(1950, directed by Akira Kurosawa)

- inducted 2017 –

“In Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), three characters--a brigand (Toshiro Mifune), a samurai (Masayuki Mori), and the samurai's wife (Machiko Kyo)--are compelled, through the human impulse to turn actual events into stories, in the name of arriving at the truth and meting out justice, to re-enact, over and over, the tragic results of their brief meeting. Due to another human impulse, the need to be seen as the person one might prefer to be, the details of their story keeps shifting. The brigand raped the wife, or maybe he seduced her; he then killed her husband, maybe at her urging, maybe not, in a battle that may have been a noble clash between two skilled fighters or may have just been pathetic. Even the account of an eyewitness (Takashi Shimura) who at first seems to be a purely impartial observer is exposed as something other than the pure truth. If Jean Renoir believed that the terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons, Kurosawa believes that there is no such thing as objective truth, at least not if we depend on stories, because everyone has his own agenda.

“In the West, Rashomon made made its director's name synonymous with Japanese cinema, and it gave a name, the ‘Rashomon effect,’ to its central insight into human behavior and the nature of truth. But though its technique has been imitated countless times (including the misbegotten Hollywood remake The Outrage), most of he attempts to use it as a mode don't linger in the mind the way it does. That's partly because the sheer power of Kurosawa's film cannot be equaled by lesser directors, but it's also because most of his imitators, misinterpreting his work or simply being less bold than the master, don't go as far with it as he does. (Kurosawa didn't invent the concept, but he did more with it than most.)

“Most modern works in which unreliable narrators reveal their motives and deceptive self-images by constructing competing narratives around the same event end up playing the discrepancies for laughs, or, worse, use it as a set-up before triumphantly revealing what ‘really’ happened. Rashomon leaves you uncertain about everything that happened, ending on a note of cautious encouragement to get on with life by living it in the moment, doing what's needed and not worrying about closure and the ‘real,’ final truth. Now that the film is canonical, many people may overlook the fact that using a visual meeting that capitalizes on people's inclination to believe whatever their eyes are telling them to convey this message is highly subversive.”

~ Phillip Dyess-Nugent