Rashomon

It isn't often a movie becomes part of the language. But Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa's 1950 crime drama, lent its name the "Rashomon effect," which is when a group of people have a different recollection of the same events. It was also the first Japanese film to gain international acclaim, winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was the first Japanese film to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

"I don't understand" are the first words spoken in the film. Three men, waiting out a rainstorm under a city gate (the name of the city is Rashomon) talk about a man who was murdered. A woodcutter describes how he found the body and testified in court.

It all starts with a samurai and wife traveling through the forest. The first to tell the story is a bandit (Toshiro Mifune), who tricks the man, ties him up, and rapes his wife right in front of him. The wife (Machiko Kyo) is now shamed, and says she can't continue to be married. So Mifune and the samurai (Masayuki Mori) battle for her, and Mifune kills him. But....

The wife then testifies that after the rape Mifune leaves. The husband looks on her with contempt, and she ends up killing him. But...

The samurai, through a medium, testifies that the wife is ready to go off with Mifune, but asks the thief to kill her husband, so she can be free to run off with him. Mifune is so disgusted by this that he asks Mori if he should kill her. Mori ends up killing himself. But...

The woodcutter then tells what we may presume to be the true story, which has much less gallantry and far more clumsiness and cowardice. But is this the true story?

Rashomon, in addition to dealing with subjective truth and unreliable narrators, considers the question of whether we should have faith in humanity. Are we simply creatures of greed and lust, and are we incapable to telling the truth, except if it furthers our own ends? The film ends with an abandoned baby--will anyone look for it?

The film is set in medieval times, when a woman who is raped is blamed, and is considered spoiled goods. Kyo, in each of the stories, is a woman who is trapped by convention, and her life becomes worthless. On the other hand, Mifune, as a legendary brigand, plays the part like Puck, an elemental man who is the embodiment of freedom, until of course he is captured.

Many people have heard the word Rashomon without ever seeing the film. You may have heard it yourself, when two or more people disagree about events that took place. This is rather remarkable for a film from Japan.

The film is also notable for the photography by Kazuo Miyagawa. A technique of using mirrors to reflect light makes the scenes in the forest, with dappled light on the actors' faces, memorable.

Rashomon is mentioned on many lists of the best films ever made. It made the top ten of two of Sight & Sound's decennial polls, in 1992 and 2002, and placed 290th in Empire's top 500 films of all time. It is surely a film that must be seen by anyone who takes cinema seriously.