Film Day: Rashomon

Monday September 10, 2012

So today we spent the class time watching "Rashomon," a film from 1950.  The film is in black and white and all in Japanese, but thankfully there are subtitles.  At first, I was completely lost as to what was going on in the movie and how this movie pertained to my senior seminar paper, but I soon discovered the film's significance.

The film tells the story of a murder of a man, but all witnesses have a different story as to what actually happened at the time of the murder.  The story starts with a darkened sky and two men are huddled in a ruined gate and are soon joined by another man.  They woodcutter keeps saying, "I don't understand" which is a reference to what happened to Japan in World War II and the many problems that the country was facing.  The men start talking about a court case that was going on at the time.  A man was found dead in the forest by a woodcutter and the authorities were trying to find the killer by conducting trials of the people that were at the scene.  The woodcutter begins to tell the others of the story he saw at the court.  He remembered listening to a bandit tell his story, then the man's wife, then the man through a medium (speaking from the grave), then the woodcutter told his own story to the murder at the courthouse.

According to the bandit, he was sleeping in the woods and saw the samurai walking past with his wife on a horse.  The wife was so beautiful he thought she was a goddess and wanted to make her his.  He followed the couple and tricked the samurai to get him into the forest, where the bandit tied him up.  Then the bandit raped the samurai's wife in front of him.  The bandit also said that the wife "fell in love" with him then asked him to kill her husband/duel with him because she was disgraced.

Then the wife tells her story.  She tells of the rape, but after the bandit ran away.  She ran over to her husband and was weeping.  She begged forgiveness, but the man only stared at her.  She started crying because he wouldn't stop looking at her in this weird way.  The wife cut his ropes but he just stayed where he was.  The wife fainted because she couldn't handle what happened to her.  When she woke up her husband was dead, so she tried to kill herself (by throwing herself in the pond), but she couldn't handle it.

Then at the court, the wife is used as a medium so her husband could recall his tale.  The men talking at the ruins had a debate that a dead man could not tell a lie, but the samurai's story was different than the others, so no one knows if he was telling the truth or not.  Again, the same rape was portrayed as before, but the bandit wanted the wife to leave her husband and marry him instead.  The bandit said that she could either marry him or dye.  The wife said that she would go with the bandit, but then the bandit was mad because the woman so easily cast aside her husband, so he asked the samurai if he wanted his wife to live or dye.  The samurai said that when he was asked this, he actually forgave the bandit for raping his wife!!!!!!  Later, the woman ran away from both men, the bandit left, and the samurai killed himself with his wife's dagger that she left on the forest floor.

The last account was the woodcutter.  He said that he had been walking through the woods and heard the woman scream, then stayed behind a bush and watched the entire thing.  This was different from his earlier story where he said he was walking in the woods and just found the body.  The woodcutter explained that every explanation was a lie because he saw the real thing, but lied during the court case because he didn't want to get involved in a murder.  The woodcutter said that the bandit asked the samurai's wife to marry him.  The husband was left go and both the husband and bandit fought til the death (bandit killed the samurai), while the wife just watched.  The wife had actually fooled them both into fighting each other for her own sick, twisted pleasure (her life must have been quite boring).  The fight was actually quite lame because it seemed like neither man wanted to die, nor kill the other, so they just swung their swords around and were jumping around (it actually looked like a VERY poorly choreographed fight).  In the end, the wife ran away, the bandit went after her, and the samurai was left dead on the ground.

It was actually interesting to watch this movie once I got the "jist" of it.  Everyone told a different story of the same event; everyone had their own perspective.  Many of the things that were told differently were told so that the teller would look better.  All stories were mutually contradictory and this gives into the idea of multiple realities.  Each story was told of the same account, but all were different!

After the movie we had a discussion of not only the movie itself, we talked about the time period in which the movie was created.  The movie came out in 1950, after World War II ended, the Japanese economy and government was having problems, and the US dropped an atomic bomb on the country.  The director wanted to portray the idea of multiple realities in this movie and how it relates to everything we do, especially history.  In the beginning, the man kept saying, "I don't understand" because many Japanese did not know what happened to their country during and after the war.  At the end of the movie the three men in the ruins find a baby, which is supposed to show a new beginning and hope for a brighter future for Japan.  This whole movie is an allegory for Japan:  things went wrong, people died, there are different perspectives/interpretations of it, but in the end there is a new beginning on the horizon.

This movie created a movement throughout the world, showing that there is no one "true" story of an event.  I can see why this movie is important to keep in mind when doing research on my paper because there will always be many different interpretations, but a good historian will take all of them and come to a solid conclusion.  No matter what a person writes, someone will always disagree with it and offer their own insight, so it is important to keep in mind that history is always changing based on how you look at it.