Rashomon And Blowup: A Study Of Truth

1723 Words4 Pages

Rashomon and Blowup: A Study of Truth

In a story, things are often not quite what they seem to be. Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon and Michaelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up are good examples of stories that are not what they first appear to be. Through the medium of film, these stories unfold in different and exiting ways that give us interesting arguments on the nature of truth and reality.

Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon tells the story of a murder. It flashes back to the event four times, each time as told by a different person. The present-time section of the plot occurs at a gate under which some characters take shelter from the rain. Three men can be found there - a woodcutter who repeatedly proclaims his misunderstanding, a priest who says that what has occurred is worse than anything else, and a third man who runs in from the rain for shelter and merely seems interested in a good story, as long as it's not a "sermon" from the priest. At the prompting of the third man, the woodcutter tells the story - providing the interesting story device of stories (the murder from 4 perspectives) within a story (the trial) within a story (the men at the gate). The tale he tells revolves around a bandit, Tajomaru, who has attacked a couple wandering through the woods, tying the husband up and forcing himself on the wife. The woodcutter found the husband dead in the forest, but what actually happened between these people is inconclusive. Tajomaru, the wife, the husband (through a medium), and the woodcutter all present different and irreconcilable versions of the events in question to the authorities.

The first version, as told by Tajomaru, portrays him in a brave light. It has him taking the woman and falling in love with her. He fights a duel with the husband, displaying dazzling swordsmanship, and kills him. Tajomaru's story seems plausible until the wife tells her story. In her version, she is violated and then rejected by her husband because of her violation. The film is not terribly clear on how the husband dies in this version. The husband is next to tell his version of the story, and it is again wildly divergent. His version has the woman begging Tajomaru to take her with him and to kill the husband. This causes Tajomaru to reject the woman and free the husband. The husband claims that he took his own life and that someone stole an expensive dagger from his b...

... middle of paper ...

...uld be a bush. The film ends with Thomas watching some white faced students mime at playing imaginary tennis. Interested, he watches and even begins to participate with them, throwing back the imaginary ball when it bounces out of the court. And in the last scene, we see that he has disappeared from where he was standing. This is Antonioni's final thought, that everything shown is unreal, that there is no truth to be established here. The harder we seek for truth, the less there is to discover.

Both films give us intriguing insights into the nature of truth. From Rashomon we see the argument that absolute truth cannot be discovered, that the notion of truth itself is a decaying thing. Kurosawa seems to argue that truth may in fact be a relative thing and that a whole truth, a pure truth can never be discovered. Antonioni's Blowup seems to argue that truth is like Thomas's blow up - to fix upon and blow up a piece of reality, serves only to bring it into greater abstraction, and perhaps further from the truth. In both of these stories, things are not what they first appear to be, and when they are examined to discover the truth, it escapes us, perhaps because of the very attempt.

Open Document