电影《罗生门（Rashomon）》的现代主义叙事结构及手法解读

谭永东

电影《罗生门（Rashomon）》的现代主义叙事结构及手法解读

来源：MIT OpenCourseWare

讲师：DAVID THORBURN

（罗生门由黑泽明导演，芥川龙之介编剧, 1950年）

学习要点：

该电影的文体创新在电影界产生了深远影响；

在现代主义（modernism）背景下，引入多叙述者（multiple narrators），同一个故事有四个不同版本。人们开始对任何单一视角的真实性提出质疑；

不要按照时间顺序讲故事, 叙述是错位甚至是迷惑的。故事结构是交迭的；

叙事手法发面，突出摄影机的复杂动作和角色自身的动作，构造最具视觉诗意的序列；

从形式上讲，从结构意义上讲，而且在内容方面也有复杂性，细微差别和怀疑。

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DAVID THORBURN:

Kurosawa's Rashomon is a particularly dramatic example of a film that understands itself to have the kind of claim請求 on its audience that the greatest art has always imagined itself to have on its audience.

So I want to begin by talking very briefly about what I call the moment of Rashomon.

There's a bit of confusion, or at least chronological confusion時系列の混乱, or inconsistency in the principle that we end the course with a film that was made and shown internationally before the last two films that we've seen in our course.

My reasons for that, as I partly explained in an earlier lecture, had to do with my desire to show a certain continuity amongst forms表现出一定的连续性 of European cinema and the link between Jean Renoir, and the Italian neorealists, and the French nouvelle vague is so intimate that it seemed to me important to show you that progression in sequence.

But if we had been going by strict chronological order, we would have introduced this Kurosawa film a bit earlier,

because it was made in 1950.

And in 1951, it won an important international prize, The Golden Lion, the highest prize available at the Venice Film Festival in 1951.

And this had a seismic effect地震效应 on movies around the world.

The dramatic and powerful subject matter主题 of Kurosawa's film of course riveted attention.

But even more than that, the freedom and imaginative想像的 energy of his stylistic innovations 文体创新in the film had a profound impact 深远影响on filmmakers around the world.

And when the film was shown at Venice in 1951, another effect it had when it won the prize was to introduce Japanese cinema to a wider world.

It was the first significant Japanese film, Kurosawa, the first important Japanese director to gain a reputation声誉 outside of Japan itself.

In fact, there are many film buffs电影迷, and especially specialists in Japanese film, who are somewhat resentful有点不满 of Kurosawa's eminence, even though no one denies that he is an eminent director, because there are other directors.

The two I've listed under item 2 in our outline are the most dramatic examples, Mizoguchi and Ozu, who are often thought to be his superior, even greater directors than Kurosawa.

This is a debate of nuances.

All three of these directors are major artists.

But it is true, I think, and it is widely recognized that Kurosawa was the director who crossed that barrier more immediately, more dramatically than any other, and opened the world, not just to Japanese cinema, in some degree, but opened the world in some longer sense to Asian cinema more generally, that the so-called Western world, the European and American cinema universes had been fairly oblivious to相当无视 Asian cinema and certainly to Japanese cinema prior to this.

And the appearance of Rashomon, its enormous impact in 1951, began to change that.

So that what was demonstrated in moment when Rashomon won this reward, won The Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, was a reinforcement of a principle.

I've been discussing throughout the semester, the notion(concept) of film as an international medium, the notion that directors from different national cinemas were now being deeply influenced by directors from other nations, and that film itself was in some deep way, a global phenomenon, even an international form.

And I think it was in the '50s and early '60s

that this idea began to become more widely embraced by film goers电影爱好者 in the United States and in Europe, but perhaps especially in the United States.

And one mark of this, the emergence of cinema as a fully recognized independent art form.

Obviously people had thought this, and many directors had achieved artistic distinction before this.

But I'm talking about the public understanding of movies, the way people in different cultures

actually recognized and thought about movies.

It was as if this is the moment in which movies were understood to enter the museum in a certain way, to earn in a public sense, the status that more traditional art forms had had.

And one of the explanations for why this would have been so, why it would have had such a powerful impact-- now, I think I mentioned last time that this insight was partial in the United States-- especially, that is to say, in the '50s and early '60s, it began to dawn on movie critics and scholars of whom there were only a few at that time and then movie audiences that European films and Asian films, especially Japanese films, might have great artistic value.

But it was a longer time before Americans began to realize that their own native forms of films had a similar kind of authority权威.

So this moment, in the early 1950s, was a deeply significant one.

Let's remember historically what it represented in Europe and in the United States.

It's the moment of the emergence of Italian neorealism新实在论, which itself begins to establish a kind of very powerful claim on people's attention.

One irony讽刺 of Rashomon's success was that it was not very successful in Japan when it was released in 1950.

And the producer, the production company responsible for the film was very dubious可疑 about entering it in the competition, didn't think it was a significant film, even though it transformed Kurosawa's career because of the immense recognition it finally got.

And Kurosawa himself recognized--he'd been making films for almost a decade before that, but Rashomon was his most ambitious film to that point, and it also incorporated more innovative strategy, visual strategies than any he had tried before.

It established him as an international director.

And I mentioned the names of two other directors just from different traditions as a way of reminding you of another feature of this phenomenon, another reason, as I began to say earlier, for why this moment was such a significant one.

And the term I use here is modernism现代主义, modernist cinema.

Remember, one of the ways to understand this idea is to recognize that a great revolution in the arts had occurred at the turn of the 20th century, the end of the 19th, and at the turn of the 20th century.

We've talked about this earlier.

It's the movement we call modernism.

It's the moment of Picasso.

It's the moment of James Joyce詹姆斯乔伊斯, and it was a kind of revolution in both visual art, literature, music took place in this period.

And among the characteristics of this modernist movement was a newly complicated and self-conscious attitude toward narrative叙述 itself, toward storytelling.

So modernism in literature and in art involved, among other things if not a hostility or antagonism敌意或敌对, at least a kind of skepticism怀疑论 about inherited traditional categories and ways of doing things.

And one form this took in narrative was to dislocate or disorien错位或迷惑 the narrative line.

Instead of telling a story in a chronological sequence不要按照时间顺序讲故事, a lot of the great works of fiction of the modernist era, books by writers like Joseph Conrad, or Proust, the great French novelist who was so preoccupied by memory and human subjectivity, or the great German novelist, Thomas Mann, a number of other great figures that we could mention began to construct stories in which chronological order was profoundly disrupted.

And they also began to create stories in which there were multiple narrators多个叙述者.

And the effect of multiple narrators begins-- even if you do nothing more than have multiple narrators, you begin to raise questions about the veracity, the truthfulness of any single perspective. 你开始对任何单一视角的真实性提出质疑。

And you will understand when you look at Rashomon why this movie embodies many of these same modernist principles.

But the point is that cinema, as a narrative form, lag behind these more traditional arts.

And it really wasn't until the 1950s, and partly because of films like Rashomon, that it began to be recognized that the movies too could embrace and embody the principles of modernism.

So one way to understand what happened in the 1950s is to recognize that directors like Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman, the great Swedish director, and Fellini, the great Italian director, and the inheritor and expander of the neorealist tradition, going far beyond a narrow realism, 新现实主义传统的继承者和发展者，远远超出狭隘的现实主义，

that directors like that began to create films that in a formal sense, in a structural sense,

and also in terms of their content had the kind of complexity, nuance, and skepticism, and even the philosophic self-awareness

从形式上讲，从结构意义上讲，

而且在内容方面也有复杂性，细微差别和怀疑，甚至哲学自我意识

that was characteristic of high modernism at the turn of the 20th century.

这是20世纪之交高度现代主义的特征。

So it's as if what was going on was the movies themselves were now asserting themselves as a modernist art.

I don't mean as a contemporary art.

I'm referring specifically to the modernist movement, and to the dislocated, and much more demanding kinds of narrative strategies that are characteristic of the modernist movement. 我具体指的是现代主义运动，以及现代主义运动所特有的错位和要求更高的叙事策略。

So Rashomon played a fundamental role in this sort of transformation of what we might call the cultural understanding of movies among ordinary people, as well as among scholars, critics, and other filmmakers.

I want to mention one other point.

I'll give you a kind of note to clarify some of what I've been implying, some of what I implied when I talked about Mizoguchi and Ozu as directors who were often even more highly regarded than Kurosawa.

I'll leave that to each individual film goer.

All three directors are astonishing惊人 and remarkable.

But it wouldn't be appropriate to talk, even about this single film, Rashomon, without paying respects to those two great directors whose dates I've put on your outline.

I won't talk about individual films by these directors, but I urge you all to look them up, read about them in David Cook's history of narrative film, and think about experimenting by extending your knowledge of Japanese cinema by trying films by these two remarkable directors.

One of the things that's characteristic of all three of these directors, of Kurosawa, even more fully of Mizoguchi and Ozu, Ozu most fundamentally of all, is that their films are marked by a kind of impulse toward stylization, toward fabular, fable-like equations寓言般的方程式 that distinguish them in some ways from Western, from European, and American films.

And I think that one explanation for this has to do with the longer artistic traditions of Japanese society.

Japanese film grows out of theatrical traditions, like kabuki theater, or Noh drama,

N-O-H drama, both of which have profoundly stylized and fable like qualities.

They're anti-narrative, in some sense, and any of you who have ever had even a minimal experience with either of these two theatrical traditions will understand what I'm discussing.

These are theaters of gesture and of very decisive, symbolic representation.

What we would think of as sort of realistic characters or realistic stories are not a part of these very ancient traditions.

These theatrical traditions go back hundreds, even thousands of years.

So there's a tradition in Japan of a kind of stylized, of symbolic representation.

And you'll see, I think, how in Russia, how powerfully this principle operates in Rashomon.

Even when film itself emerged in Japan in the silent era, it emerged in a slightly different way.

And one of the most interesting features of silent film无声电影 tradition in Japan was the appearance of a character who has no counterpart in Western cinema, a character called a benshi, B-E-N-S-H-I.

Any of you heard of it? None.

Benshi (弁士) were Japanese performers who provided live narration for silent films (both Japanese films and Western films). Benshi are sometimes called katsudō-benshi (活動弁士) or katsuben (活弁).

Well, he essentially was a narrator and explainer, and he stood next to the movies in a way and gave explanations.

He said now, we will introduce the villain坏人.

Now, we will introduce-- he was like a kind of intermediary, a narrator or a concierge who mediated between the audience and the text, who gave the audience information.

Again in one sense, we might think of it as an anti-narrative tradition, as a tradition in which things are presented or spoken rather than literally acted out, and certainly one in which the details of a story are less important than its general outline.

So when we talk about stylization, one of the things we're talking about is an impulse toward what we might think of as generalized argument instead of specific argument, an impulse to have one moment stand symbolically for many other moments, and what we might think of as a simplification or a distillation of reality into certain symbolic moments that are thought to be emblematic in certain ways, but don't necessarily have a realistic feel.

And you'll see almost instantly when this film begins, there's a kind of prologue序幕.

And then when the film makes a transition into the first sequence that takes place in the forest, you'll begin to see what I mean when I say that the film seems to enter into a kind of symbolic realm象征的境界 in which your sense of reality is in some sense undermined, as if you're entering into a dream or a symbolic space.

Kurosawa, talking about that astonishing sequence at the beginning of Rashomon, said that camera's complex movements and the movements of a character himself相机的复杂动作和角色自身的动作—everything is in motion in that remarkable opening sequence.

（叙事手法？Tan）

Some people have called it the most visually poetic sequence最具视觉诗意的序列 in the history of movies.

Kurosawa called this moment a moment in which the camera was shown to be penetrating入木三分 into a space where the heart loses its way, as if you're penetrating into an ancestral space, into a space that's dreamlike in fundamental ways.

So the very opening of the film, or almost the very opening of the film establishes this kind of complexity.

I don't want to exactly call it an ambiguity, but this complexity about the nature of the reality that you're watching.

And this is even before the film proceeds to present essentially four different accounts of the same event, these four different accounts conflicting with each other in a variety of ways.

（同一个故事的四个不同版本。难道这就是叙事的复杂结构？Tan）

So these abstracting, or symbolizing, or stylizing narrative and dramatic traditions lie behind and shape the movies in Japan, even movies like Kurosawa's, which embrace the camera's freedom in a way that's much more characteristic of Western directors than of Eastern ones.

Ozu, the second of the two directors I've listed on your outline, is especially famous for holding his camera almost stationary静止的 for a tremendously long time.

And in fact, he's sometimes called a director who tries to create a zen aesthetic禅美学,

because the camera is so quiet, and so stationary, and relatively inactive.

It's a style that lays tremendous emphasis on the nuances of facial expression and vocal tone表情和声调.

And both Mizoguchi and Ozu do, in some sense, have an even greater sense of stylization in many of their films than Kurosawa does.

But I don't want to oversimplify, because they are also capable of very great, realistic moments, and they have a moral realism that's at least as powerful in their films as Kurosawa himself.

Kurosawa's career is a very remarkable one.

And I wish I had time to talk about it in detail.

Organizational structure of Japanese cinema was not unlike the structures that developed in Western societies in the United States or in France.

There were essentially monopolies of not a small number, but a relatively larger number of film production companies operating at different levels of significance.

So they were second rate, and then they were second level and third level production companies, as well.

But all of them operated in a similar way.

The director was a more dominant than major figure in this system, and surrounding each director were a group of workers and a group of creative people, including usually performers who went with a director from film to film, as well as his technical people.

They would often use the same people to write their music, and the same crew to work on the film-- if they could succeed, get the same cinematographer.

And Kurosawa's-- so Kurosawa's group was called the Kurosawa gumi组, G-U-M-I. It means the group, or cadre.

The Kurosawa group worked on a series of films.

I don't mean it was always identical.

There were changes, but it was a stable group unified especially by Kurosawa's vision and supervision.

And I've listed here a few of his most famous and fundamental films besides Rashomon.

Ikiru, maybe his greatest film, a realistic film set in the modern world.

The title means to live, and it's about a man who discovers that he has only a few months to live.

And it stars the actor Takashi Shimura, who plays the woodcutter in Rashomon.

The other actor that you'll see in Rashomon that is one of Kurosawa's favorites and appears again and again in Kurosawa's films is the actor Toshiro Mifuni.

Rashomon, he plays the bandit匪.

You'll see what a remarkable figure he is.

So I've only listed a few of his films here,but among his most important, Rashomon罗生门, Ikiru生, Seven Samurai七个武士-- many people would say the greatest of all samurai movies, and probably the greatest of all Western movies, because it puts most American Westerns to sham蒙羞.

It's influenced by American Westerns, as Kurosawa himself acknowledged.

And it was itself, that film, made in 1954, remade as an American film some years later under the title, The Magnificent Seven.

And it was so successful that a sequel was made, something like The Magnificent Seven Return.

And in fact, one of the deep features of Kurosawa's work is that many of his films have been remade by other directors, both American and European directors.

Rashomon was made 14 years later, remade 14 years later, with Kurosawa given screenplay credit in a film directed by Martin Ritt in the United States called The Outrage.

And it retells the story that's at the heart of Kurosawa's film.

It starred Paul Newman among others, and Edward G. Robinson, among other significant American actors.

Throne of Blood I mentioned, because many people see it as the most successful of all adaptations of Shakespeare.

It's a Japanese kabuki-ized version of Macbeth starring Toshiro Mifune.

And many people think of it as the greatest of all Shakespearean adaptations.

Yojimbo用心棒 is a samurai film, a much more straightforward samurai film in many ways than Seven Samurai, also stars Mifune, and it has brilliant, brilliant sword fight sequences in it that anticipate the kind of thing that is now common in Asian cinema, but much less trivially done in Kurosawa's than in many of these later films that merely seem to want to entertain us by their sword play and the physical grace of their actors, but don't connect nearly so powerfully as Kurosawa's films do to a profound and serious historical setting and story.

Yojimbo was also made into an American movie called Last Man Standing, in 1966.

I mentioned Kagemusha影武者, only because it's a later film, and many people admire it, because it shows that Kurosawa was working effectively, even in old age.

He made another film in 1985, one of his final films called Ran乱, R-A-N, which is a remake of King Lear.

And these two older films, later films, Kagamusha and Ran, show Kurosawa's visual sense, visual imagination to great effect, but they feel stylized in the way that they're-- stylized may not be the right word.

They feel abstract in a way that earlier, Kurosawa's films do not.

They are extraordinary spectacles, but they don't have the same interest in character, the same on character that his earlier films, despite their stylisation, seem to do.

I've saved most of my time to talk about Rashomon itself, because it's such a central and significant film.

And I hope when you watch it, you'll not be impatient, and especially that you watch for the ways in which from sequence to sequence, the visual style alters.

我希望当你看到它时，你不会不耐烦，特别是你观察从顺序到顺序的视觉风格改变的方式。

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