Landmark: Rashōmon

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2018

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David Peace, Natasha Pulley, Yuna Tasaka and Jasper Sharp join Rana Mitter.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story 'In a Grove', published in 1922, became the basis for the 1950 film from Akira Kurosawa 'Rashōmon', one of the first Japanese films to gain worldwide critical acclaim. 'The Rashōmon Effect' has become a byword for the literary technique where the same event is presented via the different and incompatible testimonies from the characters involved. David Peace's new book 'Patient X' is a novelised response to Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's last years and his death by suicide at the age of 35. Natasha Pulley is a novelist and Japanophile with a particular interest in Japanese literature of the 1920s, and in the unreliable narrator implied by use of the Rashōmon Effect. And Jasper Sharp is a writer and curator, author of the Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
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0:32.0	Hello, I'm Ron Amitter.
0:33.7	Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas discussion program, which brings together leading artists, writers and thinkers in conversation and debate.
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0:58.0	Ninety-Rourg. It'll help other people find us. This is the BBC. 1951. Europe and Asia were beginning to pick themselves up from the horrors of war that had
1:04.3	devastated both continents. At the Venice Film Festival, some of the world's greatest
1:09.2	directors were in competition.
1:16.4	But their films were all beaten by a 90-minute black and white picture from that defeated wartime combatant, Japan. Its director's name was Akira Kurosawa, the film's title,
1:23.9	Roshomon. The film has become a legend because of its format, telling the same story three
1:29.9	different ways, with wildly different and subjective takes on objective truth. It's a technique
1:36.3	that's been imitated many times, and the film is regularly rated amongst the world's greatest
1:41.5	and most influential. Indeed, the expression Rachon-like is used to this day to describe a situation where nobody
1:49.5	agrees what actually happened.
1:52.3	Rashomon heralded a whole new way of filmmaking and announced Kurosawa as a spectacular
1:57.7	global talent.
1:59.3	But it was based on sources that were no less interesting,
	...

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