, and no account left clean
Governing Proposition
A bandit, a wife and a dead samurai speaking through a medium each tell a court how the samurai died, and each claims the killing or its honour; a woodcutter tells a fourth version at a ruined gate and is caught in an interest of his own. The wager of the film is that the camera can show each account with the full conviction of the truth, so that the viewer, seated where the judge should be, learns that seeing is a kind of testimony too, and that the self a person needs to be rewrites what that person has done.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in rain, at a city gate in ruin. A woodcutter and a priest sit under it, and a commoner comes in out of the downpour. He tears boards from the gate to burn, and the talk is of war, fire, famine and plague, of a capital falling apart around its gate. The woodcutter and the priest have come from the court, where they heard what was said of a death in the forest, and they tell the commoner. Everything that follows is told under this roof, and the rain does not stop until the telling is done.
The design is three spaces and four accounts. The gate in rain is the frame. The courtyard of the magistrate’s office, in flat light, is where the witnesses testify. The forest, in broken sun, is where one event took place: a bandit met a samurai and his wife on a forest road, and the samurai died. Two short testimonies come first, the woodcutter’s finding of the body and the priest’s sight of the couple on the road, and then the police agent’s account of the capture. Then come four full accounts of the event, in this order: the bandit’s, the wife’s, the husband’s, given through a medium, and the woodcutter’s second, told at the gate. They cannot all be true, and the film shows every one.
Akira Kurosawa directed it at Daiei’s Kyoto studio from a screenplay he wrote with Shinobu Hashimoto, after two stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: “In a Grove” (1922), which gives the testimonies, and “Rashōmon” (1915), which gives the gate and a theft of clothing. It was released in Japan on 25 August 1950: black and white, in the Academy ratio, with mono sound, 88 minutes. Kazuo Miyagawa photographed it, and Fumio Hayasaka wrote the score. Toshirō Mifune plays the bandit Tajōmaru, Machiko Kyō the wife, Masako, Masayuki Mori the samurai, Takehiro, and Takashi Shimura the woodcutter; Minoru Chiaki is the priest, Kichijirō Ueda the commoner, Fumiko Honma the medium and Daisuke Katō the police agent.
Movement II
The woodcutter’s testimony begins with a walk. He goes into the forest with his axe, and the camera tracks above and beside him, the sun broken through the branches, the blade flashing, Hayasaka’s rhythm under it. The walk is long and has no words. He finds things on the way: a hat hanging on a branch, a cord, an amulet case. Then the body, its hands raised. The passage sets the light in which every version will be played, and it makes him the man who found the body, which is to say the last suspect.
In the courtyard of the magistrate’s office the witnesses kneel square to the lens, others seated behind them. The questioner is never seen or heard. Each witness answers questions the viewer infers from the answers, and so the viewer is seated where the judge should be. The light is flat and even, the opposite of the forest’s. The woodcutter tells of finding the body. The priest tells of seeing the couple on the road, the wife on horseback. The police agent tells of the bandit’s capture.
Nothing said in the courtyard can be checked, and no verdict is given in it. The court is a court of the self, in which each witness answers for the person he or she needs to be, and the viewer is left holding the question an unseen magistrate is asking. What the courtyard cannot do is see. The forest will be shown four times, and each time the viewer will see it.
Movement III
The bandit, Tajōmaru, tells his story laughing. He was sleeping under a tree when the couple passed, and the breeze lifted the wife’s veil. In his telling the husband died in a fair fight, a duel of many crossed blades, and Tajōmaru killed him. Mifune plays him scratching, leaping and roaring with laughter, a body that cannot keep still in the court. His account claims the killing, and the claim makes him a hero.
The wife tells another story. After the bandit had gone, she says, her husband looked at her with contempt, and she could not bear the look. She came toward him with the dagger raised, and fainted; when she came to, he was dead. Her account claims the killing too, and the swoon makes her its victim. Where the bandit’s version was comedy and swagger, hers is anguish, and the camera gives it the same conviction.
Machiko Kyō plays a different woman in each account and is convincing in all of them. The forest is the same forest each time, the light the same broken sun, and the viewer believes the first version and then the second and cannot believe both. A flashback in a film had been trusted to show what happened. Here the image itself is made to lie, and it lies with the same authority with which it would tell the truth.
Movement IV
The dead husband speaks through a medium. As she is possessed the wind tears at her robes, and a man’s voice comes from a woman’s mouth: the samurai speaking out of the dark of the grave. It is the most frightening passage in the film. The dead return to tell their story, as the ghost returns in Noh, and a court whose questioner is never seen hears a witness who is not there.
His account claims the killing as well. When it was over, in his telling, he took his own life with the dagger. The suicide makes him a samurai: a death chosen rather than suffered, honour kept by the one witness who cannot be cross-examined. Masayuki Mori plays him almost without movement, and his look of contempt, in the wife’s account, was the hinge on which hers turned.
Three accounts, and three killers: the bandit in a fair fight, the wife in a swoon, the husband by his own hand. Each teller claims the death or its honour, and each claim serves the self the teller needs to be. Guilt is preferred to shame. The film does not choose among them, and it has shown each with the same eye, in the same forest, in the same light.
Movement V
At the gate the woodcutter tells a fourth version: he saw it. In his telling there was no duel of heroes. Two terrified men scrabbled in the brush, each afraid to die, and the fight was a farce that ended in a killing. His account strips all three of their dignity. It is the plainest of the four, and the one a viewer most wants to believe.
Then the commoner asks what became of the inlaid dagger, and the woodcutter is silent. The witness who had no stake has one. The plainest account falls under the same law as the others, and no clean fact is left standing. The court could not reach the truth. The gate, where the last witness is examined by his peers rather than by a magistrate, comes nearer, and does not arrive.
A child is found abandoned in the gate. The commoner takes the clothes from it and goes; the woodcutter takes the child, though he has six children already, and the priest’s faith, which the testimonies had shaken, is restored. The rain stops, and the woodcutter walks out with the child. The film won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1951 and an honorary Academy Award in 1952, and its title has become a word used in courts and classrooms for accounts that cannot be reconciled. Its questions stay open: whether the woodcutter’s account is also a lie, what the medium’s scene is doing in the structure. What it shows is not open. Each teller rewrites what was done to fit the self he or she needs to be.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds little to take. Each of the four accounts is required, because each makes the same death serve a different vanity: the bandit’s duel makes him a hero, the wife’s swoon makes her a victim, the husband’s suicide makes him a samurai, and the woodcutter’s farce strips all three. Remove one and the pattern, each teller claiming the killing or its honour, does not form. The woodcutter’s long, wordless walk into the forest looks subtractable and is not: it sets the light the accounts are played in and makes him the man who found the body, and so the last suspect. What gives: the commoner’s lines state what the accounts have already shown, and the coda with the abandoned child does one job, answering the commoner, at more length than it needs.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: people cannot tell the truth about what they have done, because the self they need to be rewrites the event as they tell it, even when the story convicts them. Guilt is preferred to shame, and the bandit, the wife and the dead husband each claim the killing or its dignity. The plainest version is undone in its turn when the commoner asks what became of the inlaid dagger: the disinterested witness has an interest. It is disclosed through image, the camera showing each lie with the conviction of the truth. Held below the top because the close asserts rather than discloses: the taking of the child restores the priest’s faith by an act the film has not earned, and the commoner’s cynicism is a statement, not a finding.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Elevation comes often and in several kinds. The woodcutter’s walk: the camera tracking above and beside him, sun broken through branches, the axe blade flashing, the score’s rhythm under it. The wife on horseback, the breeze lifting her veil, and the bandit waking under the tree. The medium’s possession, wind tearing at her robes and a man’s voice from a woman’s mouth, the dead husband speaking from the dark: the most frightening passage in the film. The wife facing a look of contempt she cannot bear, the dagger raised. The woodcutter’s version of the fight, two terrified men scrabbling in the brush, reaches the dreadful by refusing the heroic. The rain at the gate, heavy and grey, and its stopping. Held down a little: the frame is talk under a roof, and the coda’s height is sentiment rather than transport.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The particular is a bandit, a samurai and his wife on a forest road in the Heian period. The frame is the end of a world: a gate of the capital in ruin, talk of war, famine and plague, a priest whose faith is failing. The court is a court of the self, with the viewer in the judge’s place. The dead speak through a medium, as the ghost returns in Noh to tell its story, and at the close a child is found in the ruin. The myth bears load in the frame and the medium. Held below the top because the three figures in the forest are types in an argument more than a myth built from inside them, and the foundling is evoked as redemption rather than constructed.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the period film, the jidaigeki, as Japanese studios made it, and narrative cinema at large, where a flashback was trusted to show what happened. The film turns both. It shows four incompatible pasts, each with the camera’s full authority, so that the image itself is made to lie; it plays testimony straight into the lens with the questioner removed; it points the camera into the sun. Citizen Kane (1941) had used several witnesses, but its accounts add up; here they cancel. The wager was a period picture that refuses its audience a fact. Held below the top because the contradictory confessions, and the turn by which each teller claims the killing, are Akutagawa’s. The film’s own departures are the lying image, the frontal court, the fourth account and the frame.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. In Akutagawa the testimonies are words, and words are known to lie. Here each account is shown, and a viewer believes what he sees: the film makes the viewer undergo belief and its undoing four times, and learn that seeing is a kind of testimony too. The three spaces carry the argument: the courtyard’s flat light and frontal address seat the viewer as judge; the forest’s broken sun plays every version with equal vividness; the gate’s rain is where the accounts are weighed. The plainest witness is examined last, at the gate, by the frame rather than the court. The cost is the coda, where the form hands the film to a stated message, and the frame’s talk, which explains what the form has shown.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Seventy-six years of return are evidence. The literature is large and divided: Kurosawa’s own account in Something Like an Autobiography (1982), Donald Richie’s studies, Stephen Prince’s The Warrior’s Camera, and, outside film study, the “Rashomon effect” in anthropology, law and the social sciences. The readings are incompatible: a relativism in which there is no fact; a moral reading in which vanity distorts a fact the woodcutter nearly gives; an allegory of a defeated nation and its war-crimes trials; feminist readings of the wife, whose three faces are all made by men’s stories. It yields on return: whether the woodcutter’s account is also a lie, what the medium’s scene is doing in the structure. Held a step below because the idea can be grasped at one viewing; the choreography of the forest keeps it open.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Released in 1950, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1950s. The force: the unreliable image made a structure, a period film turned into an argument about knowledge. Part of it is Akutagawa’s and is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Golden Lion at Venice in 1951 and an honorary Academy Award in 1952 opened Western exhibition to Japanese cinema, and Mizoguchi, Kinugasa and Ozu followed through that door; the structure was taken up in Martin Ritt’s remake The Outrage (1964), Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002), Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel (2021) and many films and television episodes told by contradicting witnesses; and the title became a name used in courts and classrooms. Discounted a little, since part of the reach is a door opened, reception more than form.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole, in its one version, at its full 88 minutes, and nothing of what makes the film is lost. The presence is seventy-six years of continuous exhibition, in repertory, in film courses and on home video, and a reach beyond cinema as wide as any film’s, its title a word in common use. The fabric is the one doubt: how near the surviving image stands to what was shot is not established, a small charge, since the form is legible throughout. The Heian surface was historical in 1950 and does not date further. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it: decades are not centuries, and the film stands well below the Parthenon. With the fabric charged, form and presence would carry more; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8, level with Seven Samurai and Tokyo Story on this desk.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The command of the medium bears weight throughout. Kazuo Miyagawa’s photography gives the tracking through the forest, sun and leaf shadow on faces, and a distinct light for each of the three spaces. The courtyard staging sets each witness kneeling square to the lens, the others seated behind, so that every testimony confronts the viewer. The gate is a set on a scale that holds the rain. Machiko Kyō is a different woman in each account and convinces in all; Masayuki Mori’s stillness and Fumiko Honma’s medium bear weight. The costs hold it from the top: the score is a bolero on Ravel’s pattern, borrowed in design; Toshirō Mifune’s bandit is magnificent energy and, in his own account, overplayed; the frame dialogue is expository, and the priest is given little but grief.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the bandit’s account, a heroic duel of many crossed blades, and the woodcutter’s, the same fight as a terrified scramble in the brush. One law governs both: every account is shaped by what its teller needs to be, and the film shoots each with the same conviction, in the same forest. Comedy, horror, anguish and farce are instances of that law, and the range is wide. The court cannot reach the truth; the gate, where the last witness is examined by his peers, comes closer. The one strain is the coda. The taking of the child and the priest’s restored faith are not governed by the law of self-interest the whole film has shown; they are an exception the film asserts, and they sit outside its physics.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on what an 88-minute film of eight speaking parts holds. Consciousness, as the self that rewrites its own acts. The law, in the court and its unseen questioner. The sacred, in the priest’s failing faith and the medium through whom the dead speak, held more fully than in most films. Class, in the bandit, the samurai, the woodcutter and the commoner. Marriage and honour, in what husband and wife require of each other. History, as a ground, and the natural order, as forest, sun and rain. One event and one question integrate them. What holds the axis lowest: the family is glimpsed only in the woodcutter’s six children at the close, labour is an axe, the state is a court and a police agent, and history is told at the gate, not entered. The orders are argued more than lived.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, then The Made at 9.0. A form in which each account is shown with the camera’s full authority, so that the viewer undergoes belief and its undoing four times; a reach that opened Western exhibition to Japanese cinema and gave a structure, and a word, to films, courts and classrooms; and a making that bears weight in each of three spaces.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: consciousness, the law, the sacred, class, marriage and honour are held through one event, but the family is glimpsed, labour is an axe, the state a court and a police agent, and history is told at the gate, not entered. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.6, where the commoner’s lines state what the accounts have shown and the coda answers him at more length than it needs; then The Archetypal Deep at 8.7, three figures in the forest who are types in an argument, and a foundling evoked rather than built.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.8 and The Imperishable at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clears it by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.8 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Rashōmon (羅生門) as released in Japan by Daiei on 25 August 1950, 88 minutes, black and white, in the Academy ratio, from the gate in rain to the woodcutter walking out with the child: directed by Akira Kurosawa from a screenplay by Kurosawa and Shinobu Hashimoto after Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s stories “In a Grove” (Yabu no naka, 1922) and “Rashōmon” (1915), photographed by Kazuo Miyagawa, with music by Fumio Hayasaka. The film has one version, and it is the object. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Japanese film. The English renderings are the desk’s own, used for sense, a reader’s aid rather than the object; no subtitled version is judged, and nothing here is charged to one. No line of the dialogue is held to the word with certainty, so none is quoted, and the speech is described. Akutagawa’s stories are not part of the work and enter only where the film’s debt to them is weighed. Production stories that could not be verified, among them how the forest light and the rain were made, the film’s reception inside its studio, the route by which it reached Venice and the state of its original elements, are not given; nor are the shot count and the length of each account.