The Film That Won Venice by Accident (And Changed Cinema Forever)

Think about this. It is September 1951. You are director Akira Kurosawa, and you’ve got simply came upon your movie received the Golden Lion on the Venice Movie Competition. However there is a catch. You did not even know your movie had been entered into competitors.Properly, that is precisely what occurred.So when Rashomon received the pageant’s high prize, it stunned Kurosawa, Daiei Studios, and the worldwide movie world with its success.The movie’s entry into Venice got here by way of Giuliana Stramigioli, a consultant of Italiafilm who had seen Rashomon whereas in Japan and satisfied a reluctant Daiei to submit it. “I used to be shocked by Rashomon,” Stramigioli stated later (by way of Wikipedia). “No matter whether or not it might win an award, the primary situation is that it might generate an excessive amount of buzz. In that sense, Rashomon is a really distinctive movie, and since it’s so Japanese, I assumed it was solely acceptable.”And boy, was she proper about that buzz. Rashomon Credit score: Daiei In Rashomon, a samurai will get murdered, his spouse will get assaulted, and we hear the story from a number of witnesses who all keep in mind it utterly otherwise. Who’s telling the reality? It was revolutionary, particularly for that interval, and might be referred to as one of many first detective tales to come back out of Japanese cinema. Again in Japan, Daiei had disagreed with submitting Kurosawa’s work. They feared that the movie was too unconventional and Japanese in fashion to attraction to Western audiences. “On one hand Japanese thought-about it so indigenous that they didn’t need to convey it to the West,” stated Maria Roberta Novielli, an teacher at Ca’ Foscari College of Venice (by way of The European Movie Competition). She added, “Alternatively, for the producers themselves, the movie would have been unattractive to Western audiences, resulting from the truth that it was intrinsically Japanese.”That is to not say some viewers did not take the movie as “unique” for the interval. However the story was so robust, it did not actually matter. For instance, in his evaluate for Sight and Sound in 1952, Simon Harcourt-Smith wrote, “We discover ourselves right here in a world the place social conventions and psychological reactions are alike alien to us, and on the similar time infinitely absorbing.”After the movie received at Venice, the consequences have been quick. By the top of 1952, Rashomon was launched in Japan, the USA, and most of Europe. Instantly, Japanese cinema turned well-known within the West, largely because of the Golden Lion awarded to Rashomon. The pageant additionally factors to the Silver Lions received by Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) and Sanshô Dayû (1954) by Kenji Mizoguchi and entries like Biruma no Tategoto (1956) by Kon Ichikawa as main influences on world cinema. It seems that if you dig deep into the specifics of your tales and pursuits, you usually hit one thing common. Kurosawa’s exploration of fact and reminiscence spoke to folks all over the place, perhaps as a result of we’re all unreliable narrators of our personal lives.Do not presume to know what all audiences need. Simply inform your genuine story, and launch it to the world.