Rashomon (1950): Cinema's Finest

Akira Kurosawa tells the story of a murderer samurai from four different perspectives, each one making the crime more complex. Kurosawa has written a screenplay that tells the story through the mouths of countless characters creating this timeless effect of folkloric stories. The crime becomes less about the truth and more about the meaning of it, like an old fable in which to learn a lesson. This is enforced further by the characters being nameless, instead carrying titles: priest, wood cutter, husband, and bandit just as examples.

The film is intelligently vague with its meaning, it is both comprehensive and a fluid with its meaning, for every viewer to build their own opinion. I saw this fable as a message about forgiveness and sticking to morals regardless of how you’re wronged as each perspective of the murder has some moment of a character turning on their beliefs. If all the characters told the truth the crime would be solved.

Now you could argue this to be a flaw, that the characters motivations don’t make much sense if they’re trying to not be arrested for murder. They wouldn’t admit to a crime, and maybe it would be fixed by having the different characters accuse others of the crimes instead of confessing. While this is true, it removes the element of mystery that makes the story so compelling. We don’t know why they confess, and we must ask why? I will put my theory at the bottom.

Each setting has its own aesthetic, from the glade the crime takes place with is dreamy natural light that rippling through the trees around the set, appearing like water, reflecting how the story is constantly unsure of itself. The barren prison yard, where we never see or hear the wardens, as though our characters are confessing to a greater being. And final to the ruins of the grand gate Rashomon, with the torrential rain and aesthetic of war, destruction, and loss.

It is littered with evocative images and cinematography from Kurosawa’s frequent collaborator Kazuo Miyagawa, immaculately beautiful, images of horror and hope. Every performance is masterful, but what’s more impressive, is how that performances change through the different levels of the character’s recollection. The more stories within the stories, the most theatrical and dramatic it becomes, emphasising that idea of unknown truth truth hyerbole and lies.

Akira Kurosawa is a master of not just cinema, but storytelling, still capturing the hearts of minds of people across world to this day, his genius is immortalised by his timeless movies.

My Own Theory: SPOILERS I believe the bandit and the wife planned the escape to exact some sort of vengeance against the husband, and told conflicting narratives as well as bribing the medium to tell a different story in order to get away with the crime. The woodcutters story is most likely his own belief which he tells as a truth. This is enforced when he admits he doesn’t know what really happened.