Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Rashomon Effect

Just like Kurosawa I make mad films,
Ok, I don’t make films
But if I did they’d have a samurai


Fabulous! The Academy Film Archive has slaved painstakingly for years to restore Rashomon, one of Akira Kurosawa’s greatest films, to its original splendor. The restored version will be shown on Thursday, that’s right, this Thursday, two days from now, at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. Film Critic Kenneth Turan will lead a discussion on Kurosawa’s work immediately preceding the film.

(I wish I could be there. However, I’ve already promised to attend the Aztec Dance performance at my daughters’ school that same night. Darn.)

I have loved this film ever since grad school when my whole world snapped into a beautiful, jumbled house of cards of relative perspectives with my discovery of Narrative Theory.

Man, I went to grad school with some great people. I remember how the intellectual discourse would whirl through the room.

One fellow student, an ex-cop, shared how true to life Rashomon’s competing stories felt to him. He said that, in the case of rape, the bewildered husbands would come to him in confidence to ask, What did my wife say happened to her?

Oh, all the world’s a story…

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