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'''Rashomon''' may refer to:
* RashomonStyle (formerly TheRashomon): a storytelling technique made famous by the movie below.
* ''Film/{{Rashomon}}'': an award-winning 1950 movie Creator/AkiraKurosawa; its name has become synonymous with the storytelling technique he used.
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[[quoteright:350:http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Rashomon_1950_6357.jpg]]
A samurai went out for a walk with his wife, encountered a bandit and was murdered -- and that's all anyone knows for sure about the situation. Each eyewitness to the crime -- the bandit, the wife, and the dead samurai (through a medium) -- give vastly different accounts of what happened, and each eyewitness portrays themselves as the most sympathetic figure in their story. What's more baffling is that each witness ''also'' claims to be directly responsible for the man's death, albeit with reasonable motives.
Which story, if any, is the closest to the truth? That's the question that a woodcutter and a priest mull over as they explain the situation to a third person (and, by extension, the audience) while they wait out the rain in the gatehouse of the ruined [[TitleDrop Rashomon]] temple. As the stories are explained, a fourth story emerges from the woodcutter, who eventually admits that he actually saw what happened -- but ''his'' story contradicts the participant's accounts just as much as their stories contradicted each other's. By the film's end, neither the characters nor the audience are any closer to uncovering the truth, but the concluding events do provide some reassurance that even though humans lie and steal, they're still capable of goodness.
''Rashomon'' is one of Creator/AkiraKurosawa's most well-known works, even in the West; the film was based on the short stories "In a Grove" and "Rashomon" by Ryunosuke Akutagawa ("In A Grove" moreso than "Rashomon"). The film itself inspired two play adaptations and the naming of a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_effect psychological effect]]. This is the film that introduced Kurosawa and Asian cinema (specifically, Japanese cinema) to the West, and it received an Honorary Oscar at the 1952 Academy Awards. [[hottip:*:There was no Best Foreign Language Film category at the time, although the film -- and the eight other movies given similar awards between 1947 and 1955 -- are often considered retroactive "winners" of the award.]]
The TropeNamer of RashomonStyle, a plot which mimics the narrative style of this film.
----
!!''Rashomon'' contains examples of the following tropes:
* AbsenceOfEvidence: One of the final reveals is that the woodcutter, who at that point is the only person the viewer would be inclined to believe entirely, [[spoiler:stole a valuable dagger mentioned by all the other witnesses even though he'd specifically denied seeing it]].
* AlternateCharacterInterpretation: [[invoked]] In-universe: the characters' personalities vary greatly between the different testimonies.
* ArtShift: Tone changes with the testimonies. In the bandit's story, he is dirty and the scene resembles a botched crime film; contrast this style with the woman's story and [[spoiler:the woodcutter's second testimony.]]
* CircularDrive: The famous long dolly shot at the beginning was achieved by having the actor walk in a figure eight pattern that crossed the dolly tracks twice. It looks like the camera is following him through the woods but he is actually walking around it.
* CompleteMonster: In-universe: Tajomaru, the Bandit, constantly tries to paint himself like this, taking pride in killing and rape and never missing an opportunity to laugh evilly during his testimony. The other testimonies subvert this, painting him out as a scared, pathetic, only-somewhat-thuggish bum.
* DeathGlare: The samurai's wife's reason for (accidentally) slaying her husband after her rape.
* DrivenToSuicide: What the samurai (or medium "channeling" him) claims to have done in his story after witnessing the unfaithfulness of his wife.
* EveryJapaneseSwordIsAKatana: Averted. Tajomaru wields a ''tsurugi'', and the Samurai wields a ''tachi''.
* EveryoneCallsHimBarkeep: The names of the Priest, the Woodcutter and the Commoner are not revealed.
* EvilLaugh: Tajomaru, the bandit, all throughout his testimony. In [[spoiler:The Woodcutter's actual testimony, from the woman - either she's laughing at the bandit's failure to kill her husband, or is laughing bitterly about the bandit's feelings not being true and the fact that her "honorable samurai" is a wimp. Take your pick.]]
* {{Flashback}}: All testimonies.
* FridgeLogic: This is actually [[TheyPlottedAPerfectlyGoodWaste a main point of the film]] -- every testimony contains inconsistencies, like the woodcutter walking around in a forest obviously ''not'' intent on cutting wood when he said otherwise, a wimpy samurai, an obviously untrained bandit able to kill the samurai, the bandit ''not'' acting like the thug he claimed to be in a testimony, and so on. [[invoked]]
* HeroicBSOD: The woodcutter and the monk are not exactly the heroes of the story (although, from a certain viewpoint, they are the closest this movie gets to actual heroes), but they both seem to be suffering this at the beginning of the film. [[spoiler: After relating his version of events, the Woodcutter is blasted by the commoner about the pearl inlaid knife, originally wielded by the Samurai's Wife; this results in the Woodcutter experiencing BSOD and leads to the admission "I'm the one who should be ashamed. I don't understand my own soul."]]
* HimeCut: The Samurai's Wife.
* HonourBeforeReason: The Bandit, the Samurai and the Wife all try to justify themselves by somehow involving honour. Completely absent in the Woodcutter's tale, which makes them all look like fools.
* MinimalistCast: There are only eight actors in this entire film. Nine, if you count the horse.
* PeriodPiece: Shogunate-era Japan.
* RashomonStyle (aka RashomonPlot): The TropeNamer.
* RealityIsUnrealistic: it is surprisingly difficult to capture rain on film (it's one reason most Hollywood rain sequences are shot in the dark) so Kurosawa's team had to use enormous volumes of water (delivered using fire hoses) and eventually resorted to dying the water black--tricks he later reused while filming ''{{Ikiru}}''. Also, during the bandit Tajomaru's testimony he boasts that he crossed blades over twenty times with the samurai in the course of their duel. This is all movie fighting; in a real sword fight they would cross far fewer times. A very realistic example of such is performed by [[SevenSamurai Kyūzō early on in Seven Samurai]]
* SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism: Let's see, the monk and the woodcutter believe they've lost all faith in human nature, and the commoner harassing them giggles about the supposed badness and selfishness of every human at the end before suiting words to deeds by stealing the clothes off a baby abandoned in the ruins of the shrine. [[spoiler: The Woodcutter's willingness to take the child in and raise it despite his own poverty -- "I already have six children, what's one more?" -- restores both men's faith.]]
* SympatheticMurderer: The woman tries to paint herself as this.
* UnreliableNarrator: The whole point of the film.
* LovingForce: The bandit claims that the man's wife submitted to him after he forced himself on her, and begged for him to take her away from her husband. Not surprisingly, the wife's own account completely avoids this.
* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: An interesting twist. All three of the stories told by the three individuals involved in some way involve the woman's ornate dagger, but none of them explain why the woodcutter didn't find it when he found the body. When the woodcutter explains what he saw of the affair, the dagger doesn't appear at all. The man who he's been telling the stories to figures out what is going on: [[spoiler: the woodcutter stole the dagger after everyone else had died or left; it's the knife he uses to defend the baby at the end]].
* WimpFight: In the Woodcutter's version of the duel between the Samurai and the bandit, they run around swinging desperately at each other with their weapons. It's often taken as one of the hints that his testimony isn't exactly truthful - a trained Samurai wouldn't have done such a thing - but this was how Kurosawa commonly depicted fights.
* WorldHalfFull
----
A samurai went out for a walk with his wife, encountered a bandit and was murdered -- and that's all anyone knows for sure about the situation. Each eyewitness to the crime -- the bandit, the wife, and the dead samurai (through a medium) -- give vastly different accounts of what happened, and each eyewitness portrays themselves as the most sympathetic figure in their story. What's more baffling is that each witness ''also'' claims to be directly responsible for the man's death, albeit with reasonable motives.
Which story, if any, is the closest to the truth? That's the question that a woodcutter and a priest mull over as they explain the situation to a third person (and, by extension, the audience) while they wait out the rain in the gatehouse of the ruined [[TitleDrop Rashomon]] temple. As the stories are explained, a fourth story emerges from the woodcutter, who eventually admits that he actually saw what happened -- but ''his'' story contradicts the participant's accounts just as much as their stories contradicted each other's. By the film's end, neither the characters nor the audience are any closer to uncovering the truth, but the concluding events do provide some reassurance that even though humans lie and steal, they're still capable of goodness.
''Rashomon'' is one of Creator/AkiraKurosawa's most well-known works, even in the West; the film was based on the short stories "In a Grove" and "Rashomon" by Ryunosuke Akutagawa ("In A Grove" moreso than "Rashomon"). The film itself inspired two play adaptations and the naming of a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_effect psychological effect]]. This is the film that introduced Kurosawa and Asian cinema (specifically, Japanese cinema) to the West, and it received an Honorary Oscar at the 1952 Academy Awards. [[hottip:*:There was no Best Foreign Language Film category at the time, although the film -- and the eight other movies given similar awards between 1947 and 1955 -- are often considered retroactive "winners" of the award.]]
The TropeNamer of RashomonStyle, a plot which mimics the narrative style of this film.
----
!!''Rashomon'' contains examples of the following tropes:
* AbsenceOfEvidence: One of the final reveals is that the woodcutter, who at that point is the only person the viewer would be inclined to believe entirely, [[spoiler:stole a valuable dagger mentioned by all the other witnesses even though he'd specifically denied seeing it]].
* AlternateCharacterInterpretation: [[invoked]] In-universe: the characters' personalities vary greatly between the different testimonies.
* ArtShift: Tone changes with the testimonies. In the bandit's story, he is dirty and the scene resembles a botched crime film; contrast this style with the woman's story and [[spoiler:the woodcutter's second testimony.]]
* CircularDrive: The famous long dolly shot at the beginning was achieved by having the actor walk in a figure eight pattern that crossed the dolly tracks twice. It looks like the camera is following him through the woods but he is actually walking around it.
* CompleteMonster: In-universe: Tajomaru, the Bandit, constantly tries to paint himself like this, taking pride in killing and rape and never missing an opportunity to laugh evilly during his testimony. The other testimonies subvert this, painting him out as a scared, pathetic, only-somewhat-thuggish bum.
* DeathGlare: The samurai's wife's reason for (accidentally) slaying her husband after her rape.
* DrivenToSuicide: What the samurai (or medium "channeling" him) claims to have done in his story after witnessing the unfaithfulness of his wife.
* EveryJapaneseSwordIsAKatana: Averted. Tajomaru wields a ''tsurugi'', and the Samurai wields a ''tachi''.
* EveryoneCallsHimBarkeep: The names of the Priest, the Woodcutter and the Commoner are not revealed.
* EvilLaugh: Tajomaru, the bandit, all throughout his testimony. In [[spoiler:The Woodcutter's actual testimony, from the woman - either she's laughing at the bandit's failure to kill her husband, or is laughing bitterly about the bandit's feelings not being true and the fact that her "honorable samurai" is a wimp. Take your pick.]]
* {{Flashback}}: All testimonies.
* FridgeLogic: This is actually [[TheyPlottedAPerfectlyGoodWaste a main point of the film]] -- every testimony contains inconsistencies, like the woodcutter walking around in a forest obviously ''not'' intent on cutting wood when he said otherwise, a wimpy samurai, an obviously untrained bandit able to kill the samurai, the bandit ''not'' acting like the thug he claimed to be in a testimony, and so on. [[invoked]]
* HeroicBSOD: The woodcutter and the monk are not exactly the heroes of the story (although, from a certain viewpoint, they are the closest this movie gets to actual heroes), but they both seem to be suffering this at the beginning of the film. [[spoiler: After relating his version of events, the Woodcutter is blasted by the commoner about the pearl inlaid knife, originally wielded by the Samurai's Wife; this results in the Woodcutter experiencing BSOD and leads to the admission "I'm the one who should be ashamed. I don't understand my own soul."]]
* HimeCut: The Samurai's Wife.
* HonourBeforeReason: The Bandit, the Samurai and the Wife all try to justify themselves by somehow involving honour. Completely absent in the Woodcutter's tale, which makes them all look like fools.
* MinimalistCast: There are only eight actors in this entire film. Nine, if you count the horse.
* PeriodPiece: Shogunate-era Japan.
* RashomonStyle (aka RashomonPlot): The TropeNamer.
* RealityIsUnrealistic: it is surprisingly difficult to capture rain on film (it's one reason most Hollywood rain sequences are shot in the dark) so Kurosawa's team had to use enormous volumes of water (delivered using fire hoses) and eventually resorted to dying the water black--tricks he later reused while filming ''{{Ikiru}}''. Also, during the bandit Tajomaru's testimony he boasts that he crossed blades over twenty times with the samurai in the course of their duel. This is all movie fighting; in a real sword fight they would cross far fewer times. A very realistic example of such is performed by [[SevenSamurai Kyūzō early on in Seven Samurai]]
* SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism: Let's see, the monk and the woodcutter believe they've lost all faith in human nature, and the commoner harassing them giggles about the supposed badness and selfishness of every human at the end before suiting words to deeds by stealing the clothes off a baby abandoned in the ruins of the shrine. [[spoiler: The Woodcutter's willingness to take the child in and raise it despite his own poverty -- "I already have six children, what's one more?" -- restores both men's faith.]]
* SympatheticMurderer: The woman tries to paint herself as this.
* UnreliableNarrator: The whole point of the film.
* LovingForce: The bandit claims that the man's wife submitted to him after he forced himself on her, and begged for him to take her away from her husband. Not surprisingly, the wife's own account completely avoids this.
* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: An interesting twist. All three of the stories told by the three individuals involved in some way involve the woman's ornate dagger, but none of them explain why the woodcutter didn't find it when he found the body. When the woodcutter explains what he saw of the affair, the dagger doesn't appear at all. The man who he's been telling the stories to figures out what is going on: [[spoiler: the woodcutter stole the dagger after everyone else had died or left; it's the knife he uses to defend the baby at the end]].
* WimpFight: In the Woodcutter's version of the duel between the Samurai and the bandit, they run around swinging desperately at each other with their weapons. It's often taken as one of the hints that his testimony isn't exactly truthful - a trained Samurai wouldn't have done such a thing - but this was how Kurosawa commonly depicted fights.
* WorldHalfFull
----
to:
A samurai went out for a walk with his wife, encountered a bandit and was murdered -- and that's all anyone knows for sure about the situation. Each eyewitness to the crime -- the bandit, the wife, and the dead samurai (through a medium) -- give vastly different accounts of what happened, and each eyewitness portrays themselves as the most sympathetic figure in their story. What's more baffling is that each witness ''also'' claims to be directly responsible for the man's death, albeit with reasonable motives.
Which story, if any, is the closest to the truth? That's the question that a woodcutter and a priest mull over as they explain the situation to a third person (and, by extension, the audience) while they wait out the rain in the gatehouse of the ruined [[TitleDrop Rashomon]] temple. As the stories are explained, a fourth story emerges from the woodcutter, who eventually admits that he actually saw what happened -- but ''his'' story contradicts the participant's accounts just as much as their stories contradicted each other's. By the film's end, neither the characters nor the audience are any closer to uncovering the truth, but the concluding events do provide some reassurance that even though humans lie and steal, they're still capable of goodness.
''Rashomon'' is one of Creator/AkiraKurosawa's most well-known works, even in the West; the film was based on the short stories "In a Grove" and "Rashomon" by Ryunosuke Akutagawa ("In A Grove" moreso than "Rashomon"). The film itself inspired two play adaptations and the naming of a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_effect psychological effect]]. This is the film that introduced Kurosawa and Asian cinema (specifically, Japanese cinema) to the West, and it received an Honorary Oscar at the 1952 Academy Awards. [[hottip:*:There was no Best Foreign Language Film category at the time, although the film -- and the eight other movies given similar awards between 1947 and 1955 -- are often considered retroactive "winners" of the award.]]
The TropeNamer of RashomonStyle, a plot which mimics the narrative style of this film.
----
!!''Rashomon'' contains examples of the following tropes:
* AbsenceOfEvidence: One of the final reveals is that the woodcutter, who at that point is the only person the viewer would be inclined to believe entirely, [[spoiler:stole a valuable dagger mentioned by all the other witnesses even though he'd specifically denied seeing it]].
* AlternateCharacterInterpretation: [[invoked]] In-universe: the characters' personalities vary greatly between the different testimonies.
* ArtShift: Tone changes with the testimonies. In the bandit's story, he is dirty and the scene resembles a botched crime film; contrast this style with the woman's story and [[spoiler:the woodcutter's second testimony.]]
* CircularDrive: The famous long dolly shot at the beginning was achieved by having the actor walk in a figure eight pattern that crossed the dolly tracks twice. It looks like the camera is following him through the woods but he is actually walking around it.
* CompleteMonster: In-universe: Tajomaru, the Bandit, constantly tries to paint himself like this, taking pride in killing and rape and never missing an opportunity to laugh evilly during his testimony. The other testimonies subvert this, painting him out as a scared, pathetic, only-somewhat-thuggish bum.
* DeathGlare: The samurai's wife's reason for (accidentally) slaying her husband after her rape.
* DrivenToSuicide: What the samurai (or medium "channeling" him) claims to have done in his story after witnessing the unfaithfulness of his wife.
* EveryJapaneseSwordIsAKatana: Averted. Tajomaru wields a ''tsurugi'', and the Samurai wields a ''tachi''.
* EveryoneCallsHimBarkeep: The names of the Priest, the Woodcutter and the Commoner are not revealed.
* EvilLaugh: Tajomaru, the bandit, all throughout his testimony. In [[spoiler:The Woodcutter's actual testimony, from the woman - either she's laughing at the bandit's failure to kill her husband, or is laughing bitterly about the bandit's feelings not being true and the fact that her "honorable samurai" is a wimp. Take your pick.]]
* {{Flashback}}: All testimonies.
* FridgeLogic: This is actually [[TheyPlottedAPerfectlyGoodWaste a main point of the film]] -- every testimony contains inconsistencies, like the woodcutter walking around in a forest obviously ''not'' intent on cutting wood when he said otherwise, a wimpy samurai, an obviously untrained bandit able to kill the samurai, the bandit ''not'' acting like the thug he claimed to be in a testimony, and so on. [[invoked]]
* HeroicBSOD: The woodcutter and the monk are not exactly the heroes of the story (although, from a certain viewpoint, they are the closest this movie gets to actual heroes), but they both seem to be suffering this at the beginning of the film. [[spoiler: After relating his version of events, the Woodcutter is blasted by the commoner about the pearl inlaid knife, originally wielded by the Samurai's Wife; this results in the Woodcutter experiencing BSOD and leads to the admission "I'm the one who should be ashamed. I don't understand my own soul."]]
* HimeCut: The Samurai's Wife.
* HonourBeforeReason: The Bandit, the Samurai and the Wife all try to justify themselves by somehow involving honour. Completely absent in the Woodcutter's tale, which makes them all look like fools.
* MinimalistCast: There are only eight actors in this entire film. Nine, if you count the horse.
* PeriodPiece: Shogunate-era Japan.
* RashomonStyle (aka RashomonPlot): The TropeNamer.
* RealityIsUnrealistic: it is surprisingly difficult to capture rain on film (it's one reason most Hollywood rain sequences are shot in the dark) so Kurosawa's team had to use enormous volumes of water (delivered using fire hoses) and eventually resorted to dying the water black--tricks he later reused while filming ''{{Ikiru}}''. Also, during the bandit Tajomaru's testimony he boasts that he crossed blades over twenty times with the samurai in the course of their duel. This is all movie fighting; in a real sword fight they would cross far fewer times. A very realistic example of such is performed by [[SevenSamurai Kyūzō early on in Seven Samurai]]
* SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism: Let's see, the monk and the woodcutter believe they've lost all faith in human nature, and the commoner harassing them giggles about the supposed badness and selfishness of every human at the end before suiting words to deeds by stealing the clothes off a baby abandoned in the ruins of the shrine. [[spoiler: The Woodcutter's willingness to take the child in and raise it despite his own poverty -- "I already have six children, what's one more?" -- restores both men's faith.]]
* SympatheticMurderer: The woman tries to paint herself as this.
* UnreliableNarrator: The whole point of the film.
* LovingForce: The bandit claims that the man's wife submitted to him after he forced himself on her, and begged for him to take her away from her husband. Not surprisingly, the wife's own account completely avoids this.
* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: An interesting twist. All three of the stories told by the three individuals involved in some way involve the woman's ornate dagger, but none of them explain why the woodcutter didn't find it when he found the body. When the woodcutter explains what he saw of the affair, the dagger doesn't appear at all. The man who he's been telling the stories to figures out what is going on: [[spoiler: the woodcutter stole the dagger after everyone else had died or left; it's the knife he uses to defend the baby at the end]].
* WimpFight: In the Woodcutter's version of the duel between the Samurai and the bandit, they run around swinging desperately at each other with their weapons. It's often taken as one of the hints that his testimony isn't exactly truthful - a trained Samurai wouldn't have done such a thing - but this was how Kurosawa commonly depicted fights.
* WorldHalfFull
----
