"I don't care if it's a lie as long as it's entertaining" says the "commoner" in Rashomon. He is the man to whom all the versions of the story are told. His character is ultimately revealed to be bleak, unrepentant and deeply pessimistic. Yet he is the one who is a spectator among many: alongside us and the never-seen judge at the court. It is as a stand-in for the spectator that I find his words most compelling.
His words, like most of his lines, are chilling, in the context of the film. But what do they say about the categories of truth and lies, or reality and fiction, in the realm of film spectatorship? One of the things that has always fascinated me about film is that it is capable of both categories at the same time. As Maya Deren writes: "The reality of a tree confers its truth upon the events we cause to transpire beneath it." What a backdrop for art. The story that unfolds, in narrative cinema, takes place in a world that looks like ours. And so film can purport, as in the case of documentary, to replicate the real. Cinema can pass fictions off as reality.
Looking like reality is not enough to make film into an art. Arnheim: "there is a serious danger that the film maker will rest content with such shapeless reproduction." He calls for interpretation, use of camera positions, to bring out the unfamiliar in a familiar object, writing, "Art begins where mechanical reproduction leaves off."
So our theorists call upon filmmakers to use the technology of film to do more than duplicate reality. With gusto, they call to enhance it, manipulate it. But this manipulation -- what about its dark side? Rashomon asks its viewers to question whether an author's story, even when visibly mirroring a world that looks like ours, is trustworthy. Even in film, especially in film -- when we expect the visual representation to stand in for the original it is replacing -- the document lies. It is always a construction. Is there room for redemption? Does it matter if "it's a lie as long as it's entertaining"?
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I was struck by the camera angles in Rashomon, especially in the courtroom scenes, where the witnesses faced the audience and spoke directly to the camera, as though we were the unseen courtroom judge who would be required to pass judgment. In a sense, we are, though we do have information that the courtroom wouldn't have in that we get, at the end, the perspective of the woodcutter. Of course, the nature of the film calls this account into question since it is just one version among many different versions, all of which are mututally exclusive.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, they contain similar elements. In both Tajomaru's version and the woodcutter's, the woman is fiery and passionate. Both Tajomaru and the husband say, it different ways, that the woman asked Tajomaru to kill her husband (there is an element of this in the woodcutter's story as well). In the woman's story and in the woodcutter's, she sobs on the ground. There are common threads. During each sequence the camera seemed to focus on the point of view character, giving the audience a good view of that person, rather than putting the audience in the place of the character (I was particularly struck by the moment in the woman's version where she is clinging to her husband and slowly pulls away. His back is to us, immovable and blank in vivid contrast to the intensity of her emotion, and so all we really see is the look of horror on her face. I was reminded of Arnheim's discussion of the difficult of showing the faces of two people in conversation with each other). I thought this was especially telling in relationship to the courtroom scenes where the audience is clearly standing in for the courtroom judge. Are the characters lying, or are they telling the story as they remember it? The document lies and it is always a construction, but couldn't the same be said of memory?
Of course, film is a representation of reality, not reality. If done well it is, as the theorists point out, a manipulated and enhanced representation. It is narrativized into coherent threads; camera angles are chosen in ways that will highlight symbolic elements and draw the audience's attention to certain things. It is specifically articulated and intentionally constructed. Perhaps the difference lies in that meticulous intentionality. As Sonora points out in her post, even reality is never completely unmediated.
I don't know that I have an answer for the question of redemption. Rashomon is bleak, and doesn't flinch from the idea that objective truth either cannot be known or never existed in the first place. However, at the end, the most sympathetic of the characters, and the only one we have not seen do something horrible (or in the case of the woodcutter failure to intervene in the rape and murder, failure to do something good) regains his faith in humanity when the woodcutter takes the baby. In his confusion and disgust, the monk stands in for the audience as much as any of the other characters do. That is a redemptive moment, provided we are willing to trust that from of a text that denies objective truth.