The Crucified Lovers (1954, dir. Kenji Mizoguchi)

Tatsuya Nakadai has a productive day at the office in Sword of Doom (1966, dir. Kihachi Okamoto)

The Crucified Lovers (1954, dir. Kenji Mizoguchi)

Yumiko Nogawa & Tamio Kawaji in Story of a Prostitute (1965, dir. Seijun Suzuki)

Pitfall (1962, dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara)

Rashomon (1950, dir. Akira Kurosawa)

“[The three assistant directors on Rashomon] found the script baffling and wanted me to explain it to them. ‘Please read it again more carefully,’ I told them. ‘If you read it diligently, you should be able to understand it because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible.’ But they wouldn’t leave. ‘We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don’t understand it at all; that’s why we want you to explain it to us.’ For their persistence I gave them this simple explanation:

‘Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings–the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave—even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.’”

-Akira Kurosawa, excerpted from Something Like an Autobiography

Masayuki Mori & Machiko Kyō in Rashomon (1950, dir. Akira Kurosawa) (via)

Marge: C’mon, Homer, Japan will be fun. You liked Rashomon.

Homer: That’s not how I remember it.

-The Simpsons, Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo

Akira Kurosawa standing before a projected image of his favorite leading man, Toshiro Mifune (1963, photo by Brian Bake)

“During youth the desire for self-expression is so overpowering that most people end up by losing all grasp on their real selves.”

-Kurosawa, in his 1982 memoir Something Like an Autobiography