Rashomon (羅生門 Rashōmon) is a 1950 Japanese crime mystery film directed by Akira Kurosawa, working in close collaboration with cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa. It stars Toshirō Mifune, Masayuki Mori, Machiko Kyō and Takashi Shimura. The film is based on two stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa — ("Rashomon" provides the setting, while "In a Grove" provides the characters and plot).

Rashomon can be said to have introduced Kurosawa and Japanese cinema to Western audiences, albeit to a small and discerning number of theatres, and is considered one of his masterpieces. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and also received an Academy Honorary Award at the 24th Academy Awards.

...it's not really a bad film. Just not a great one.

Rashomon (1950)

Usually what you see in a film, what images compose the whole picture, you accept those as true. Whatever the events depicted, you accept them as real because they are happening right in front of you. But that rule need not apply to Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. In this exciting movie he presents us with five different versions of the same truth. The truth? A man has been killed. Now the question is why. If you notice the way this film was staged, added to the acting style and the dominant style of the film is a challenging one that wants you desperately to figure out your own sense of reality. That was Kurosawa's intention from the beginning, and he made it clear to his cast & crew. During shooting, the cast approached Kurosawa en masse with the script and asked him, "What does it mean?" The answer Kurosawa gave at that time and also in his biography is that "Rashomon" is a reflection of life, and life does not always have clear meanings. The questioning scenes are so perfectly staged that, by never showing you who's making the questions, and not letting you hear this "person", by just placing the camera in front of the person being questioned, the director was making the viewer his very own interrogator. We as viewers are being challenged to act as interrogators. As such, we end up having a role in the film, so to speak.

Kurosawa succeeds in making us engage. You must reach your own decision of what "really" happened. Rashomon succeeds also at stretching the possibilities of what film can do as an art form. It penetrates your mind and forces you to reach, based on your own life experience as you unravel the maze of different accounts regarding the man's murder, witness accounts, and come to a decision of your own. According to director Robert Altman, no two people will react the same way to the different versions of the story being told within the story and so the final conclusion in the movie is your responsibility. The only fact that these stories share is the man's death. It really has to be seen for my words to be understood and made sense of. The constant rain that keeps the three men we meet anchored in under the refuge of the ruined Rashomon gates of the ancient Japanese capital, acts as a wall or curtain. The rain sets the audience apart from the action. This is another cinematic convention used by the director to let the viewer feel a disconnect between the action taking place and to better process the information coming in. The rain also acts as the agent which triggers the encounter of our three characters, who, through conversation and recollection, tell us the whole story. The rain was so important to Kurosawa that, having used all the water power to simulate it, and still not happy with how it looked on camera, against a white sky, he was forced to add black ink to the water to make it noticeable. Kurosawa and his cinematographer, Kazuo Miyagawa, had to create visuals to tell the story, because the screenplay was so light on dialogue.

Our three characters are as follows: a woodcutter who finds the body in the forest, a priest who talks about the horrors of human reality at the time the movie takes place: war, earthquakes, the plague, bandits, etc. I would make a parallel between the horrors seen by the priest and the horrors of Japan at the time this movie was made, only five years after World War II. Japan has been recently ruined by Allied forces. Could the priest be speaking about those horrors? The third character is a commoner who shows up and brings common sense into reason. Each account told by them, even those "narrated" by other people like the woman or the medium, are seen through their eyes and presented in flashback. Trough them, we meet Tajomaru, a famous bandit who seems proud and half mad most of the time. He confesses to having killed the man. The story only goes on from there...

In short, Rashomon is a story about the relativity of reality. The monk says something that has always struck me as being rooted at the very core of the story, he says: "This time I may finally lose faith in the human soul." That line encapsulates the art and meaning of the movie for me. For us humans to exist and survive as a society, we must have a set reality to believe in. That way nothing is real, and anything we want it to be can be real. We create our own version of reality, so we can survive. It's like choosing what we want to see in order to fit our needs, to take a line from the some of the film's dialogue: Rashomon is a film that questions what we take for granted. Both visuals and dialogue are treated with equal care. What we see, as well as what we hear, helps us take on the film director's challenge to decide our own reality after seeing the movie. The shots were carefully designed in a unique way; the cinematography achieved is what gives the movie its importance in the medium.

Shades of reality are presented to us in such beautiful and intriguing ways that it can cloud the mind to try and make a decision about what really happened. And decide you must, otherwise you just wasted your time letting pretty images roll in front of you.

This could have been a good movie, but it was way too undecided in it's approach. I think the director should have focused on telling the story one time properly, instead of wasting our time telling it several times...

Super .

The ideas and concepts behind this film are far better and more interesting than the execution and actual film itself.