Through the storytelling structure that (within the medium of film, anyway) has become directly associated with Rashomon (arguably the finest example) we get multiple accounts of the same events told from different perspectives.
First one character tells the story then the next character says, “Nah, that ain’t how it happened, it was more like this. . .”
I was giving a little Film History lesson the other day to a friend and I told him all about Rashomon and how it has influenced so many films that came since. Then as I sat so pompously upon my Film Buff high horse prepared to rattle off a list of titles that were examples of a Rashomon-influenced story structure, I suddenly drew a blank. I couldn’t come up with a single example! Even now, the only one I can come up with is Courage Under Fire.
Now I know there’s a bunch of them. I know I’ve seen a bunch of them. I’m sure I’ve seen at least three that have come out in just the past few years. Help me out folks! Name a few.
Like you, I have the feeling there are lots of movies like this but my memory is failing me! The only one springing to mind is the romantic comedy He Said, She Said, where we see how the man and the woman view events in their relationship differently.
Oh, I just thought of another movie where the same events are seen from multiple points of view: Go.
Run Lola Run is similar in that it presents three different versions of the same story, although in this case it’s not a question of different perspectives. It’s more like parallel worlds, or a video game in which the heroine can try again and again until she gets the best possible ending.
I’d consider Memento a thematically related film in that it deals largely with the unreliability of memory. We only see one version of the story within the movie, but there are several versions of the unseen backstory.
The first one that comes to mind is Citizen Kane, which is primarily made up of flashbacks; however, CK wasn’t influenced by Rashomon, predating it by about 9 years. It’s not quite the same idea, anyway, since the different flashbacks in CK generally don’t have a great deal of overlap, while the flashbacks in Rashomon are all focused on the same event.
You might try looking at www.imdb.com For each movie, they have a “Movie Connections” link, giving a list of movies referencing a particular movie (among other things). Here’s the specific link for Rashomon. Of course, I don’t see any information provided on specifically how a given movie references Rashomon, so it’s not obvious that each of those movies listed must have the Rashomon flashback style; some of them may reference Rashomon in some other manner.
The idea has been used on a lot of TV shows, too. I know that it’s appeared on All in the Family and ** The Dick Van Dyke Show**, and I seem to recall it elsewhere as well.
Of course, as I’ve remarked before, I have this weird idea that seeing an idea on a lot of TV shows at very roughly the same time suggests that this was a screenwriting school assignment. Wouldn’t surprise me to find some teacher saying – “Hey, let’s try out the old “Rashomon” idea! Get inside your character’s heads and show what makes them different!”
Well, there is the Clue movie… If you ask me, I’ll deny I’ve seen it. But I’ve heard rumours it contains the same storyline with different endings. Rumours, that’s the ticket. And Tim Curry was old and needed the money.
Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction don’t really count. Nor does Citizen Kane. In those movies the story is tolf nonsequentially, and from the points of view, perhaps, of different characters. But the point of Rashomon was that the versions told by different people didn’t mesh – the stories were not the same. In the ones I just listed, the stories were identical.
Great line from the Simpsons:
Marge: You liked Rashomon the last time we saw it.
Looking at Rashomon’s keywords on IMDb, you have contradictory-accounts (which also lists Basic, Courage Under Fire, The Falling and One Night at McCool’s) and multiple-perspectives (which lists some of the above, About Adam, Elephant, Eve’s Bayou and I Shot a Main in Vegas)
Yeah, but they’re not the same ending as seen by different characters, they’re just a bunch of “joke” endings, then the “real” ending. IIRC, the idea was, you’d have to see it in the theater multiple times to see all the endings. More of a marketing gimmick than an artistic statement.
And wasn’t there an episode of the TV series MASH where Frank Burns was recounting some heroic action he had performed and than Hawkeye recounted his version of what had happened?
My favorite episode (well, one of them) of X Files is the one where Mulder and Scully are both giving reports about what happened while they were investigating a case. Both reports are ‘acted out’ as though we are watching what happened, but we see it once from the point of view of Scully, then again from the point of view of Mulder. The differences in their reports make for some pretty funny and character-revealing moments.
Xfiles did that a couple times, didn’t they? Once with Luke Wilson as the small town sheriff–when Mulder was telling the story, he was a bucktooth rube; when it was Scully’s turn, he was sexy and seductive. WAAAY funny.
Then there was another one, right? with Charles Nelson Reilly? Or am I confused?