Rashomon (1950)

There are a few different positions I’ve seen people take on this film.  A common one is that it’s a picture of corrupt self-interest.  That’s if everyone is lying.  Another is that it shows that access to the truth is either inherently subjective, or that what anyone believes will be affected by what they want to believe.  That’s if everyone believes their own story.  

Any viewer will explain it however they want to explain it, whether to say they lied out of self-interest, that they have distorted perspectives, or that truth itself doesn't exist.  Errol Morris complained about people assuming that there is no truth in the film, and about people comparing Rashomon to his documentary The Thin Blue Line.  This is quite understandable: The Thin Blue Line is about real people that experienced real suffering, one of whom was almost killed by the state.  The idea that there was no real truth in that case is simply offensive.  

If they're lying, why?  And why should we see them in the detail the film offers us?  The enactment of their stories on the screen always involves something more than what they can get across in words.

All the stories except the woodcutter's are delivered in court.  The woodcutter tells his story in the run-down Rashomon temple where he hides from the rain with his two interlocutors.  In the court, on the other hand, there is no interlocutor.  They sit in a mostly empty yard in front of a featureless wall.  We don't see the judge, we just look at the characters head-on as they tell their stories.

But in the woods, the camera spins and roves.  Sunlight comes only partially through the leaves.  The veil worn by the samurai's wife flows gently as her horse passes by, briefly giving her an ethereal appearance.  The parts of the film that show us the woods directly evoke the emotional turmoil of the narrators in a way that simply isn't salient at the court. 

The viewer need not not go from the fact of lies or confusion to some conclusion about human nature.  The reason why the stories are inconsistent can remain unresolved.  If you acknowledge this, something else becomes clear: whatever the answer is, it hasn't made it to the court.  It was lost in transmission, along with a great deal of other information.  It's another failure of governance to go with the collapsing buildings and rampant poverty depicted in the film.  In Rashomon, it doesn't matter why the truth is not available.  It matters what you do next.