Exploring ‘The Rashomon Effect’ through Akira Kurosawa
Cinema is such a prominent force in the world of art that it often extends into the world of law, philosophy and social theory. When The Matrix was released back in 1999, it made us question the nature of reality and turned audiences onto theorists of metaphysics. Another perfect example of this is the epistemological reasoning present in Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon.
Rashomon is a psychological crime drama starring Kurosawa’s frequent collaborators, Toshiro Mifune, Masayuki Mori and Takashi Shimura. The film was based on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short stories ‘In a Grove’ and ‘Rashomon’. The story focuses on the murder of a samurai and the rape of his wife just outside of Kyoto in the 11th Century.
The distinctive feature of the film is the unconventional angle with which it approaches its storytelling. The film opens with a woodcutter and a priest discussing the rape and murder with confusion, as they have heard conflicting reports from several individuals on the events. In fact, three separate people appear to have claimed that they themselves committed the murder.
Seeing as both the woodcutter and the priest claim to have seen the samurai – either dead on the ground after his murder or in the days leading up to it – they are summoned to testify in court. A bandit suspect is also brought before the court to testify, as is the samurai’s wife. The account of the samurai himself is told through a medium.
The bandit claims to have killed the samurai in a competitive and fiercely fought duel, having raped his wife. However, the wife claims that the bandit did indeed assault her, but afterwards, her husband looked at her with such distaste that she begged him to kill her. The husband had been tied up by the bandit, and his terrible glare had then made his wife faint. When she woke up, she found the dagger she had been holding lodged in her dead husband’s chest.
The samurai, through the medium, claims that after the bandit had raped his wife, he had offered her the chance to travel with him. The wife accepted because of the shame of ‘belonging’ to two men, which led the samurai to kill himself with his wife’s dagger.
However, after the trial, the woodcutter states that all three stories are false. He turned down the opportunity to testify, not wanting to get involved, but he had actually witnessed the events. He claims that the samurai did not wish to defend his wife’s honour, so he chose to decline the duel. The wife then said that both he and the bandit were not real men, reluctantly rousing the men into battle. When the fight began, all three of them were scared – very different from the prior recollections – and the bandit won through a stroke of luck while the wife escaped.
The film had a profound effect on cinema, literature, law, psychology and sociology, spawning the term ‘The Rashomon Effect’, which can be described as a situation in which an occurrence is told from several contradictory perspectives and helps to explain the unreliable nature of multiple narrators.
Bret Easton Ellis would employ the Rashomon effect to wonderous use in his 1987 novel, The Rules of Attraction, in which several narrators at an elite liberal arts college in New Hampshire relay shocking events with contradiction. The anthropologist Karl G. Heider would also use the notion to demonstrate the subjectivity of perception present in recollection in one of his studies on ethnography in 1988.
Furthermore, the effect would be referred to in an Austrailian court case. Justice Peter Applegarth wrote – concerning the case between The Australian Institute for Progress and The Electoral Commission of Queensland – “The Rashomon effect describes how parties describe an event in a different and contradictory manner, which reflects their subjective interpretation and self-interested advocacy, rather than objective truth. The Rashomon effect is evident when the event is the outcome of litigation. One should not be surprised when both parties claim to have won the case.”
These instances go to show the tremendous power that cinema has in the world of social theory. With Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa transcended the screen, and its themes bled into the human realms of real life. In this sense, Kurosawa himself became a philosopher, further stating his case as one of the best filmmakers of all time.
