Kurosawa Daringly Questions the Integrity of Humanity in his Groundbreaking Film Rashomon

Some films are so great in stature that they have a tremendously lasting influence on filmmaking throughout the world. Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Rashomon is one such film. When the film was first featured at Venice Film Festival in 1951, it took the world by storm. It won the Golden Lion Award, the highest available award at the festival. The film opened the gates of world recognition for the Japanese cinema and set a young Kurosawa on the path of greatness. Since then, a lot of attempts have been made to match the level of greatness of Rashomon but none has been able to achieve even half of the eminence as Rashomon.

Rashomon explores the animalistic tendencies of human beings and sheds light on their lack of integrity and honesty. The film begins with a heavy downpour and we are introduced to a perplexed woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) and a priest (Minoru Chiaki). They have witnessed something so horrible and strange that they are at a complete loss of words. A murder and a sexual assault have taken place and although the authorities have recorded four testimonies, they are far away from knowing the truth. As a commoner approaches them, he finds the story ‘entertaining’ and is intrigued as the woodcutter explains all the testimonies one by one. Kurosawa takes his time for setting a base for the story. His camera follows the woodcutter in the forest slowly and picks up pace as he leads the woodcutter (and the audience) into a world full of treachery. Kurosawa’s love for nature is clearly manifested in this film as he uses different elements of nature quite frequently in his imagery. He shoots directly into the sun blinding the camera and foreshadowing how we all will be blinded by a heavy mesh of lies. He beautifully captures the beauty of the forest, the dense thickets, the forest floor, and the wind swiftly moving the foliage. He uses wide shots to disconnect the viewers from ongoing action and uses close-ups to focus the attention of the audience towards the faces of the characters, making it even more difficult to differentiate what is true and what is false.

Kurosawa handles the subjective truth very cleverly as he introduces each testimony in the form of a flashback. We can’t help but believe what we are seeing is the truth until another equally believable testimony blinds the viewers even more. Tajomaru (Toshiro Mifune), a fierce bandit glorifies himself and his manhood as he expresses his pride of killing the Samurai and assaulting his wife (Machiko Kyo). In the wife’s version of the story, she cries uncontrollably as she expresses her husband’s hate and disgust towards her claiming herself as innocent in the eyes of the viewers. We also witness the testimony of the dead samurai who communicates through a medium to convey how his wife’s betrayal propelled him to take his own life. The most believable version of the killing is given by the woodcutter who reveals the cowardice of both Tajomaru and the Samurai who went to lengths to embellish themselves in their own versions of the story. Each and every character lies, even to themselves as they try to conceal their weaknesses, guilt, cowardice, and selfishness by weaving a mesh of fabricated truths. Till the end, we never clearly understand the reality of what had happened. Throughout the film, we feel no hope for humanity just like the priest. The film has undertones of noir: a bleak plot, an attractive femme fatale, morally ambiguous characters, and a relentless search for truth. But the film shows signs of slight hope when the woodcutter selflessly adopts a stranded baby and restores the priest’s faith in humanity. Here, the baby is an allegory for hope in an otherwise bleak film.

When I first watched Rashomon, I was quite surprised by the pronounced gestures and body language of the characters. But here, Kurosawa is not really looking for realism. He was a fan of the traditional Japanese Noh theatre, an art form that has found a place in many of his works, especially in Throne of Blood. In Rashomon, he wanted Tajomaru to act like a predator, pouncing upon his prey. This heightened acting style and exaggerated expressions have become a stylistic trademark of Kurosawa’s films.

The way Kurosawa has maneuvered the nonlinear narrative approach was quite groundbreaking at the time it was first released. The film has spawned a variety of other films that have used unreliable narrators and contradictory viewpoints, more commonly known as the Rashomon effect. Some of the films that use this narrative device include Hero (2002), Gone Girl (2014), The Usual Suspects (1995), and Badla (2019) amongst numerous others. Today, nearly 70 years after it was made, it is still fascinating and powerful to its very core. It handles moral dilemmas and deceitful human tendencies in an extremely innovative manner. For years to come, Rashomon will be remembered as a film that has inspired numerous films and filmmakers, yet none of them could actually match the stature it has achieved over the years.

Written by:

Muskan Sharma

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