Kurosawa’s Moving Camera In Rashomon

Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which adopted the constantly changing camera movement mode, is one of the films that have the greatest impact on the development of tracking shots. The excellent zooming shots through the forest taken by Kurosawa may be the most amazing technological achievements of this film. It has to say that the scenes of shuttles in the bushes added a sense of suspense to the story. The style of Rashomon is focused on the use of moving cameras. It used different paces to emphasize the subjectivity of the characters’ narratives. For example, before the parties concerned with their own stories, the woodcutter mentioned his discovery of the corpse. At the Venice Film Festival in 1951, the series of shots in the forest following the woodcutter surprised many film critics and made Kurosawa famous (Yoshimoto 2000). It is certain that for Kurosawa, the shooting style is a necessary action to shape the characters. The woodcutter is an ordinary person. His rapid movement through the bushes before founding the corpse showed that he was in a good mood and at ease, although the background music indicated a nervous atmosphere. Contracted with the narration of Tajomaru, the feeling is different, although it included a faster movement through the forest. The angle of the story of the robber is very weird enough to keep us away from him from the beginning. The fast-moving camera set off his eccentric personality. This kind of tracking shot is completely distinct from the frame with the woodcutter.

Since the location of this film is common that the difference between the bushes is irrelevant, it is not hard for the audience to understand its spatial relation. This situation can be compared with the method used when Kurosawa pointed out that Rashomon was the location of the frame story, that is when shooting the first few shots of the film (mainly static shots), the distance between the camera and the characters had changed several times. Because it is extremely important for the audience to see exactly where the frame story took place. In contrast, when shooting several embedded stories, the camera did not allow us to get a clear impression of the bamboo forest. Once we see it completely, we may get bored. But this film didn’t bore us from beginning to end, even when I saw the fourth party recall his story, I didn’t feel that way. It showed that Kurosawa was very careful to shoot bamboo forests in different ways, and the way he uses it made us not really bother to distinguish this bamboo from that bamboo. In each specific shot, the special role played by the moving camera is mainly to emphasize the various things discovered by the parties, or to reveal some aspects of the party’s depiction to the audience dramatically. The scene where the woodcutter found the dead body was composed of tracking shots taken from different angles and distances. These shots only produced a feeling of rapid movement at the beginning, and finally caused a nervous atmosphere. The audience gradually realized that the woodcutter was about to see something important. The footage edited together includes several shots of sunlight shining into the bamboo forest, which was an ominous omen that implied that an objective observer will know some vital event.

When the movement is carried out according to a certain specification, the static scenes can be used in a surprising and sudden way. This clip(Woodcutter I) did this exact way. The beginning of this segment is about fifteen shots, most of them are the frames of people and cameras moving, and then close-up shots of the woodcutter suddenly motionless, and the music also stopped. Then came a static medium shot, that is he looked at a woman’s hat caught on a branch. He moved on again, and the camera followed him until he found another thing, a cap of a samurai that had been trampled on. He bent down to pick it up and then saw a cut-up piece of rope. And further along in the leaves, there was a shiny amulet case with red lining. He started to move forward, but he almost stumbled as soon as he took a step when the camera was panning. He turned back, then we could see a close-up shot, two stiff arms were stretched out, obviously a dead man’s hands, and the preliminary discovery ended. The section of the camera followed him to the place where the corpse was found so that we were immediately feeling the mental state of the woodcutter. It is simple to summarize, completely afraid, and surprised. In the audience’s opinion, his reaction is normal, but actually this is the behavior he pretended to satisfy the judge. In order to enable the judge to believe his story, he had to fabricate the entire plot he passed through the bamboo forest, saying that before he found the corpse, he had been carefree, and fused with nature in his familiar environment.

This is a meaningful achievement in technique. Kurosawa’s arrangement of the order is clever and thought-provoking. He specifically expressed the stories and all the themes that every character told, in fact, every theme and story narrated by each person was connected, even though they seemed incoherent and unable to explain at all. Kurosawa’s attractive use of a moving camera is not just a skill, but also played a role in connecting the film as a whole (Yoshimoto 2000). At the same time, it also clarifies the subjective impression component of the stories told by the parties, that is each character described the case with strong emotion. We saw that the fast tracking-shots formed an extremely excited mood in some parts. Not only that but the objective environment in which each character expressed is also related to the turbulent inner state of the narrator.

The main reason for Kurosawa’s use of moving cameras which achieved an excellent effect is that he was good at cutting from one tracking shot to another. Even for the majority of films whose movement speed is slower than Rashomon, such a cut is technically difficult. When the characters move, cutting is usually easy to produce a disorienting result unless the audience can see the location of the movement from the front and rear scenes. But Rashomon did exactly this.