Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1950 Rashomon is famous for its revolutionary storytelling technique. Four different people, mostly without any names or backstories, recount a murder four times. Each one’s account differs significantly, from the identity of the killer to the personality and sympathy of each participant. In the end, it is not clear exactly what is true—even the seemingly accurate and impartial account of the woodcutter is hiding his thievery. The film’s format seems to examine the power of the observer and the reliability of what can be seen.
The first testimonies are all told in a court setting, as the law attempts to find who is guilty of the murder. However, the judge or jury are never seen or heard, even when they ask a question to one of the onscreen characters. Instead, the testifiers speak directly to the audience, with the camera in the position of a court official. It is the viewer of the film who is given the role of authority and power, who is spoken to directly and asked to make a judgment. However, even those scenes where the audience is king are colored by the interpretations of characters. In the court scenes, the other characters can be seen in the background observing from behind, and the audience only gets to experience those scenes from the priest and the woodcutter recounting them to the commoner. As such, the viewer is constantly given third hand accounts of the murder, from known liars, but they are presented just the same as the true events taking place at the temple. The viewer as observer is given the tools to look at each account and make their own conclusions and point out contradictions, as the characters themselves do. However, they are not true observers given a window to the truth, just forced to look through people’s lies.
The power of observation and sight are present in the accounts themselves. In his own account, the bandit Tajômaru notes that he would not have hurt the samurai or his wife had he not been able to spy her hidden face when the wind blew her veil, but the first glance was enough to fill him with resolve. In the wife’s story, she notes that it was the unforgiving gaze of her husband that made her kill him—she would have accepted violence or death, but having him merely look at her and see her shame was enough to drive her to kill. The woodcutter spied it all from afar, and was the only one to know the whole truth. He was able to use his position of observer to profit, by stealing and selling the wife’s valuable dagger. He would have gotten away freely had he not decided to create his own observer, the commoner, who noticed the contradiction in the tale and called him out on it.
The viewer is not given a chance to see the murder for themselves—the closest account they get is a first-hand one from the woodcutter, but they go as far as the priest recounting the medium recounting the samurai’s story. Instead, they must make do with the fallible stories of the characters, who all have means and motives to lie. In the same way that we view only what a director shows us, we only get to listen to what the true witnesses choose to tell. The viewer has the power to interpret the stories and find contradictions, but unlike the commoner cannot call the character out on their lies. We cannot see the murder directly, but may observe the film itself and use that for our own judgments. Even then, as we are not true witnesses we cannot change a thing or ever be sure.
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