Most films usually entertain their audience for a short span of time, but Rashomon has defined the art of film-making.
Directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1950, this Japanese film is about a crime. Or probably, it is more about a story of perspectives.
Before this movie, the camera was more trustworthy; the viewers would take visual depiction as reality. Rashomon revolutionized that concept of film-making, and by doing so, it rendered the objectivity of the camera into question.
This new trend adopted by the succeeding film-makers around the world has known to be the Rashomon effect. It is associated with the unreliability of the camera and whatever situation it depicts in an event.
Plot
The film contains three levels of story-telling, with three main characters, and the three contradictory viewpoints.
At the gate of a ruined temple, a woodcutter tells the first story to the other two men, all of whom join by the accidents of a rain storm.
Then a contesting narrative is depicted in the second story that comes forth during the witness trial at the courtyard. The third story undresses itself as the audience witnesses the crime unfolding.
In short, Rashomon is a multi-layered story involving a murder that is explained in four contradictory ways by the same number of witnesses. In this high drama, the film-maker seems to trap the viewers in the labyrinth of doubts and uncertainty from which he can never come out.
The story develops as the woodcutter recounts the events of the murder of a Samurai and the rape. He narrates the events as a witness to his accidental fellows at the Rashomon gate.
Highly Participatory Film
Rashomon is a highly participatory film that involves the audience both as a witness as a judge. But what makes it a trend-setter is the depiction of four contradictory accounts of murder and rape incident. Interestingly, the entire film revolves around an uncertainty between truth and lies and persisting an unceasing tension between what we see and what we believe we see.
The first point of view comes from the bandit who claims to have killed the Samurai and raping his wife in the forest.
But the second version that comes from the wife contradicts the first viewpoint. She claims that the bandit leaves her for dead after raping her, and she asks her husband to kill her to save her from the shame. But the blankness of Samurai’s face disillusions her, and she faints. After coming back to consciousness, she finds the husband lifeless.
The third version comes none other than from the murdered husband, which contradicts both versions. According to this, after the bandit dishonors his wife, he suggests his woman elope with the adulterer. However, the wife asks the bandit to kill her husband before leaving. The husband claims he kills himself out of shame after this.
Yet, the fourth version comes from the woodcutter, who should be, but isn’t, impartial. According to him, though the bandit murders the husband, it is not how the murderer described in his version: the murder was unintentional!
More:
Rashomon is undoubtedly a story within a story within a story, making the viewers seek the truth of their own amid a narrative structure that is fractured. This fractured narrative structure has, on one side, made the murder-rape mystery an unsolvable mystery, while making it a trend-setter in the cinema culture as a cult movie.
In the end, Rashomon is less about truth or false than it is about perspectives. In fact, in this movie perspective itself is reality.
