Movie #22: Released in 1950, directed by Akira Kurosawa, 88 minutes. Seen it before.

LetterBoxd Score: 5 stars

Whatever is the top shelf for human cultural achievement, this feels like it belongs on it. Kurosawa basically invents a new parable here, one whose power comes uniquely from its medium. As Robert Altman puts it, in a commentary, with film we all see the exact same thing, which imbues film with a sense of objectivity (in the sense of what is seen is observer independent) that you don’t have in other narrative mediums. To render this most objective medium so subjective, we get a more visceral sense of how truth can be unknowable and unresolvable observer independent. That’s probably the reason this movie kicked off the phrase “Rashomon effect” even though the idea of different people perceiving events differently is probably as old as people.

Of course, it wouldn’t work if it wasn’t also well executed. The various performances are great (Mifune is great as usual, and the medium was way weirder and more unsettling than I expected in a movie like this, the first time I saw it). The settings have a lot of atmosphere, especially the rain drenched Rashomon gate.

I’ve seen this one at least twice before, but it had been long enough that I didn’t remember how it would go. At first I was surprised to discover the movie ends with the “objective” woodcutter’s story: he’s not part of the trio of people whose actions and motives are the subject of the trial and he’s the only one to directly tell his story (the others seem to be relayed to us via the woodcutter, priest, or medium), so his story seems likely to be the “true” one. I thought I had misremembered the movie, and that it was mostly about how different people perceive and represent themselves, not the unknowability of truth.

But as the movie went on, my interpretation of the woodcutters story as the truth was eroded away. The characters are at their most cartoonish here – a bunch of scaredy cats, likely a projection of the cowardly woodcutter. As one of the other listeners points out, we have already established he is untrustworthy, since earlier in the film he tells a contradictory version of the events. And unlike the other stories, we never see him in this story, observing from the side.

I give it five out of five, and will probably watch again. If I have a critique it’s that I don’t feel emotionally invested in the story. It’s an intellectual puzzle, but an important one.

Why would someone think it’s one of the ten greatest films ever made?

There’s so much here. I asked GPT-4 to give me critical analyses of the film using semiotics, Marxist theory, formalist theory, reception theory, psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and auteur theory. I don’t much care for some of these approaches, but the fact that you can find so much in this film to talk about, from so many angles, is a reason it’s one of the greats.

Next: Singin’ in the Rain