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WORK TITLE: Kurosawa’s Rashomon
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
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CITY: New York
STATE: NY
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http://ealac.columbia.edu/portfolio-items/paul-anderer/ * http://weai.columbia.edu/paul-anderer/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of Michigan, B.A., 1971; University of Chicago, M.A., 1972; Yale University, Ph.D., 1979.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Columbia University, New York, NY, faculty, 1980–, became Fred and Fannie Mack Professor of Humanities and professor of Japanese literature, also chair, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, 1989-97, director of Keene Center, and vice provost for international relations. Waseda University, Tsunoda fellow, 2012, visiting faculty, 2014; La Sapienza, visiting scholar, 2013. Formerly taught at Tokyo Institute of Technology, University of Notre Dame, and Kinki University.
AWARDS:Grants or fellowships from Fulbright Commission, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Social Science Research Council.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Paul Anderer has devoted himself to the study of modern Japan, with special emphasis on the work of its literary and artistic icons. He works from the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, where his academic career began in 1980. He has also studied and taught at Japanese institutions.
Anderer’s early writings are devoted to respected authors of modern Japanese fiction and literary criticism, but his subjects are not always well known to western audiences. Other Worlds: Arishima Takeo and the Bounds of Modern Japanese Fiction delves into the work of an early twentieth-century writer known for his commitment to humanitarian values and his sympathy for the working class. Although he studied and taught briefly in the United States, his work remained unfamiliar to the average American reader. As the editor of Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo–Literary Criticism, 1924-1989, Anderer introduced another unfamiliar name to western readers. Hideo has been credited for transforming the field of Japanese literary criticism into nothing less than an art form.
Anderer’s next subject was already well known in the West, but perhaps not well understood. The author is an unabashed admirer of filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, and especially of his 1950 film Rashomon. Kurosawa’s Rashomon: A Vanished City, a Lost Brother, and the Voice inside His Most Iconic Films is not a typical film critique, however. Anderer explores the film through its connection to traumatic events in the filmmaker’s personal life–and vice versa. He attempts to illuminate Kurosawa’s complicated life through the lens of his masterpiece.
Rashomon was released at what film historians have described as a low point in the traditional Japanese film industry, which many (including Kurosawa himself) characterized as tired and out of date. Kurosawa was experiencing a low point himself. According to Anderer, the filmmaker was also suffering under the weight of Japanese history: the destruction of Tokyo by the earthquake of 1923 and the more recent devastation of World War II and the subsequent U.S. occupation. The loss of his artistic brother Heigo to suicide added weight to the burden. Kurosawa reportedly sought to find underlying meaning in these tragedies by pursuing multiple interpretations of the life-changing events, Anderer argues, and the pursuit of truth also became a theme of the film.
As the story of a bandit who rapes the wife of a samurai in twelfth-century Japan, the story is not remarkable. As an exploration of multiply filmed interpretations of a single event, energized by a melodramatic musical score, intensely close-up camera work, and innovative film editing, Rashomon upended Japanese tradition. Its favorable comparison to Hollywood films of the era attracted international notice, and Kurosawa was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion of the Venice Film Festival in 1951. The term “Rashomon effect” came to represent the notion that truth is relative.
Kurosawa went on to a fifty-year career in film, with a portfolio of classics that included The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and Ran, but his personal life remained somewhat ephemeral. Even his autobiography reflected a selective interpretation of events. For Anderer, the film Rashomon illuminates important aspects of Kurosawa’s life that the filmmaker himself declined to address, and he examines them at length. In the New York Times Book Review, critic Phillip Lopate observed: “He is, in short, a Kurosawa enthusiast, and his book should be warmly welcomed by all who share his enthusiasm.”
The critical response was otherwise divided. A Kirkus Reviews contributor credited Anderer with a “sensitive investigation” that offers “perceptive insights about the mysterious heart of a legendary movie and its maker,” but countered that the focus on multiple, often contradictory contributing forces resulted in “a complicated, enigmatic, and unsettling portrait.” A reviewer in Publishers Weekly compared Anderer’s strategy to the theme of the film itself: “This approach hinges on the message … : one must hear multiple sides of the story to know what has happened.” Lopate: “The book’s strength lies in its grasp of Japan’s cultural history.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2016, review of Kurosawa’s Rashomon: A Vanished City, a Lost Brother, and the Voice inside His Most Iconic Films.
Library Journal, September 15, 2016, Terry Hong, review of Kurosawa’s Rashomon, p. 84.
New York Times Book Review, December 2, 2016, Phillip Lopate, review of Kurasawa’s Rashomon.
Publishers Weekly, August 22, 2016, review of Kurosawa’s Rashomon, p. 106.
ONLINE
Columbia University Web site, http://www.columbia.edu/ (May 19, 2017), author profile.
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (July 26, 2016), review of Kurosawa’s Rashomon.
New York Times Book Review Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (December 2, 2016), Phillip Lopate, review of Kurosawa’s Rashomon.*
Paul Anderer is the author of Other Worlds: Arishima Takeo and the Bounds of Modern Japanese Fiction, andLiterature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo―Literary Criticism, 1924-1939. He has written widely on Tokyo and the culture of cities. He teaches courses on Japanese literature and film at Columbia, where he is the Mack Professor of Humanities. Paul Anderer lives in New York City.
Fred and Fannie Mack Professor of Humanities and Professor of Japanese Literature, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Email: pja1@columbia.edu
Modern Japanese literature, film, and cultural criticism; narrative topography; city cultures; modern tragedy
Professor Anderer’s most recent book is Kurosawa’s Rashomon: A Vanished City, a Lost Brother, and the Voice Inside His Iconic Films (Pegasus Books/W.W. Norton, 2016).
In the fall of 2012, he conducted research at Waseda University as a Tsunoda Fellow; in the spring of 2013, he was a Visiting Scholar at La Sapienza in Rome. In the summer of 2014, he advanced Columbia’s “Global Liberal Arts” Mellon Initiative by teaching a short course (on Akira Kurosawa) at Waseda University.
Professor Anderer was educated at Michigan (BA), Chicago (MA), and Yale (PhD), He joined the Columbia faculty in 1980, and has served the University as Chair of EALAC, as Director of the Keene Center, as Acting Dean of the Graduate School, and as Vice Provost for International Relations.
Professor Anderer holds degrees from Michigan , Chicago , and Yale, and has held teaching or research appointments at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Notre Dame, and Kinki University . He joined the Columbia faculty in 1980.
MACK PROFESSOR OF HUMANITIES; PROFESSOR OF JAPANESE LITERATURE
Paul Anderer holds degrees from Michigan (BA ’71), Chicago (MA ’72), and Yale (Ph.D. ’79). He joined the Columbia faculty in 1980. From 1989 until 1997, he was the chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. He has also served the University as Vice Provost for International Relations, as Associate Vice-President for Academic Planning and Global Initiatives in the Arts and Sciences, and as Acting Dean of the Graduate School. His writings include Other Worlds: Arishima Takeo and the Bounds of Modern Japanese Fiction (Columbia, 1984); and Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo-Literary Criticism, 1924-1939 (Stanford, 1995), along with numerous articles exploring the culture of the city (Tokyo) and Japanese modernity. His work has been awarded support from the NEH, the SSRC, and the Fulbright Commission. He teaches Japanese fiction, film, and cultural criticism in addition to Asian Humanities. He is currently writing a book on the black and white films of Kurosawa Akira, in their relationship to the Japanese post-war and to the era of silent film-making. Professor Anderer is currently serving as the Director of Undergraduate Studies.
Anderer, Paul. Kurosawa's Rashomon: A Vanished City, a Lost Brother, and the Voice Inside His Most Iconic Films
Terry Hong
141.15 (Sept. 15, 2016): p84.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Anderer, Paul. Kurosawas Rashomon: A Vanished City, a Lost Brother, and the Voice Inside His Most Iconic Films. Pegasus. Oct. 2016.254p. illus. filmog. index. ISBN 9781681772271. $27.95; ebk. ISBN 9781681772776. FILM
When Rashomon won the Venice Film Festivals Golden Lion in September 1950, the world embraced its director, Akira Kurosawa (1910--98), who quickly gained unrivaled prominence--Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg are a few of his seli-declared disciples. Beyond reaching iconic status and inspiring endless volumes of analyses and critiques, Rashomon has become "a key word of our time," referring to the impossibility of knowing the truth and instead being confronted with multiple perceptions of what might have happened. Anderer (Mack Professor of Humanities, Columbia Univ.; Other Worlds: Arishima Takeo and the Bounds of Modern Japanese Fiction) turns that Rashomon effect on the film itself, presenting the inspirations and histories that went into its creation, including the pivotal consequences of the youthful double suicide of Kurosawas beloved older brother and his lover, writer Ryunosuke Akutagawas original texts, Japanese film history, Kurosawas films before and after, important collaborators reminiscences, and much more. VERDICT In spite of a culturally provocative premise, the narrative repeats and temporally wanders often; moreover, the texts assumed familiarity with Kurosawas films suggests general audiences are unlikely to have the sustained interest to finish.--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hong, Terry. "Anderer, Paul. Kurosawa's Rashomon: A Vanished City, a Lost Brother, and the Voice Inside His Most Iconic Films." Library Journal, 15 Sept. 2016, p. 84+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463632522&it=r&asid=bdd8123e9c471288b5e050bc6de05716. Accessed 2 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463632522
Kurosawa's Rashomon: A Vanished City, a Lost Brother, and the Voice Inside His Most Iconic Films
263.34 (Aug. 22, 2016): p106.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Kurosawa's Rashomon: A Vanished City, a Lost Brother, and the Voice Inside His Most Iconic Films
Paul Anderer. Pegasus, $27.95 (254p) ISBN 978-1-68177-227-1
Anderer (Other Worlds: Arisima Takeo and the Bounds of Modern Japanese Fiction) explores the early life of Japan's most famous film director, Akira Kurosawa, in this meandering and unsuccessful work. Active for more than 50 years, Kurosawa directed classics such as The Seven Samurai, Ran, and Rashomon. Anderer's premise is that a more complete understanding of Kurosawa's films can be obtained by examining the director's relationship with his older brother, Heigo, a film actor and suicide; the dual destructions of Tokyo in 1923 and 1945; and the director's early political leanings. <
Agent: Michael Carlisle, InkWell Management. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kurosawa's Rashomon: A Vanished City, a Lost Brother, and the Voice Inside His Most Iconic Films." Publishers Weekly, 22 Aug. 2016, p. 106. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461609356&it=r&asid=f4b8cbe06a069d9b347fcd89a4bc1ba3. Accessed 2 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461609356
Is ‘Rashomon’ Kurosawa’s Best Film?
By PHILLIP LOPATEDEC. 2, 2016
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The samurai’s wife: Machiko Kyo in “Rashomon,” 1950. Credit From "Kurosawa’s Rashomon"
KUROSAWA’S RASHOMON
A Vanished City, a Lost Brother, and the Voice Inside His Iconic Films
By Paul Anderer
Illustrated. 248 pp. Pegasus Books. $27.95.
In September 1951, the Venice Film Festival awarded its top prize, the Golden Lion, to “Rashomon,” by a little-known Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa. Immediately, the film and its maker became international sensations. It is easy to see why, given its dynamic, virtuoso cinematic technique, sensationalistic story involving a bandit raping a samurai’s wife, “Bolero”-like musical score and tantalizing if schematic structure of flashbacks contradicting one another. The title quickly entered the English language and became shorthand for the relativity of truth: “the Rashomon effect,” invoked to indicate how witnesses to the same event may see it differently.
Paul Anderer, who teaches Japanese literature and film at Columbia University, has written a well-researched study that is part biography of Kurosawa, part cultural history of modern Japan and part film monograph. He is previously the author of two scholarly works, but his prose in “Kurosawa’s Rashomon” is energetic, straightforward and free of academic jargon — if rhetorically overheated, at times, seeming to mirror his subject’s excitable style. He has chosen to focus on “Rashomon” as the fulcrum of Kurosawa’s career, emphasizing what he regards as the early influences in the filmmaker’s life that fed his thematic vision — specifically, its mixture of the appalling and the redemptive, the apocalyptic and the humanistic.
Among these influences was a pair of catastrophes that left his city devastated: the earthquake of 1923 and the firebombings of Tokyo in 1945. “Kurosawa’s was an imagination of disaster, lined by fear and an often overwhelming darkness. His most daring work, though, moves beyond the shadows, perseveres to locate some sliver of light,” Anderer writes. Kurosawa was only 13 when the earthquake occurred, but his older brother, Heigo, insisted they walk through the ruins and view the corpses, ostensibly to overcome fear by staring reality in the face. That older brother exerted a major influence on Kurosawa: A movie buff, he took Akira along to silent film classics, mostly foreign, and even became a benshi: “The benshi were there to explain the plot but also to impersonate the characters. Such a narrator, standing at the podium to the left of the stage, made faintly visible by the lectern light, would declaim from the start to the finish of a feature film.” Heigo was a celebrated benshi, but when sound came in, his profession evaporated. Depressed, he committed double suicide with a waitress.
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Anderer views the newspapers’ contradictory accounts of that tragedy as a template for “Rashomon.” More important, he sees the older brother looming over Kurosawa throughout his career, imbuing him with a love of 1920s silent, experimental cinema and a passion for Russian literature, especially Dostoyevsky. So taken is the author with this brother motif that he locates Kurosawa’s “core” narrative as “variations on a story about one brother’s rise and fall, and another brother’s efforts to recall their life together in its vitality, complexity and memory-shaping force.” This seems a bit far-fetched, but Anderer presses on, squeezing the brother into the tail of sentence after sentence: “Kurosawa knew, of course, that a shadow character was more than just a filmic cliché, that such a character could be someone you knew intimately, someone you feared or relied on, as you would a brother.” He also hits the shadow/light metaphor pretty hard.
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Curiously, given the book’s title, there is not that much formal analysis of “Rashomon.” There is scant discussion of the acting: The seductive star Machiko Kyo is mentioned only once in passing, and the superb Masayuki Mori, who plays the samurai, is singled out not for his performance but for his writer-father, who committed double suicide. The great cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, so crucial to the film’s appeal, is complimented without exploring how his work for Kurosawa contrasted with that done elsewhere. More significant, there is little attempt to place “Rashomon” in the larger context of Japanese cinematic practice. Part of what made Kurosawa’s technique stand out — and be accused by Japanese critics as too “Western” in spirit — was his extreme close-ups and the way he moved the camera. Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu both disdained close-ups, and Mizoguchi used elaborate, choreographed camera movements but in long shot, affording a more detached perspective. Kurosawa has the bandit rush through the forest, keeping the mobile camera close, for a blurred, visceral effect. “Visceral” is Anderer’s word for what Kurosawa was going after. No wonder the New Hollywood princes — Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg — embraced Kurosawa as their master: He was employing a propulsive rhythm and impulse to entertain more in keeping with Hollywood films, far removed from the contemplative, transcendental style that had been the hallmark of Japanese cinema.
Anderer argues that Kurosawa required “a more melodramatically charged, allegorical framework for his postwar film project, which was to shock what had become a cultural dead zone back to life.” And he quotes Kurosawa’s rather self-serving 1945 statement that Japanese films “ ‘have lost their youth, vigor and high aspiration.’ Movies . . . look like the work of tired, old men, ‘who make petty judgments, have dried-up feelings, and whose hearts are clogged.’ He adds, ‘If we say films made by such people are mature, we should throw such “maturity” to the dogs.’ ” So much for the sublime pre- and postwar efforts of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshita.
Anderer sees Kurosawa as retrieving Japan’s honor after its shameful war defeat, by winning the Golden Lion for “Rashomon” and going on to make “Seven Samurai” and “Ikiru.” In my opinion he overrates “Rashomon.” The fact that it is “iconic” does not necessarily make it a masterpiece — certainly not one of comparable depth to, say, Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu” or Ozu’s “Late Spring.” Visually dazzling, yes, but the hammy and naïve aspects remain irksome. Toshiro Mifune’s monkey-scratching bandit, charming at first, becomes one-note; the drifter’s cynical laughter is excessive; and the woodcutter’s rescue of the baby at the end, a crudely sentimental device. Kurosawa’s Big Thoughts, like What is truth? and Is man inherently evil?, seem trite. The problem is not that these questions are undeserving of consideration, but that Kurosawa poses them in a didactic, simplistic, self-congratulatory manner.
The novelist Yukio Mishima once said that Kurosawa’s ideas were those of a middle schooler. Anderer cites this judgment but isn’t fazed by it: He shrugs off the charge of sentimentality, and continues to treat the director’s films as philosophically profound. <
Phillip Lopate is the editor of “American Movie Critics.” His latest book, “A Mother’s Tale,” will be published in January.
KUROSAWA'S RASHOMON
A Vanished City, a Lost Brother, and the Voice Inside His Iconic Films
by Paul Anderer
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KIRKUS REVIEW
A prismatic look at the esteemed filmmaker’s life.
In his masterpiece Rashomon (1950), Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) presents contradictory stories about a murder in 12th-century Japan, as told by several witnesses. For viewers, notes film scholar Anderer (Humanities/Columbia Univ.; editor: Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo—Literary Criticism, 1924-1939, 1995, etc.) in his <
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Pub Date: Oct. 11th, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-227-1
Page count: 240pp
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: July 26th, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15th, 2016