Law On Reels; Rashomon In The Courtroom-Exploring The Paradox Of Subjectivity In Legal Proceeding

Rashomon also has one of the most spectacular sword fights ever filmed. The battle itself is nothing special, but the emotion and ludicrous realism elevate it to a new level of cinematic sword combat. The battle is presented from two separate views, and while the fight from the first perspective is acceptable, it pales in compared to the fight from the second perspective. The second rendition of the battle is filled with reality, humour, and tension as the two collide as if their lives were on the line.

Storyline

The foremost dialogue we hear anybody say in Rashomon is, “I just do not understand.” It is the priest (Minoru Chiaki) discussing with the commoner (Kichijiro Ueda) and the woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) outside Kyoto during a civil war, and he is referring to the gossip of brutal death and possible sexual assault in 12^th century Japan. The details of a horrific afternoon in the woods do not line up since they are provided by at least four persons, not counting the priest himself. A samurai (Masayuki Mori) is assassinated, and his wife (Machiko Ky) is raped. Furthermore, each scenario contains a deranged individual known as the bandit, Tajomaru (Toshiro Mifune), who committed the rape and/or murder. Both men lament a disturbing series of events; they tell the peasant that they had just returned from court, where they testified against a bandit for the death of a samurai and the rape of his wife. The woodcutter claims to have discovered the samurai’s body, but the priest claims to have seen the samurai and his wife in the forest.

Nonetheless, the priest and the woodcutter heard the contradictory statements of the abused woman, the bandit Tajomaru, and even the dead samurai through a medium in court (Noriko Honma). Each account varied, with two things remaining constant: a rape and a death. Not even the charge of murder is consistent. The bandit claims he fooled the samurai and tied him up, raped the wife in front of her husband, and then duelled the husband to defend the wife’s integrity, triumphing. According to the wife’s narrative, her husband insulted her for allowing herself to be raped so swiftly, and in a fit of rage, she murdered her husband. The husband’s soul attests that his wife agreed to flee with the bandit after the rape, provided the bandit killed her husband. The bandit denied it, and the husband committed himself out of despair with his wife’s knife, which he believed was stolen from his corpse after his death by an unknown person.

After the priest and woodcutter relate three testimonies and three different interpretations of the same story to the peasant, there is yet another indication of scepticism. Finally, the woodcutter acknowledges that his court evidence was incorrect and that he was there during the incident. He claims to have witnessed the bandit begging the woman to flee with him following the rape. The woman answers indecisively in the woodcutter’s version, demanding that the two men combat for her hand. The men reluctantly duel, and the bandit kills the samurai, but the wife and bandit flee in panic.

None of the men at the Kyoto gate understands what it means; nonetheless, the woodcutter’s confessed attendance at the scene raises the question of whether or not he took the dagger from the samurai’s body, maybe to sell it for a hefty profit. The peasant, satisfied that there is no sense in such anecdotal discrepancies, concludes pessimistically, “Do not worry about it-it is not as though men were reasonable.”

The three men at the gate then hear a baby cry. The amoral peasant proceeds to sell the child’s garments for bread, but the priest and woodcutter are horrified. The priest, already perplexed and dissatisfied by the testimonies, is unable to answer, but the woodcutter steps in. He takes the infant into his arms, and as the rain stops and the light begins to shine through the clouds, the woodcutter begins to return home, vowing to protect the child.

Nonetheless, because none of the recountings, not even the woodcutter’s testimony, can be reconciled, Rashomon becomes a narrative of untrustworthy narrators from whom no truth can be ascertained. At the film’s climax, there is some optimism, but how much we believe the woodcutter rests primarily on the audience. More least one, if not all, of the testimony, including those of the woodcutters, must be fake. Given the contradictory possibilities of the samurai’s death, the missing dagger, and numerous other loose ends, they cannot all be true. Each of the three people involved confessed and claimed responsibility for the samurai’s murder, although the woodcutter, who has previously revised his tale, may have lied again to escape being implicated as a thief if he shamelessly took the samurai’s knife.

This unresolvable doubt remains Rashomon’s most interesting aspect, in that meaning cannot always be derived from the events in the film, at least not within the context of the plot. Meaning, like a great piece of conceptual art, must be invested in subjective truth, while there is no chance for objective truth within the constraints of the film. Fortunately, Shimura’s moving portrayal as the woodcutter leads us to think that, while he may have deceived and perhaps stolen the knife in the forest, his woodcutter adopts the kid out of some hidden remorse and desire for forgiveness. Shimura was undoubtedly cast for this purpose by Kurosawa, who frequently cast him in the most melancholy parts. Shimura is responsible for the film’s concluding minutes, which offer a vaguely promising ending rather than an atmosphere of unattainable, painful ambiguity.

Rashomon and Law

A few researchers have discovered that eyewitness-identification testimony at a crime scene can be very unreliable; therefore, it is expected that law enforcement agencies and courts will follow social scientists’ recommendations when using and assessing eyewitness techniques, such as line-ups, in criminal cases. The Rashomon effect refers to the dishonest unreliability of eyewitnesses. It defines a circumstance in which the people involved provide inconsistent interpretations or explanations of an occurrence.

Since the 1960s, social scientists have established via several research that there are considerable grounds to be worried about the accuracy of eyewitness identification testimony used in criminal prosecutions. Although witnesses are frequently certain that their recollection is correct when identifying a suspect, the flexible nature of human memory and visual perception makes eyewitness testimony one of the most untrustworthy pieces of evidence.

Eyewitness testimony frequently has a fatal fault; it is not always correct. A witness giving misleading or incorrect testimony might result in a wrongful conviction. There is conflicting evidence on the credibility of eyewitness testimony. Witness reports, according to some academics, are often accurate. However, the credibility of eyewitness evidence is sometimes called into doubt due to the circumstances that impact a witness’s capacity to recall an incident correctly.

The Rashomon effect haunts the many strands of the investigations into the 2002 Gujarat riots, the Sunanda Pushkar death case, the Tikku-Kakkar double murder, the Aarushi-Hemraj double murder, the Neeraj Grover murder, the Nithari massacre, the most recent Sushant Singh Rajput case, the Disha Salian case, the Palghar lynching case, and the heinous Hathras gangrape, People are concerned when law enforcement appears to take weeks, months, or years to track down, apprehend, and convict an offender; when a dangerous criminal is released early from jail owing to a lack of eyewitnesses, he can go on to perpetrate a series of violent crimes.

The film beautifully depicts how different people’s perspectives may be on the same scenario and how tough it can be to arrive at the actual story. The film exemplifies the adage that there are two sides to every coin and the coin itself.

Views are personal.