event Cinematheque: Rashômon
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Fri Sep 3
7 pm
Cinematheque: Rashômon at Vilas Hall
If the greatest films of all time are also the most prismatic, Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Rashômon deserves its high slot in the pantheon for simultaneously encouraging and questioning every interpretation tossed in its direction. From the opening shots of an almost biblical torrent of rain, Kurosawa blankets the screen in layers of obscurity, filtering “the truth” through ambiguous images, conflicting testimonies, self-serving motivations, and subjective memory. Expanded from a pair of Ryunosuke Akutagawa short stories, the film employs a radical flashback structure to look at a rape and murder from radically different perspectives.
Vilas Hall 821 University Ave., Madison, WI
If the greatest films of all time are also the most prismatic, Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Rashômon deserves its high slot in the pantheon for simultaneously encouraging and questioning every interpretation tossed in its direction. From the opening shots of an almost biblical torrent of rain, Kurosawa blankets the screen in layers of obscurity, filtering “the truth” through ambiguous images, conflicting testimonies, self-serving motivations, and subjective memory. Expanded from a pair of Ryunosuke Akutagawa short stories, the film employs a radical flashback structure to look at a rape and murder from radically different perspectives.
Updated 08/26/2010
