Rashomon: Harris Theatre, A Film and My Downtown Travels

On Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2022, I set out to watch a 7:30 PM showing of Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon at the Harris Theatre on Liberty Ave. The main problem with this task was that, due to circumstances regarding space and time, I had to drive there.

Driving in downtown Pittsburgh when you don’t know the roads is like catching a glimpse of the seventh layer of hell. The cars move too fast, and the roads are so tangled together that your GPS will be just as confused as you are. On one occasion, I accidentally took a wrong turn, and while my map application took its sweet time readjusting my route, the robot voice gleefully told me to drive headfirst into a wall at 45 miles per hour. With all the honking going on around me, I was of half a mind to do just that. The drivers of downtown Pittsburgh have my utmost respect and commendation for not going completely insane.

Once I finally arrived at the Harris Theatre, I had to find parking. I’m lucky enough that the campus newspaper is ready to reimburse me for this cost. If you don’t have an organization ready to do that, I am sorry.

On my way out of the parking garage, I saw a car parked, like most cars, on the side of the road, and yet this one had a bright yellow parking citation tucked underneath its windshield wipers. I didn’t see anything the car violated, so it must have been one of those invisible violations. It’s a shame. Due to this city’s strange idea of urban planning, many people are forced to own cars. And yet, when the time comes to park them, they are punished for it one way or another. Sometimes, it seems that what this city wants you to do is to buy a car and never get out of it. I prayed for the soul of the owner of that car. If the city of Pittsburgh could charge me for that, I know it would.

At this point, I realized that I had underestimated the roads, and I was about ten minutes late. A note to those looking to attend a showing at the Harris Theatre: This is not like other cinemas. The movie starts more or less on time. You don’t have the leeway of a half hour of advertisements the way you do at other theatres. Lucky for me, I have access to a very legal online copy of Rashomon, so I watched the movie beforehand.

The woman working at the ticket booth was very nice to me. If there is any testament to how well the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust takes care of its theatres, it is the niceness of the employees and the cleanliness of the venue. The Harris Theatre is very clean, so don’t worry about that.

I went into the cinema and sat all the way at the back. There were three other people there. Apparently, back in the 60s, Liberty Ave was a red light district, and the theatre (not yet named the Harris Theatre) showed porn films. I wondered if, 60 years ago, any of the attendees secretly wished they would show Rashomon instead.

Kurosawa’s film has a reputation for unreliable narration. To hear it told by the cinema experts of old, nothing like Rashomon had ever existed until Rashomon. Akira Kurosawa’s attempt to destroy the myth of objective truth is almost lost on me, as a Zoomer who has always been surrounded by films influenced by films that were influenced by Rashomon. In a way, I have seen Rashomon through the hundreds of films it inspired. In all honesty, the thing that stood out the most to me was the way everything looked.

The shots, like the script, forsake any pretense of objectivity. People are highlighted and elevated like figures of myth. There is a single digit number of characters here, and each of them is tossed around the set in an attempt to unravel them completely. Light is treated not as a toy, but as a weapon, one with the capacity to indict every subject it falls upon. Light is the tool of guilt, and it will lay bare the depravity of all those who stand in it.

In the film, a priest and a woodcutter take refuge from the violent rain underneath the Rashomon city gate. The woodcutter mutters, over and over again. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand.” A man approaches them, also taking refuge from the storm, and he asks the woodcutter to tell him the story.

From that point, the woodcutter and the priest recount a trial for the murder of a samurai whose body was found in a forest. Involved are the woodcutter, who found the body in the forest; the priest, who met with the victim and his wife before his death; a bandit, who sought to rape the wife of the victim; the wife herself; and a spiritual medium who channels the soul of the murdered samurai into her body.

As the stories are told, we bounce back and forth between the stormy Rashomon city gate and the beautiful sun-dappled forest where the violent crimes occurred. According to the bandit’s account, he killed the samurai. According to the woman’s account, she may have killed the samurai. According to the samurai, he killed himself. The only constants in all the stories are that the bandit at some point ties the samurai up, and then afterwards rapes the woman.

In this film, the camera acts as a window into each person’s account. At some point, you almost forget that you are bearing witness to a story within a story within yet another story. In the case of the spiritual medium, you can add another layer of separation, as the medium must commune with the heavens to get the samurai’s story. It’s almost like a visual game of telephone. We have only this priest and woodcutter to trust about the events that transpired within the trial.

At the end, we learn that the woodcutter lied during the trial, and that he actually witnessed all the crimes. What actually happened was: After the bandit raped the woman, he and the samurai fought pathetically, with the bandit eventually prevailing. The woodcutter refused to tell the story during the trial because he did not wish to get involved. If he’s telling the truth, then he also refused to get involved while a woman was being attacked. To an extent, it’s hard to blame him. The bandit seemed to be an exceptionally strong man. Perhaps the woodcutter’s axe should have been enough. Perhaps he should have caught the bandit unawares. Society doesn’t prepare us for these situations.

The whole time, I couldn’t get out of my head that the woman is getting the worst deal out of all of them. The woodcutter can cry all he wants about how little he understands, but the woman was violated, and in all accounts, her husband, a supposedly valiant samurai, refused to defend her. To him, she was now spoiled and worthy of death. Her virtue, her “purity”, was more important than her life. She did not choose to be born. She did not choose to be born a woman. She did not choose to be attacked. She did not choose to be saddled with the burden of purity. And yet those with power, the men with the swords, decide the value of her life, and they decide she is forfeit. I wouldn’t blame her if she did kill her husband.

Back at the city gates, the storm rages on. The entire time, the priest tries to hold onto his faith in humanity, but by the time all the stories are told, it, like so many stones and mountains, has been eroded by the rain.

The men are interrupted by an abandoned baby, crying. The commoner, the one who incites the entire film at the beginning, robs the baby of a kimono and a necklace. The woodcutter tries to stop him. He is as helpless to stop this injustice as he was that day in the forest.

Then, perhaps in an effort to save his own soul, the woodcutter takes the baby home to take care of with his family. The storm lifts, and the woodcutter walks off with his new son into the brightness of the new day. The priest watches, clinging to the last string of hope the woodcutter has left him. Fade to black. Lights.

I imagine you could read the movie as one long explanation the woodcutter gave to his wife to explain why he came home late carrying another woman’s baby. After all, everything we saw on camera was, in some way or another, a story told to us by someone else. Akira Kurosawa is the woodcutter. He is the filmmaker, the voyeur, watching tragedies and relating them to us the only way he knows how.

I walked out of the theatre and decided on a whim to take a walk around. The weather that night could best be described as confused. It wasn’t too hot, nor was it too cold, but it was not exactly pleasant. The air smelled severely of car exhaust.

On every other sidewalk was a homeless person. Due to the convenience of credit cards and the fact that I make most of my purchases from home, I don’t carry cash anymore. I wonder when the day was that I stopped caring about paper money. Because of that, I had nothing to give to anyone. An entire method of helping people, despite how small it is, is slowly being erased. The winter will be cold. Homeless people, like the wife of the samurai, are being punished merely for existing. This city has failed them.

We are all waiting for the punishment of a crime we did not commit. It will come in the form of floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, and storms. And when it comes, the refuge of a city gate will not be enough to protect us. The stories we tell won’t be of sun dappled groves, but of slightly less ferocious storms, which we will remember with something almost resembling fondness. When our electrical grids fail, and the sun goes down, there will be no light to lay bare the failures of man. We will not need it to see.

The drive home was almost as stressful as the drive there. There are roads that I didn’t even know I was allowed to drive on until I saw other people driving on them. My fellow drivers were impatient with me, but I can’t blame them. They don’t know how unfamiliar I am with these roads.

If you ever get a chance to see Rashomon, do it. And if you can, catch a movie at the Harris Theatre. I highly recommend it. Just make sure you make it there on time, don’t get a parking ticket, and maybe keep a few coins on hand.

Story by: Yousuf Ibrahim (yli5000@psu.edu)