Rashomon (1950)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa, 1950.
Plot
Three men shelter from rain under the ruined Rashomon gate in a devastated medieval Kyoto. A woodcutter and a priest tell a commoner about a trial they’ve just witnessed. A samurai has been found dead in a grove; his wife was raped; a notorious bandit, Tajomaru, was apprehended nearby.
Four accounts of what happened, each dramatized as a flashback. Tajomaru says he raped the wife, then fought the samurai in an honorable duel and killed him. The wife says she was raped, her husband looked at her with unbearable contempt afterward, she begged him to kill her or take her with him, and when he refused she stabbed him herself. The dead samurai, speaking through a spirit medium, says that after being tied up and forced to watch, his wife begged Tajomaru to kill him — at which point Tajomaru, disgusted, actually asked him for permission to punish her — and that he, the samurai, took his own life out of shame. Finally the woodcutter, who originally claimed he only found the body, confesses he saw the whole thing. His version is the least heroic for anyone: a clumsy, pathetic struggle between two men who didn’t really want to fight, and a wife who mocked them both.
The film ends with the woodcutter adopting an abandoned baby — one small, uncertain act of human goodness in a world where truth itself has collapsed.
What It’s About
Rashomon is the reason “Rashomon effect” is now a phrase in English. The film’s question — what do we do when every witness’s account of the same event is incompatible with every other, not because one is lying, but because each is restructuring reality around their own ego — is the question Nietzsche called perspectivism. There is no view from nowhere. Every account is a will-to-self-preservation dressed as memory.
Freud is here too, in a less literary form. Each witness’s testimony is shaped by what the unconscious needs that witness to believe about themselves. Tajomaru needs to be a heroic swordsman. The wife needs to be a tragic figure. The samurai needs to be a wronged aristocrat. The woodcutter needs to not have stolen the valuable dagger (which is why he lied about not seeing the whole thing). Everyone’s version is a compromise-formation.
The film also reads, at a distance, like a cinematic sibling to [[the-trial|Kafka’s The Trial]]: a tribunal where truth is structurally inaccessible, witnesses are all unreliable, and the procedure itself cannot ever settle the case. Kurosawa’s version is warmer than Kafka’s — the final gesture of adopting the baby is a small refusal of nihilism — but the epistemic black hole at the center is the same.
Rashomon was the film that brought Japanese cinema to the West; it won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1951 and, overnight, made Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune international figures.
Connections
- Akira Kurosawa — the film that launched him globally; his first great formal experiment
- Friedrich Nietzsche (page not yet written) — perspectivism; the claim that every “truth” is an interpretation serving a particular will
- The Trial — the tribunal as a place where truth is structurally unavailable
- Sigmund Freud — each testimony as unconscious wish-fulfillment and ego-preservation
Lineage
Predecessors: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s stories “In a Grove” and “Rashomon”; Nietzsche’s perspectivism; Kafka’s The Trial; the Japanese noh theatre’s approach to split narrative.
Successors: The Usual Suspects; Hero (Zhang Yimou); Gone Girl; The Last Duel; every “unreliable-narrator mosaic” film in the last seventy years.