RASHOMON at the GFT

This classic landmark pioneering film has been copied in one manner or another for almost six decades since it came out in 1950.

The story device has been around for a long time in the world of books , one dating being from a Florentine work at the very end of the 17th century.Kurosawa brought this poetic way of telling the story of a single incident from the view and perceptions of a multitude of characters to the visual power of the cinematic setting so beautifully that it has been imitated many times but never surpassed in terms of depth and the power of getting the viewer to ask penetrating , searching questions about how true and rooted their perspective in internal and external realities.

Robert Altman explains with clarity and conciseness the value of the film to our understanding of the medium as an art and philosophical discussion in parallel in which the seemingly detatched observer becomes the central character who is given the responsibility of finding coherent answers.



There is a very cogent observation in this review from the Guardian  from a PhilipD worth quoting.

"This is a great summation. What so many people miss about Rashomon is how the characters are not trying to avoid responsibility - they are in fact trying to claim responsibility for the death of the Samurai (while avoiding responsibility for the rape). Kurosawa's insight that guilt makes people distort memory in a way more simply that straightforward denial has great psychological insight - this must be one reason why post war European audiences immediately grasped its important (unlike American critics, who thought it was a mystery to be solved)."

Philosophically the film touches upon the modern and post-modernist materialist driven concept that there is no such thing as Truth , only opinions.The problem with this understanding , which has a very darwinian-capitalist underpinning which would make reputed Left thinkers shudder if they thought about it deeply enough , is that it then leads to its corollary sister-philosophy of "art of persuasion" which entails assuming there is no truth but the presentation of the argument is the key , therefore making modern sophism the truest "art".This kind of reasoning can lead to us having the leaders of the calibre  of Tony Blair being in charge over us expousing what is ultimately a neo-liberal reality imposed by the ones with the private access to the means of production of a media "truth".

The important avenue of the time and thought in Japan in which Kurosawa made this film is examined in detail in this video by Alan Macfarlane.