Rashomon

How does the form of the film fit the function?

Akira Kurosawa’s classic film, Rashomon, opens with the subtitled line, “I just don’t understand.” Spoken by one of the men to whom the audience, as observers, can feel the closest, this first line (spoken by the woodcutter) foreshadows the truly confusing nature of this movie. Focusing on the main story of a bandit who defiles (be it rape or otherwise) a passing woman, and the subsequent death of her husband, Kurosawa opts to show us these fairly simple events four times over, each time through the eyes of a different player in the drama. The film relies primarily upon the use of flashbacks to tell the story, placing the audience’s perspective completely under the control of each of the characters, and allowing us no sense of omniscience. By doing this, Kurosawa places the audience in an instinctively suspicious position, a position that becomes increasingly more guarded as the film progresses.

As we move through the different perspectives, it becomes obvious that there are distinct differences in each of the character’s accounts. Any viewer who goes in with a mind to piece the stories together to form one true explanation, however, will find failure in the glaring contrasts. Each of the three characters involved in the event claims responsibility for the death of the dead man. The bandit’s story concludes with the two men clashing swords twenty-three times, both fighting valiantly until the bandit ends the other man’s life. The woman’s account has her fainting while holding a dagger, and waking up to find her husband dead, with the same dagger buried in his chest. The dead man’s account (as told through a medium) would have us believe that he plunges the dagger in his own chest, then dying as he feels it pulled out by another. The final account, as told to us by a supposedly impartial observer, shows the man and the bandit nervously fighting while goaded on by the woman, both shaking at the thought of killing each other (a stark contrast from the original account).

As the film progress, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish which of these differences are simple discrepancies, and which are flat-out fabrications. Kurosawa does an excellent job of keeping the audience distrustful of the characters, giving us a reason to disbelieve each one. Through the use of motifs such as cackling and slapping at seemingly imaginary bugs, he subtly gives the audience an impression of insanity from the bandit. The man’s story is told through a medium, allowing the opportunity for even