Rashomon

The "Rashomon effect" occurs whenever at least two witnesses provide competing testimonies about a given event. The word is attributed to Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, which in turn is adapted from Ryu Akutagawa's short stories "Rashomon" (1915) and "In a Grove" (1922). In Rashomon, four testimonies are relayed by two narrators to one listener, who provides a surrogate for the cinematic audience. Rather than getting one reliable story, which most film-goers in the mid-twentieth century expected from feature films, Rashomon's viewers instead get a frame narrative built around an unstable system of stories, which acquire significance as something like a variable myth cycle rather than as a mutually determined series of events.