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Volume 33, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 1059-440X
  • E-ISSN: 2049-6710

Abstract

The legacy of Akira Kurosawa has become ‘fertile land’, beckoning a plethora of intercultural and intermedia adaptations (1950), which is adapted from two short stories by the great Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), namely, ‘Rashōmon’ (1915) and ‘In a Grove’ (1922), surprised Hollywood by refusing the dominant traditional narrative techniques of the period. Although this masterpiece was created over half a century ago, it has been reproduced continually through multimediated practices. was a cognitive explosion that revolutionized western perceptions of the creative and imaginative potential of eastern cinema. Since its release, this cinematic masterpiece has been rewritten and recontextualized into a slew of film, stage and musical productions. Adaptation is the process of reinterpreting and negotiating a target text for new cultural and sign biospheres. This work analyses the transformation process of into the movie adaptations (Ritt 1964) (United States) and อุโมงค์ผาเมือง (, also known as ) (Devakula 2011) (Thailand) to answer the following questions: what elements are added, amplified or excluded in the adaptations? Can the recontextualization of in the United States and Thailand show how the adaptations accommodate and confront cultural and epochal similarities and differences? What translatable and adaptable ‘textual gaps’ allow the adaptations to discourse and reinterpret the source/original/adapted texts? This article uses theory of adaptation as the main theoretical framework to address the questions above.

Funding
This study was supported by the:
© 2022 Intellect Ltd
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2022-04-01
2025-03-25
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East–West rewriting and recontextualization: Approaching Rashōmon (Akira Kurosawa) and its afterlives from adaptation theory
Asian Cinema 33, 55 (2022); https://doi.org/10.1386/ac_00047_1
/content/journals/10.1386/ac_00047_1
/content/journals/10.1386/ac_00047_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): At the Gate of the Ghost; domestic culture; equivalence; faithfulness; interpretative gaps; multimedia legacy; remake; The Outrage

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