Cinematography In Rashomon And Ida

A successful film can be a thought provoking, enlightening, and powerful vehicle of change in our media-crazed society. Achieving the right vision for a film can prove to be difficult, and many aspects, people, and opinions go into the overall vision for a film. Merriam-Webster defines cinematography as, “the art, process, or job of filming movies,” and a large aspect of this art has to do with lighting, framing, and camera movement. In the films Rashomon (1950) and Ida (2013), cinematographers use these tools to tell their stories in a beautiful, complex way. Good acting, on its own, is a crucial component of filmmaking, but when combined with good cinematography classics are created. This paper will provide an analysis of the cinematography used to create the films Rashomon and Ida and comparisons between the two films cinematography.

This film is a compilation of a bandit’s, a wife’s, a samurai’s, and a woodcutter’s version of the same crime. Each perspective is as different, as contradicting, and as credible as the next because they are all clouded by the pride of the teller. In Rashomon, perspective not only colors the interpretation of reality, but perspective is reality. The motion picture Ida follows the story of a young orphan sent to visit her aunt before taking the vows to become a nun. Ida and her aunt set out to find the remains of Ida’s parents to pay their respects. The film follows Ida while she sets on this journey confronting her faith, and both her and her aunt confront the isolation they have been experiencing in their separate, everyday lives. The two films while taking two very different approaches, both deal with the search for