RASHôMON (MEASURED BY CHRONOTOPES) (1950, Japan)
directed by: Akira Kurosawa

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IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042876

Submitted by Yuri Tsivian on 2007-05-22

Yuri Tsivian's comment:
The story evolves in 3 time-space registers (something that Bakhtin would term 3 chronotopes): 1) the space-time of the crime events, 2) the court trial interrogation of the participants and 3) the Rashomon gate at which 2 eyewitnesses (woodcutter and priest) tell a commoner about the event and the court trial testimonies. This is how I measured the film.
Shots under the credits sequence included; the end title too.
There is one cut missed in the credits sequence and perhaps 2 or 3 mistakes in the wood running sequences (cut hard to detect -- many CU cuts on fast running figures with bushed flashing in the foreground, but on the whole the measurement is accurate.

ASL:Average Shot Length
in seconds 12.4 
MSL:Median Shot Length
in seconds 8.1 
MSL/ASL:Median/Average Shot Length ratio
 0.65 
LEN: Length of the film
Minutes:Seconds87:5 
NoS: Number of shots420 
MAX: Longest shot
in seconds105.9 
MIN: Shortest shot
in seconds0.3 
Range: Range between MIN and MAX
in seconds105.6 
StDev: Standard deviation
in seconds13.3 
CV: Coefficient of variation
(SdDev/ASL)1.07 

Name:
events
court
gate
Number of shots:
291
38
91
Length(min):
48.03
15.51
23.54
ASL(sec):
9.9
24.5
15.5
MSL 6.7 22.1 11.1
MSL/ASL
0.68
0.9
0.72
StDev 9.8 23.9 13.2
Min 0.3 1.1 1.1
Max 72 105.9 76.6
CV 0.99 0.98 0.85
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Step: Vertical resolution: Height:
Degree of the trendline: Moving average
rangeThe range over which the average is computed.
If set to 10, the average will be computed for 11 shots: the current one, 5 before it, and 5 ahead of it
: Color code?


Users' comments:
Author: Yuri Tsivian Date: 2007-05-22

The ASL difference between the 3 categories account for the fact that the event chronotope is mostly action, the court is monologues, and the gate, dialogs and triologs.
Author: Yuri Tsivian Date: 2007-05-23

A note on accuracy: Donald Richie who scrutinized the film on the editing table lists 417 shots incl. credits. So this is only 3 cuts off (or he is)

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