teaching with "Rashomon"

[Chan Choon Ling]

Hi David ,

I'm currently a student at the National University of Singapore and I major
in Japanese studies . This semestser , I 'm doing Japanese pop. culture 
and part of the module emphasizes on the Film industry in Japan. 
I thought since you'll be teaching Rashomon , you'll definitely have
greater  infor. about this famous film and director of the film . I would
be grateful if you could supply me with some valuable infor. I 'm apologise
for any disappointment ; you required members to supply you with extra
infor but instead I'm asking you for them but you may discover some
interesting things/points in the process of telling me more about the film
and director . I'm rather interested in the differences between the
literature text and the film and how Kurosawa used the text to produce the
film .
Any infor. is apprecisted !
Thank you .

Regards,
Chan Choon Ling

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From: David N. Averbach <averbach at uclink.berkeley.edu>
To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Subject: Re: teaching with "Rashomon"
Date: Tuesday, March 17, 1998 11:37 AM

I'm only a doctoral candidate, but I've been anxious to teach Rashomon
for a while.  In a prospective course proposal I submitted earlier this
year, I suggested having the students read the film script and the two
Akutagawa stories.  "Yabu no naka" (In a Grove) is the Akutagawa story
upon which the content of Kurosawa's Rashomon is based.  Kurosawa's
Rashomon borrows only the name and the gate from Akutagawa's Rashomon. 
My copy of the film script, edited by Donald Ritchie and published by
Rutgers University Press, 1987 under the series Rutgers Film in Print,
contains the script, both Akutagawa stories, American reviews of the
film from the 1950s, as well as various commentaries.  What I wanted to
do was to look at the differences between what Akutagawa was doing
narratively with literature in 1922 and what Kurosawa was doing
narratively with film in 1950.  I believe literature in the early 1920s
and film in the early 1950s were similar in the sense that those time
periods represent, respectively, a sort of narrative apex vis a vis
literature and film in Japan.  Both Yabu no naka and Rashomon are
important for what they bring to their craft and it is interesting to
compare those differences on a formal level.


Translations of the Akutagawa stories:

Akutagawa Ry?nosuke. "Rashomon." Trans. Takashi Kojima. Rashomon and
Other Stories. Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo, Japan: Charles E. Tuttle
Company, Inc., 1952. 26-34.


Akutagawa Ry?nosuke. "Yabu no naka." Trans. Takashi Kojima. Rashomon
and Other Stories. Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo, Japan: Charles E. Tuttle
Company, Inc., 1952. 13-25.

Akutagawa Ry?nosuke. "In a Grove." Trans. Takashi Kojima. The Oxford
Book of Japanese Short Stories. Ed. Theodore W. Goossen. Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 95-102.


and in the film script book mentioned above.


I also have a note to look at this, although I'm not sure it really
relates.  Film Noir in the sense of telling a story through flashbacks,
inverted narrative, etc.

Schrader, "Notes on Film Noir." <underline>Film Genre
Reader</underline>. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1986.


Hope this helps, although I haven't tried it yet myself.


>  Please forgive me if portions of this request are 

>stultifying: I don't have access to the web or to my 

>university library for some days and am trying to draft 

>a course description which would use the film and 

>the (translated) script of "Rashomon" and its 

>literary sources for a sort of mid-level comparative 

>lit. course on hermeneutics, theory, etc. I imagine 

>that this has been done often. What I wonder is whether 

>any list members would be kind enough to share 

>their experiences (or syllabi, for that matter) using 

>Rashomon as a teaching text, and (this is the 

>embarrassing part) might clue me in on the sources 

>(I'd assumed the film was based on Akutagawa's story 

>of the same title and this is obviously not so). 

_______________________________________________

David Averbach


University of California at Berkeley

Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures

104 Durant

Berkeley, CA 94720

FAX: (510) 642-6931


averbach at socrates.berkeley.edu

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