Rashomon (1950)

Rashomon (1950)

Dir. Akira Kurosawa

There's a saying that the camera never lies. But it doesn't hold true in Rashomon. Dir. Kurosawa turns the traditionally objective film lens into a wholly subjective tool, recording and replaying half-remembered half-truths from unreliable sources.

The story, which is told partly in flashback, is a simple one about an opportunist bandit (Toshirô Mifune), a samurai (Masayuki Mori) and his wife (Machiko Kyō), but the web of lies surrounding it is far from simple.

With minimal sets and very little dialogue to comfort us, it's the technique that makes Rashomon special, that makes it infinitely watchable, with striking fixed perspectives that put the onus on the viewer to decide what to believe and what to discount.

The Martian Chronicles (1950)

The Martian Chronicles (1950)

Author: Ray Bradbury | Page Count: 305 [1]

'The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke. And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye...'

TMP is Bradbury's account of mankind's attempts at colonising and taming the mysterious red planet. Like some of his other books, it's a 'fix-up novel', a collection of individual short stories that were penned over a number of years and later collected together with a newly written bridge narrative, a kind of literary glue.

He revised a few of the shorts and added intercalary chapters to help it better fit a novel's structure, but some discordance remains - none of which, it must be said, is enough to belittle the concept, in general.

Bradbury's Mars isn't the dusty, desolate, and craggy landscape that we've come to accept as the norm in modern sci-fi stories. It's ornate, delicate, an organic but equally stylistic extension of the planet's mystery and its peoples' imagination, which manifests as the kind of harmony that seems to exist perpetually out of mankind's reach.