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The day has finally arrived. As of press time, and barring any 11th-hour twists of fate, the Senator Theatre will go on auction July 22 at 11 a.m. Alex Cooper Auctioneers will handle the proceedings the 5904-5906 York Road property is currently listed as "One-story plus mezzanine art deco theatre building known as 'the Senator Theatre'" and it will take place at the Senator. In the past few weeks, Senator owner/life force Tom Kiefaber has turned up the heat on the city officials whom he feels deserve it for how the Senator situation is being handled, appearing on the Tom Marr show on WCBN-AM and even granting a long, supposedly unexpurgated interview with Senator activist Laura Serena, who blogs at astrogirlguides.blogspot.com, with hopes of shedding "some light on the Senator's imperiled situation that bears little actual resemblance to what the media and the public think they know from all the rampant misinformation going around" (see: astrogirl blog, July 9 entry "The Senator's Lover Bares All [Part 1]).

Obviously, there are many versions of what's going on with the beloved movie house and, intentionally or not, what could be Kiefaber's final booking at the Senator is a movie that not only mines the relativity of truth, but is the very fiction that has lent its name to subjective storytelling.

Akira Kurosawa's 1950 Rashomon opens this Friday in a stunning restored 35mm print that should be required viewing for film fans, even if you picked up the 2002 Criterion DVD. Digitally and hand-restored from a 1962 print struck from the movie's original negative, this Rashomon looks gorgeous and features a new, fresh-scrubbed soundtrack, too. It's an intoxicating piece of cinema for its sensuous aspects alone; that it's also a pivotally inventive narrative on top is almost icing on the cake if this story and how it is told wasn't the very reason the movie remains so beloved, quoted, and contentious today.

At the time Kurosawa was but a 40-year-old director who had made some heartfelt movies and interesting genre flicks (Drunken Angel, Stray Dog), still to mature into the confident storyteller of his prolific 1950s and '60s period. He had left Toho Studios, for whom he made the bulk of his life's work, and made Rashomon for Daiei Motion Picture Company, a relatively new studio that would establish its name with more action-oriented fare of the Daimajin trilogy and the Zatoichi and Gamera film series. For this adaptation of two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, he cast the then-30-year-old actor Toshir? Mifune, with whom he had worked twice before but who was still very early in his career. He was to work with a cinematographer named Kazuo Miyagawa, who had been working almost exclusively with director Hiroshi Inagaki, who liked to use complicated tracking shots. Kurosawa, Mifune, and Miyagawa would eventually become renown in their home country and beyond as masters in their fields and in the case of Kurosawa and Mifune, almost inseparable and Rashomon was the movie that brought all of them critical attention in the West.

Rashomon's ingenuity lies in how its recognizes the complexity of the simple tale: the story is basically three men talking about a crime and recent trial, just as people today discuss events in the media cycle. A man (Masayuki Mori) and his wife (Machiko Kyo) are walking in the woods in 11th-century Japan when a bandit (Mifune, in a performance that remains a marvel of subtle mutations) rapes (or not) the woman and kills (or not) the man. This crime is told in flashbacks when a commoner (Kichijiro Ueda) comes upon a priest (Minoru Chiaki) and woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) who, while seeking shelter from the rain, try to wrap their brains around the trial they just saw. In flashbacks (and, eventually, flashbacks within flashbacks) the woodcutter tells the commoner about the trial, in which four different versions of the crime from the bandit, the woman, the dead man through a medium (Fumiko Honma), and the woodcutter himself--are told and enacted.

These shifting points of view describe the same events, altered just enough to suggest different reasons for the crime provided different people's motivations and truthfulness. In the process, Kurosawa's movie puts forth less a theory of the shifting veracity of truth and more a cynical depiction of human nature (the movie appeared a mere five years after the bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima). A contentious and perhaps even sentimental coda provides a humanist tonic to this cynicism, but what feels like a sharp shift in tone is better served by Kurosawa's visual presentation. And this restored print sumptuously spotlights Rashomon's sly visual logic. A heavy rain falls throughout the movie's present tense, while the sun only peeks through the tress during the crime's various re-tellings. At the end, the sun doesn't so much come out as the rain abates, the sky itself becoming as streaked by light as the forest floor. The priest and woodcutter may never before have heard such a strange story, but the artistry that goes into how this story is told ensures that Rashomon will go on being digested again and again and again and again.