Kurosawa's Film 'Rashomon': Cinema Seminar, Cambridge, 2005

(talk on 27.9.05 for seminar on film and modernity, organized by Srijana Das)

Catharsis, moral reconstruction and the making of a new nation: Kurosawa’s Rashomon

Films both reflect the world they are created in and try to give it meaning and order. They are the modern equivalent of myths or dramas. They are thought experiments, running through with the audience an experience which is often too painful to contemplate.

A prime example of the cathartic and moral aspect of films is the famous 1950 film ‘Rashomon’ by Kurosawa. It was made just a few years after the humiliating 1945 defeat of Japan.

[Anyone seen? – the story]

The usual interpretation of ‘Rashomon’ is for the ‘Rashomon effect’ whereby its originality was to de-stabilise truth by showing the same murder through the eyes and narrations of a number of characters, and to leave the viewer to wonder whether any of them is correct, or indeed if there is any ‘reality’ apart from that constructed by human beings. This is indeed the device. But why was it deployed now and in this way by Kurosawa?

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The central emotional and didactic heart of Rashomon is both different and similar to that of Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach', a mid Victorian English lament. Arnold’s poem reflects on the loss of hope, faith, meaning, trust, and belief in absolutes. Here is the second half of Arnold's poem:

'The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.'

There are major differences between this poem and Rashomon. In the Japanese case, it was not religious faith in a monotheistic God which had disappeared, for this had never been present, but rather the complex web of faith in fellow Japanese and in the innate goodness and trustworthiness of human beings. Likewise, the core integrator, the Emperor, was lost.

The exhortation in Arnold’s poem to find salvation in the love between man and woman, romantic love, is not present in Rashomon. Instead, at the curious ending to the film when the priest hands the little baby to the woodcutter, the latter affirms that this act of love by the woodcutter has saved him from despair. Likewise the woodcutter clearly finds in this act of paternal love some healing for his despair at the start of the film: 'I don't understand. I just don't understand'.

Finally, as Kurosawa looked round Japan in the late 1940's it was hardly a 'land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new'. Rather, as the broken gatehouse visually reminds us, and descriptions of a world full of war, famine and plague, of bandits and fire emphasize, this was Japan after the firebombing of Tokyo and after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A 'world of dew' which had become a world of death. Even the beautiful woods, the nature which the Japanese worshipped, recalled in the flashbacks, becomes a sinister haunt of violence and lies.

Yet while it is different in many ways, what makes the film so powerful is the same message that makes 'Dover Beach', or Oedipus Rex or King Lear great. Kurosawa strips away our illusions, leaves us on the blasted heath where we realize that there is no meaning, no trust, a Hobbesian world of a war of all against all. Life is indeed nasty, brutish and short. What makes the film so interesting is the way in which this devastating message, with its minor consolation, achieves the same effect as Hobbes in philosophy, Sophocles and Shakespeare in drama, and Arnold in poetry. The principal method, of course, is the famous device of narrating the story of a crime seen through four recollections of the event.

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At one level this structure is obvious. Anyone who has heard people recalling an event, particularly in a court of law, would be familiar with it. Basically it shows that although there must have been a real set of actions, a man is murdered, beyond that everything is interpretation. Each witness will re-construct, and perhaps come to believe, what they saw. This is not necessarily 'lying', but it shows how far reality is socially constructed.

This could not have been news to Kurosawa's audience in Japan. Much of Japanese thought and ethics had been based for many centuries on the axiom that 'social truth' is more important than 'factual truth', and indeed on the realization that they are inseparable. On the other hand, it may account for part of the 'Rashomon effect' on western audiences.

Why should the woodcutter find it so hard to accept? Obviously representing the audience, he poses again and again the central question: 'I do not understand'. He also makes this lack of understanding into a huge issue. Although only one person has been killed and a woman ravished, he insists that the events and subsequent trial are worse than all the wars, earthquakes, typhoons, fires, plagues, bandits and other disasters which were going on around him. They are bad, 'But I've never known anything as horrible as this'. He beseeches someone (the filmmaker?) to 'Tell me what it all means'.

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I guess that part of what it all means may be as follows. Kurosawa's film captures a terrible moment in Japanese history. In the thousand years up to 1945 there had been a civilization which lacked many things. There was no universal God who made a sharp distinction between absolute good and evil, no foundational legal system to differentiate right and wrong, no firm social system to provide a clear code of social behaviour. In many ways, Japan was already existentially much like Arnold's Dover Beach. Yet it was not desolate, for while it lacked much, it also contained the antidote to the lack of absolutes.

Japan had indeed been a very beautiful world, 'a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new'. It had perhaps the greatest aesthetic and literary tradition in the history of the world. It might not have had truth, but it had beauty and, as Keats remarked, 'Truth is beauty, beauty truth'. All this was shattered by the war. The ugliness of the industrial revolution in Japan at least produced wealth. Now all that struggle and ugliness which had overlain the earlier beauty was in vain - flattened and torn to pieces like the beautiful gatehouse of Rashomon.

Secondly, while Japan lacked a universalistic, religious and legalistic basis for faith in a single 'truth', and even a categorical moral imperative to trust, in practice a vast set of devices had been elaborated to fill what outside observers often saw as a moral void. In practice, multiple social threads held people together and as visitors noted, the Japanese were in fact truthful, trustworthy, honest, trusting. Their word was their bond, they were honourable. These tough, binding yet flexible, rigidities had withstood the most rapid industrialization and social transformation in history and had created a mighty empire.

And where was all this when Kurosawa looked round him in the late 1940's? Japan had been invaded successfully for the first time in a thousand years. It had effectively lost its only guarantee of universal allegiance, the Emperor. Whatever had remained of religion, as becomes clear in the film, was dead; State Shinto, Buddhism, Confucianism, all were empty lies. The economy, and the feeling that there might be much suffering but at least people could live better and compete effectively in a world market, were in ruins. Worst of all, the social glue which had held the people of Japan together had dissolved.

The greatest social philosopher of C20 Japan, Maruyama Masao remembered this period as follows. ‘The situation just after the collapse of Japanese Empire had something similar to the situation just after the Meiji Restoration….based on my own direct experience of the aftermath of World War II. The value system held until just recently collapsed so rapidly. It was no longer possible to tell good from evil or right from wrong. People were at a loss and they did not know how to judge things. This is not just a political anarchy as a result of the breakdown of institutions in a narrow sense, but also a mental anarchy…’ (quoted in Jun Sato’s comments on Maruyama & Fukuzawa, p.3; from Maruyama, I:64)

I think that this is the central message, re-iterated again and again in the film. Much of the discussion is about truth, lying; who is one to believe, who is one to trust in this desolate world? Even the dead, we learn, cannot be trusted, even if one character cries out pathetically 'I can't believe that the dead lie'. The message is stressed again and again and all attempts to avoid its implications are blocked off. The priest laments that while 'life is Hell', he 'has trust in mankind', yet he is then asked 'Just think... which story do you believe?' And of course, he cannot come up with an answer. Likewise, the woodcutter laments again towards the end, 'I don't understand any of them', and the only answer he gets is 'Don't' Worry. What people do never makes sense'. But if it never makes sense, of course, how is social action possible? We have to assume it makes sense, is predictable, that we can trust the other; how else, even at a humdrum level, can we survive?

All of this comes to a climax at the end. In the torrential rain in the broken gatehouse, in the desolation of a Japan which no longer had hope, trust, social bonds, beauty, humans are reduced to their Hobbesian basics. Utterly selfish, utterly unpredictable, the social contract revoked. The protagonists in the murder kept acting in contested, unpredictable and often totally selfish ways, forgetting the other, and thus negated the basic premise which had held Japanese society together in the absence of all other over-riding systems. So, in the immediate years after 1945, the Japanese were on the edge of a moral abyss. They had finally found that, like the woodcutter, who had proclaimed his altruism and trustworthiness, they were not to be trusted, liars and thieves like the rest of humanity.

It is this sense of utter worthlessness, of loss of all self-esteem as well as of certainty, which strikes me as such a central feature of the film. Self-disgust is very strong. And this is perhaps what Kurosawa was trying to stave off. Like many great artists he believed that the only way to overcome the void was to gaze deeply into it for a while, and then to draw back. The catharsis which the film provides is not through escapism, but by staring straight into a world stripped of everything, to recognize that humans are as Hobbes described them.

Yet then, as Hobbes described writing after another (Civil) war which had stripped his generation, like the Japanese, of their leader and of all inherited trust, people can build up a world of hope, meaning and beauty from the rubble. It starts with a small gesture, the taking of a baby, the moment of genuine trust, and from that moment all is possible. Again the film has echoes of other great literature, for example the central motif of Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner'. There also, the Mariner finds that in the midst of complete desolation he is rescued by one moment of selfless thought.

In this film Kurosawa takes his audience through the horrors they were facing, then provides them with a ray of hope. It is a catharsis and a promise.