Yah, 2001 really need to be seen after reading the novel. As a “space ballet”, it makes sense - there are some lovely images in it, and I truly enjoy it. But it completely fails to convey the story on its own; you need to know it going in.
You never find out what “really” happened, and furthermore, it doesn’t matter. Most stories with multiple viewpoints are about an event, but Rashomon is about the viewpoints themselves, the actual event is immeterial. It’s pretty high concept, and done stylishly. The movie definitely sufferes from the Casablanca effect, riffed on so much that it loses the punch of originality. Imitators still get it wrong, though, by inevitibly ending tidily.
One other point is about contemporary history. When this film was made, it was in the immediate post-war period and Japan was still under occupation. So again, times were tough and it was often hard to feed one’s family. There was corruption and the black market, but people still wanted to believe that most were capable of better behavior, and that tomorrow would be better.
I think the differing viewpoints of the inner story are an interesting plot device, and they are what most people remember from this movie, but I always come away thinking about the people under that shabby, decaying gate, in the rain.
Roddy
From “The Films of Akira Kurosawa” (Donald Richie):
"…based, loosely, upon two of Akutagawa’s hundred-odd short stories; the title story, Rashomon…
…the general description of the ruined gate, the conversations about the devastation of Kyoto during the period of civil wars and the atmosphere of complete desolation."
I don’t agree - I got the general idea when I saw it and I never read the book - namely, that the aliens where helping humans to evolve and Bowman was the ‘next step’ in that process.
It’s almost as old as the movie, but the Evergreen paperback edition of the script is a wonderful resource in helping to understand the film
It not only has an English translation of the script and lots of photos, it also has several essays on the film and its relation to Japanese history. It also has translations of the two Ryunosake Akutagawa stories the film is based on (“Rashomon” and “In the Bush”). For a crowning touch, it has the beginning of the script of the Outrage, the really oddball western based (Seven samurai/Magnificent seven style) on Rashomon, and starring Paul Newman, William Shatner, Edward G. Robinson, Claire Bloom, Howard da Silva, and Harvey Keitel. A mixed bag of a film it is. I don’t know why they don’t have the whole script. I’ve never seen this one, although I’ve seen Kurasawa’s film several times.
So, you’re smarter than we.
Let’s beat him up and steal his lunch money!
Not really. In the movie the story doesn’t seem all that important anyway. I did read the book some time after I saw the movie and even though they were based on some of the same ideas they feel very different.
Actually, this was the hot new trend in contemporary literature at the time. While literature has always had stories featuring protagonists who were liars, braggarts, idiots, drunk, or very young - and whose stories, therefore, were meant to be understood as some degree of inaccurate or fantastic - these stories were usually structured in such a way as to make it clear to the audience what “really” happened. In the post-war period, the new trend was for stories where the actual truth had to be deduced, or in some cases, could not be deduced, with the deliberate intent of leaving the audience in disagreement over what actually happened.
Kurosawa was fairly ahead of the curve on this with Rashomon. The term for this device, “unreliable narrator,” wouldn’t be coined until a decade after the film was made. Even so, he was far from the first artist to work with the concept. What he did that was revolutionary was in how he adopted it to film. Instead of just making a character an unreliable narrator, he made the camera itself unreliable. The assumption in most films is that what the camera sees “really” happened. The occasional dream sequence or drug trip aside, the camera lens is treated like a window onto the world of the drama, through which the audience can observe the truth of events. Sometimes the events might be shown out of order - you might see the hero shoot someone in cold blood, only later to see him loading the gun with blanks, for example. In Rashomon, the camera is straight up lying to your face. For the audiences of the day, it was quite the mindfuck.
Can you name a pre-Rashomon work of literature that presents conflicting accounts of the same event from multiple perspectives and never reveals what “really” happened? I’m not saying there weren’t any, but off the top of my head I can’t think of a literary example of this structure that I’d expect to be more widely known than Rashomon.
Miller has already said most of what I was going to say about the assumption of reliability when it comes to what is actually shown onscreen in a movie. While a work of literature can have an unreliable narrator, reading a story with an unreliable narrator isn’t the same experience as actually seeing the events play out before you. Even today, more than half a century after Rashomon, audiences will generally accept that what happens onscreen is objectively true within the universe of the movie. If we’re shown something that isn’t true, the movie will nearly always make this obvious (e.g. character is shown waking up from a dream) and we’ll then have a pretty good idea of what really happened within the movie world.
I do know of one other movie released about the same time as *Rashomon *that also contained an unreliable flashback. Since the revelation that the flashback wasn’t true is a major plot twist I’ll spoiler the name of the movie. It’s not that well-known today, but it had a famous director so some people reading this thread may be planning to see it sometime.The movie is Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright.At the beginning of this movie, Character A tells Character B about something that just happened to him. We see most of this story play out in flashback. Near the end of the movie, Character B discovers that Character A invented this story to cover up a crime he’d committed. I have read that a lot of people at the time were angry about this, and felt the movie wasn’t playing fair with the audience by showing something in flashback that hadn’t actually happened. And in the spoiler-boxed movie, there was only one false flashback, the truth was ultimately revealed, and the story was obviously a mystery from early on so there must have been some expectation of a twist. I presume that Rashomon, a movie that’s largely made up of flashbacks that can’t all be accurate and where the objective truth is never revealed, must have been pretty surprising to audiences in 1950.
It would be somewhat surprising even today. While it’s not unusual to see a movie or TV episode present the same events from different perspectives, these “Rashomon style” works rarely take it as far as Rashomon did. They usually wind up revealing what really happened and why the different characters were mistaken or lying about what they’d seen. One of the few exceptions I can think of is The X-Files, which did at least one episode where different witnesses presented different versions of events and the truth of what had really happened wasn’t clear…but The X-Files is kind of a special case in that many episodes ended without Mulder and Scully being able to conclusively prove what had really happened.
One of the stories Rashomon was based on worked this way.
And that was the best thing they ever did, by the way.
Believe it or not, I did originally mention “In the Grove” in my post. 
I decided to cut that part out before posting because I doubt “In the Grove” was particularly well-known in the US before Rashomon. (I have no idea how famous it was in Japan.) So it’s not like a lot of Western audience members went into Rashomon wondering how faithful it would be to its source material.
Right, I have no clue how well-known the story was either. I doubt people in the U.S. knew anything about it. But we can say it did present those events that way.
Well, the plot involving the baby was a bold step in film-making that set the tone for decades, even if the subject matter now seems at best quaint. It’s important we not overlook the significance of the birth of an Asian.
Don’t go bringing up a controversial topic by talking about youth in Asia.
In the top 7 or 8 for sure.
Well, the setting of the frame story being the Rajomon gate kind of puts an upper limit of ‘the 16th century’ on it, since that’s when the last remnants were removed. (All that’s there, now, is a marker saying that it used to be there.)