Even if you have never heard of Rashomon, you are still likely familiar with the plot of this 1950 Japanese film directed by the master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Television shows as diverse as All in the Family, The X-Files and King of the Hill have all produced episodes that pay homage to the legacy of Rashomon. In fact, The Dick Van Dyke Show structured roughly one-third of its episodes as a series of subjective flashbacks within a frame narrative—a dramatic structure that exploits what is now known as the "Rashomon effect." "The "Rashomon effect" occurs whenever two or more witnesses give competing interpretations of the same event, preventing listeners from determining the objective truth.
Perspective—Kurosawa's, the audience's, the storytellers'—is one of Rashomon's key concerns. The divergence between various characters' perspectives dictates the film's unusual plot structure, which unfolds several different versions of the central tale, one by one. Kurosawa worked with longtime collaborator Shinobu Hashimoto in drafting a final screenplay based on the adaptation of two short stories by Ryu Akutagawa. The film's frame narrative draws from Akutagawa's 1915 short story "Rashomon," set in a twelfth-century city-gate that sits at the southern end of Suzaku Avenue in Kyoto. The narratives told by the film's characters are drawn from Akutagawa's 1922 short story "In a Grove," which provides several accounts of an encounter in a forest between a thief, a woman, and a samurai.
Film historians often credit Rashomon with popularizing Japanese filmmaking worldwide; critic Andre Bazin has remarked that Rashomon "can truly be said to have opened the gates of the West to the Japanese cinema." Produced during the American occupation of Japan, and according to code imposed by the Office of Civil Censorship Detachment, Kurosawa's film makes only one, vague reference to "warfare" in the priest's first speech. Nevertheless, the allusions to pervasive death and ravaged wasteland outside of the city-gate walls surely conjured images of bombing and nuclear destruction among the postwar film-going public. The central moral debate of the film—between the priest's faith and the commoner's nihilism—also encapsulates the kind of grave spiritual crisis that many in Japan and across the globe were experiencing after an extended armed conflict that claimed millions of lives.
Rashomon's style draws heavily from Japanese Noh theater and Kurosawa's painterly eye as a film director. The wife's tale and the dead man's tale in particular unfold in dreamlike, gestural movements, departing from the realism of Tajomaru's account. The most famous image of the film is probably Kurosawa's innovative, face-up shot of the sun shining through the trees—an indelible symbol of the film's testing of the limits of the senses and the mind. Also notable is Kurosawa's use of the "wipe"—a right-to-left scene transition that makes the changing of the scene resemble the turning of a book's pages. In 1977, George Lucas would later popularize the use of the "wipe" as a scene transition with the Star Wars franchise.
Without Akira Kurosawa's knowledge, an Italian producer named Giuliana Stramigioli recommended the film to be included in the Venice Film Festival, although the Japanese government feared that the film was not representative enough of Japanese cinema or culture. The film ended up winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1950, and an Honorary Academy Award for Best Foreign Language the following year. In the years since, Rashomon has not only inspired a legion of imitators, but has routinely been ranked by critics among the ten or twenty greatest films ever made.
