Kurosawa's Film, Rashomon The purpose of this research is t

The purpose of this research is to examine Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon with reference to two critical theories, semiology (semiotics) and deconstruction. The plan of the research will be to set forth the broad outline and context of the film, the principal components of semiotics and deconstruction as analytical theories, and then to discuss the film in respect of those theories. Throughout, reference will be made to the strengths and weaknesses of the theories as bases for discussion of the film, with a view toward effecting a synthesis that results in an enlarged understanding of it.

The pattern of events of Rashomon is quite simple: A bandit attacks a samurai and his wife. The wife is raped; the husband is killed; the bandit is tried and executed. But the texture of events, or the pattern of ideas underlying the events, is quite complex, for the story of the rape and murder is told from four points of view: the Bandit, the Wife, the Husband, and a Woodcutter who witnessed (or who says he witnessed) everything. Though the versions intersect as regards the playing of what happened, none of the versions agrees entirely with any of the others. After the stories have all been told, there is a denouement wherein the Woodcutter carries an abandoned baby home to be reared along with his several other children.

The film raises several questions relevant to the pattern of events in the film and to its psychological and philosophical implications: Who is telling truth? Who

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Johnson, 1980, p. 5). A deconstructive approach to Rashomon easily suggests that the different versions of the rape-murder create an aesthetic frame upon which the vicissitudes of human experience may be hung. Further, the different versions are the most obvious warring forces of signification within the work. Johnson's description of deconstruction is consistent with the idea that close examination of the film reveals that no single story has an unusually valid claim to dominate the viewing experience. Indeed, it argues that the whole of the film involves a teasing out of the plurality of the warring stories, so as to make a larger meaning. Such specificity as the film achieves could be located in the overarching fact of difference, for where difference of this type emerges, so do the troubling waters of honesty, morality, ethics--those abstractions associated with highly traditional critical methods of theme-searching. And for the reason that such difference is located in the varying stories of the dramatis personae, what drives the individual personalities sexually, morally, psychologically, and so on also frames the stories. It is at this point that Kurosawa's oft-quoted statement of the role of ego in Rashomon becomes not o

Category: Film - K