Originally published in South China Morning Post, 13 June 2015
Truth and justice are admired in our modern, ethics-based society, but sometimes laws have to be broken.
When it comes to moviemaking, the conventions set down by cinema's forefathers aren't always meant to be followed - despite what film professors will tell you. Visionary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa knew this when he conceived Rashomon, his breakthrough 1950 film that put him on the world circuit.
In feudal Japan, a gruesome murder has taken place: a fallen samurai has been found in a dark, gloomy forest. At the murder trial, four testimonies are heard: that of the bandit who confesses to killing the samurai; that of the samurai's white-veiled widow who insists she was raped; that of the deceased samurai, summoned by a medium; and that of a seemingly impartial witness to the events.
All accounts follow a strikingly similar path, but each story differs in the whodunit details. And as the tales are told again and again, the film begins to play out like a backwards courtroom drama, where each testimony only serves to see the truth retreat further from view.
Rashomon's innovative four-person flashback structure might be greatly admired among film critic circles, but more impressive was the way Kurosawa brought the audience's subjective viewpoints into play. Taking inspiration from two early 20th-century short stories, the director infused the film with then-exceptional melding of Eastern and Western philosophies, both inside the cinema and out.
Through the Western-tinged examples of ethical courts of law, alongside a Hollywood-like aesthetic of shadowy visuals and urgent editing, Kurosawa opened up Japanese films to the greater intellectual world, where cinema was starting to be seen as a medium of ideas and values.
Through his probing of Eastern "laws" such as karma and fate, he infused the film with a thoroughly pessimistic moral tone in which deceit, ego and vanity rendered the law meaningless and truth inconsequential.
As we follow each tale, we are drawn into the proceedings: a sense of cynicism and distrust creeps in; our beliefs, perceptions and life experiences make us question not only the film's true answers, but that of our existence.
Rashomon is bleaker than most of Kurosawa's films and far from the jovial spirit that infused his later, "more appreciated" works such as Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. But it's arguably his most groundbreaking picture and as radical as they came during the early 1950s, all but foretelling the austere zeitgeist that would rule over cinema over the next three decades.
Where would, for example, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo be without it, or Federico Fellini's 8½? Through its structure, philosophy and aesthetics, Rashomon reveals the ways a court of law can be deceived, the means whereby moral fibre can be bent - and how cinematic laws can be broken.