Rashomon And Its Effect On The World Of Cinema

Rashomon and its effect on the world of cinema

Undoubtedly a great classic film in the world of cinema, we return to the 50s with Rashomon by Japanese director Akiro Kurosawa (who won the Golden Lion and the Critics Award in Venice and the Oscar for the best foreign film). This is due to the aforementioned immeasurability, subjectivity and undecidability between the four versions that occur in the same criminal acts, whose exact and concrete truth is impossible to determine unique, undoubted and apodictically.

Both being previous in its conception and the brilliance of the film and the most massive impact that the cinema allows today above literature, Rashomon deserved the honor of naming that "effect". Although the British writer Lawrence Durrell could also have also deserved it, who wrote between 1957 and 1960 a cycle of novels called El Quarteto de Alejandría. Interestingly there are also four different versions of the same facts and each of the four novels is titled the name of one of the characters involved, the one that gives its version – particular and immeasurable with that of the others – of the events carried out together.

But as mentioned before, the honor won the film directed by Akira Kurosawa and Shinobu Hashimoto, from two stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1827) titled "Rashomon" and "In the forest". With her in addition, Kurosawa became internationally and popularized for the first time outside her country to the then very powerful and creative Japanese cinema.

Let’s analyze how the famous immeasurable stories effect is presented and formula in the movie in the movie.

After its complexity of three scenarios, four characters, four versions of the same facts and four parts to distinguish in its development, Kurosawa’s film is all structured by a significant duality. He has made it deeply and beautiful in the preface to his philosophy of law although, much earlier, he had already defined the two great routes that give meaning to his phenomenology of the spirit. In a part of the duality, we find the pressing personal, vital, subjective and even violent experiences of some events (in Rashomon: the crime and rape committed in the forest). Interspersed as successive statements before justice, these facts are narrated in the first person and from their point of view by the three involved (bandit, lady and samurai) and by an hidden observer. As those stories are totally incompatible and immeasurable with each other, they disorient and threaten the possibility of truth as such.

The real facts have to be unique and the same, but the stories are incompatible and seem to be unable to emerge a unique and unquestionable truth. This is the question of the second part of the duality that marks the disputes of three more characters in the Puerta Temple and under the thick rain. Here is another type of conflict (now philosophical and in appearance exclusively theoretical) that will be the object of rigorous reflective scrutiny, but also of distressing debate.

Let’s analyze the causes of the "rashomon effect" and how this affects the confrontated testimonies. Hegel argues that there is a type of testimony that, totally marked by his personal point of view, is unable to transcend his immediate and vital role, and therefore cannot reach the objective perspective. It is incapable, then, to overcome its "I" and its particular determination – although it has social origin – that isolates it at all;unable to adopt the perspective of "us". This- Hegel says- is not only collective, but, especially, includes the epistemic perspective from the whole, from the totality that becomes dialectically, and therefore has the absoluteness that must characterize the truth.

The "rashomon effect" can only be ignored to the extent that, without invalidating the personal vital perspectives of the agents involved (because let’s not forget that this is the only possible starting point), a global perspective is achieved that, integrates and justify thosevital perspectives, while offering another one of greater guarantee and legitimacy. We are undoubtedly facing an old and constant philosophical aspiration, at least since Pythagoras argued that, those who go to the Olympics to contemplate them theoretically, acquire from them a knowledge superior to those who go to them moved by a more immediate and personal interest, either to compete and gain fame, either to negotiate or take advantage of them to sell. For Pythagoras, the distanced theoretical contemplation was the authentic philosophical attitude and the only guarantee of accessing the complete and rigorous truth of the Olympic fact, while all the others are prisoners of the very specific option and interest of the participants. These will undoubtedly have their personal and unquestionable experience, which must be taken into account, but only the distanced philosophical contemplator (Pythagoras, Hegel and Kurosawa coincide) can access a true or maximally accurate knowledge of the complete reality that happened.

As soon as the world’s thought, it only appears in the time after reality has completed its training process and has been completed. What the concept teaches, the story shows with the same need: only in the maturity of reality the ideal appears in front of the real, and erects that same world, apprehended in its substance, in the form of an intellectual kingdom.

In conclusion, it seems that Kurosawa or his co -course had news of this text and the idea of Hegel, because certainly the film Rashomon is structured in a strict duality, both of content and visual presentation, which strictly remembers what we have just mentioned inHegel.

But despite the radical contrast between the two great scenarios and what is manifested in them, Kurosawa wants to remind us that they ultimately refer to the same human problem. Well, as Hegel also said, what is lived (and everything lived is true for the one who lives it, with which the "rashomon effect" is inevitable here), will then be reflected, analyzed, discussed and ruled in its truthor intersubjective falsehood, seeking to overcome the "rashomon effect".

Therefore, finally, Kurosawa wanted to unite, truth and well, in a great and beautiful work of art. Only in the final scene are they again together, as the two original stories, the four incompatible versions of the same facts and the three complementary scenarios …, in the same, harmonious and admirable work, rashomon,.

Bibliography

• Durrell, l. (1960). THE QUARTETO DE ALEJANDERÍA. Jalandhar: Faber and Faber.
• Hegel, g. F. (1937). THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAW. Buenos Aires: Clarity.
• Kurosawa, a. (Address). (1950). Rashomon [movie]. Japan.