Rashômon (French Edition)

Release Info

---

At a friend's wedding, Robert finds evidence that his daughter was dragged into the dark and raped. Much later on, Vicente's flashback shows that although his actions were heinous enough he didn't go all the way. In One Night at McCool's , three different male characters relate their often conflicting impressions of Liv Tyler 's character Jewel, revealing the particular brand of misogyny present in each one.

The film Rules Of Engagement is about a Marine colonel who's accused of killing innocent civilians outside an American embassy in Yemen, and it's up to his defense attorney to find out if the colonel's claims are substantial. In the end, it turns out every civilian present, including a young child, was actively attacking. The entire premise of Vantage Point. The events leading up to an attempt to abduct the US President , told from eight perspectives, each revealing more information than the last.

Only in the last telling do we have the whole story and the aftermath. Though in this case, none of the perspectives are objectively wrong; it's just that most of them are operating with incomplete information.

Navigation menu

Wonderland depicts a true-life example, in which two different parties, one of whom is porn legend John Holmes, give detectives accounts of the events leading to a brutal multiple murder. Each party places the greater share of blame on the other, and as in real life, no definitive conclusion is reached; although a third account is introduced again true-to-life, though it did not surface until after Holmes' trial that indicates that not only was Holmes lying, he was involuntarily involved. In Eve's Bayou , both Louis and teenaged daughter Cicely's accounts differ on what happened the night after Louis had too much to drink after a heated argument with wife Roz, and Cicely went to sit with him.

In Cicely's version, Louis got aggressive and tried to rape her , and when she resisted, he slapped her to the floor. This leads to Eve placing a voodoo curse on him. Later, we find out Louis' version of that night, where she was the aggressor, giving him a sweet peck on the lips then suddenly started kissing him "like a woman," and he slapped her to get her off of him. The movie ends without us ever finding out what really happened.

The Way of the Samurai has a minor case of this occurring during a Flash Back scene. Both Ghost Dog and Louie the mobster have a flashback to when they first encountered each other. In both cases Ghost Dog is getting beat viciously by a group of thugs, and Louie comes over to end the disturbance.

Contribute to This Page

In Louie's version of events the leader of the group hesitates a second, then pulls a gun and points it at Louie, at which point Louie shoots him in self-defense and the rest of his gang run away. This western begins with a shootout, which results in the arrest of a man Sterling Hayden for wounding his wife Anita Ekberg and killing her parents. At the subsequent trial, several people describe different points of view on the events leading up to the shooting, with the man painted as either a blameless cuckold or a brutal thug.

In Surveillance This is the non-linear style way David Lynch tells a story of a murder from the surviving dirty cop to the drug stealing criminals eventually the kid reveals sort of what actually happens. Downplayed in Inside Man , which uses this as one component among many of its "pulling off the perfect bank robbery" plot.

The story intercuts between activities in the Hostage Situation in the story's present to interviews with witnesses after it's resolved, some of whom are lying.

The busty female hostage, for instance, is one of the bank robbers. We ultimately learn that taking hostages was merely a diversion and the real plan was to rob a safe deposit box, then hide Clive Owen 's character in a hole dug inside the bank so he could simply walk out the front door with the loot after the bank resumed normal operations.

The Last Jedi does this with the retelling of Kylo Ren's fall to darkness, between two characters. Next, Kylo tells Rey that he turned to the Dark Side because Luke tried to murder him in his sleep out of fear of his power. Finally, after Rey confronts him, Luke tells her the most complete version of the story: Luke immediately regretted it, but it was too late - Ben Solo saw his master's activated lightsaber and attacked. Luke views Ben's transformation into the dark Kylo Ren as his own fault and is racked by guilt. In the movie Marshall Based on a True Story of Sam Friedman and Thurgood Marshall's defense of a black chaffeur accused of raping and trying to kill his white employer , we first see her version of events—he raped her, tied her up, then threw her off a bridge.

Then we see his—the sex was consensual and she tried to kill herself in a panic over her infidelity being discovered. The real perpetrators of the crime, who appear throughout the film in talking-head interviews, differ in their recollections of how they came up with the idea to rob the library. Both versions are dramatized by the actors portraying them. As the film cuts between the two versions, the actors occasionally make a comment that actually pertains to the other version of the events just before the scene cuts to it.

Demetri Martin parodies this in one routine with the story of a bee sting, told from various, progressively more bizarre and unsympathetic perspectives: The person getting stung, a friend nearby, the bee, the newspaper the bee got swatted with, the chair that got hit with the newspaper, her friend's phone, the phone's battery, a squirrel in a nearby tree, the tree the squirrel was in, the ointment she put on, and finally, God. A young woman, her mother, and two men one of them being the boss of the other , travel on a train. The train enters a tunnel.

The sound of a kiss is heard, followed quickly by a slap. One of the men kissed my daughter, but she defended her honor. One of the men tried to kiss me, but kissed my mother in the darkness instead, and she slapped him on the face! This idiot kissed the young lady and she tried to slap him, but she missed in the dark and hit me instead!

Rashomon - Wikipedia

The other man thinks: I made a kissing sound in the air and slapped my boss on his face! The true story of the Sutpens is pieced together from information given by three different tellings. Each of the tellers doesn't know the whole story, and may be changing or making up some of what they say. They don't call it a precursor of the modern mystery novel for nothing. Arthur Phillips' Angelica features the same possibly supernatural events told from four different P. This can be seen in Harry Potter: Dumbledore and Trelawney both tell different versions of the story of Trelawney's first prophecy, neither of which turns out to be exactly true.

The time when James saved Snape's life crop up several times, from a few perspectives. In the first book, Dumbledore mentions to Harry in passing that James saved Snape's life and Snape never forgave him for it, because it meant he had to repay the debt before he could go back to "hating [Harry's father's] memory in peace". In the third book, when Harry calls out Snape for not being grateful to his father for saving him, Snape replies that James was only saving his own skin because the cause of near death was a prank James was playing and, had it been successful, he would have been expelled.

At the end of the third book, Lupin explains that Sirius convinced Snape to enter the Shrieking Shack while Lupin was transforming into a werewolf inside it. Snape only suspected the werewolf bit and James kept him from going all the way in. However, Snape believed that James and Lupin were in on the plot the whole time. It features four Unreliable Narrators , all with his particular take on the same intricate series of events.

As an added twist, each subsequent narrator is moved to write his own version after reading the earlier ones, so each subsequent testimony also includes clarifications, annotations, comments, criticism, refutations and fillings of the blanks. There's no "definitive version of what really happened" either. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner is told from the heads of something like fourteen narrators, and the only half-sane one in the entire book gets sent to an insane asylum for trying to burn his mother's steadily-decaying body in someone else's barn and while inside the asylum, goes crazy.

Major points and potentially a Ph. D to whoever can actually figure out who's reliable and what's going on. The three holy books of the Abrahamic faiths have this to varying degrees. The Christian New Testament begins with the four Gospels, each credit as being "The Gospel according to" a different author. There's some noticeable discrepancies between them for which non-Christians sometimes cite as proof for it being inaccurate, making this trope Older Than Feudalism.

One such example is how each Gospel portrayed Jesus: Matthew had him as an Expy of Moses and cited a myriad of Old Testament prophecies to really drive the whole Messiah thing home; the intended audience was probably Jews. Mark's gospel was Darker and Edgier and puts emphasis on Jesus' miracles because his audience was Christians persecuted by the Romans. John's gospel is the most mystic-like of the four and writes a Higher Self version of Jesus to emphasize His divinity to committed Christians.

A scholarly article on the subject: The Old Testament features two different stories of Creation, one immediately after the other: The confusion about Goliath probably stems from there being two Goliaths. Waved in the plot of Chronicle of a Death Foretold: While not made in the traditional way, only the main facts remain with each retelling, as people can't even remember what weather was that day, and it goes down from there.

This is one of the few things about this novel we're reasonably sure of. The Lover , a novel by Israeli writer A. Yehoshua, is told from the viewpoints of the six major characters. Hook's Big Black Box has a group of friends meet up at a college reunion, and end up discussing events that happened when they were students. All of the flashbacks are unreliable, and all of the narrators tried to double-cross their friends at least once. Santiago Gamboa's Necropolis has the life story of a speaker who killed himself during a writer's congress retold three times by himself, his partner, and his wife.

Ken Kesey's novel Sometimes a Great Notion makes heavy use of this trope, weaving together the narratives of several warring family members and townspeople to illustrate the interpersonal conflicts surrounding a town-wide lumber strike. For added fun, sometimes POV shifts happen mid-sentence.

All three suffer from various degrees of self-delusion, especially Georgina. The Akutagawa short story that Rashomon is based on, In a Grove. Two people confess to the same murder, three if you count the dead man since he claims to have stabbed himself and would have bled to death anyways. Confusingly, "Rashomon" is also the name of an entirely different Akutagawa story, which is very creepy but rather less of a mind screw. Rashomon shares a theme with In a Grove — Self-Justification: An Old Retainer has been fired from his job and is under the Rashomon Gates contemplating suicide.

Then he sees an old hag who is seemingly doing unspeakable things to some dead bodies. He feels so much fear and revulsion that he is willing to die before letting the hag do whatever she is doing. When he tries to stop her, the hag reveals she is robbing the corpses because she needs the money and they not. The Old Retainer realizes that he was thinking first of suicide, then of dying for a good cause, and now he understand that his feelings are nothing more than a way to justify his acts, so he chooses to do the act that benefit him the most, and steal the goods from the old hag.

Robert Browning 's The Ring and the Book, an epic-length series of dramatic monologues based on a real Italian murder case. Everybody involved chimes in, including the murderer and the victim. Surprisingly, a picture book: Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne. It gives a contrasting point of view of the events of that series without actually contradicting any of it, while simultaneously filling in a variety of Plot Holes.

The second half of the book tells the conclusion of the conflict that Corran Horn went to the academy to learn to deal with, which is related to, but separate from, the story of the happenings at the academy. Most consider it better than the trilogy. Agatha Christie 's Five Little Pigs has Hercule Poirot solve a murder that took place sixteen years before by listening to the stories of the 5 people involved, who each provided a slightly different account on what had actually happened.

An odd variation on this concept is used in Quills Window. Events are portrayed objectively as they happen- the important change, however, is that different characters interpret these events in different ways. We'll see the event in question from the point of view of one character in the book, but later on it will be referenced by other characters as having had entirely different personal connotations.

Hoot has a variant. It's narrated in the third person, and as the story jumps between three main characters - Roy Eberhardt, Officer Delinko, and Curly Branitt - there are occasional narration overlaps. For instance, when Curly encounters the guard dog trainer Kalo trying to round up his dogs after the snakes are placed out, Delinko stops by and the event is described from Curly's point-of-view. In a later chapter that follows Delinko, a small summary of the same scene from his perspective is shown. Used in The Bartimaeus Trilogy. All the narrators are unreliable, with Kitty being the closest to a reliable one.

Rashomon: No 5 best crime film of all time

Nathaniel's Badass Longcoat outfit at the beginning of the second book. Whereas Nathaniel thinks that it is, well, badass, Bartimaeus finds it completely ridiculous and Kitty proclaims it kind of stupid, though it is not clear if she just says this because she hates magicians in general or because the outfit really is stupid.

Bartimaeus' illusions of grandeur are dashed by the third-person and therefore more accurate narration of Nathaniel or Kitty, though of course he's always damn cool, whether he calmly asks the whiny boy to "please be quiet" or shrieks at him to "shut up! Spoon River Anthology has this as one of its main conceits. Unusually for this trope, we generally get an idea of what's true — for instance, a former mayor and moral crusader is clearly a Knight Templar and murderer.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas. Like Akutagawa's "In a Grove," which it may have inspired, it contains testimony from both the living and the dead. The story is divided into two main sections: Essentially, both are unreliable narrators , but the Sinner's account is especially skewed towards portraying him as more noble and righteous. For instance, according to eyewitnesses, he killed his brother by stabbing him in the back from the shadows. He himself claims he shouted a warning and engaged in a duel. The characters briefly discuss how they got out of a particular jam. One remembers getting world leaders together to save the planet.

Another remembers unicorns flying to their rescue. None are correct; their escape was only a simulation, and they're actually about to get blown up. The prologues to each book of The Belgariad are an excerpt from an in-universe document that gives a piece of history relevant to the book in question—for the most part these are in accord, but the last one comes from The Book of Torak , holy text of the Religion of Evil authored by or possibly ghostwritten for by one of his Disciples the Big Bad.

It retells many of the same events but puts a radically different perspective on them- and one that Torak seems to actually believe, which really hits home just how crazy he is. The biographies of Belgarath and Polgara disagree on exactly how a lot of things went down.

In Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style , where the same story is told in 99 different ways, we have the subjective points of view of two protagonists. The Doctor Who New Adventures novel Lucifer Rising has a version involving a futuristic surveillance system that makes only a basic record of what happens, relying on computer extrapolation to fill in the details when it's played back.

It becomes both sides of a Rashomon Style dispute about what really happened in a certain conversation, producing two different extrapolations in which the speakers perform the same actions and say the same words, but the way they do it makes the difference between the version where one speaker was trying to help the other and the version where he was deliberately making matters worse. Carrie by Stephen King contains many versions of the same events by different characters, and, in some cases, by newspapers.

Only Revolutions has one side of the story by one protagonist, the other side of the story by the other protagonist. Given the sheer length of time that the story covers, it makes sense for there to be discrepancies. However, there are more than just discrepancies, as both sides tell it in a way to make themselves look good at various points and have different recollections altogether of certain events.

The Egyptian novel Miramar by Egypt's only Nobel Laureate for Literature , Naguib Mahfouz is told four times in the first person from the perspective of four lodgers at a pension a kind of boarding house in s Alexandria: All four men pursue the young, uneducated, but plucky peasant woman Zohra, newly arrived from the countryside. All four stories end with the death — probably by suicide — of Sarhan. The narrators are biased but not really unreliable; they differ in their interpretation of character and motives, but don't disagree about facts.

Mahfouz used the same technique in Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth , which tells the story of Pharaoh Akhenaten 's short reign and scandalous behaviour from the POV of more than a dozen different characters. Most of them agree on what happened, though why is another matter The only thing most of them agree on is that this monotheism business died with the Pharaoh. In his memoir Hitch , Christopher Hitchens discusses Rashomon Style when recounting an event he shared with good friend Martin Amis, who had recorded his version in his own prior memoir. In Sarah Waters' Fingersmith , the two girls involved give their sides of the stories and their narratives overlap as the book's twist unfolds.

It seems Marcela, an orphaned rich girl, in a whim decided to be shepherdess, and she is so beautiful all his City Mouses suitors have become shepherds only to woe her. She never give anyone any hope, so the Sierra Morena is full of Love Martyrs , and they are going tomorrow to the funeral of one of them, Chrysostom.

Pedro describes Marcela as a good person. At last, Marcela appears at the funeral and claims that she is So Beautiful, It's a Curse and, as a free, decent woman, she had the right to reject anyone. Nobody says, but everybody implies, Spurned into Suicide. Not present through the whole text, but events in Dirge for Prester John are sometimes told from different, and conflicting, points of view. Namely John and Hagia's narration. And Sefalet's two mouths. Professor Mmaa's Lecture is written from the termites' viewpoint, but the epilogue has the ending and the backstory presented from the viewpoint of humans living near the termite mound.

The first three books are each from the POV of one the three protagonist siblings, so the early events of the series from their hatching until the raid on the egg cave and their scattering get this treatment — with each book, the Copper becomes increasingly sympathetic while AuRon becomes less so; their parents AuRel and Irelia seem like completely different characters in each book; and recurring antagonist the Dragonblade has a slightly different personality in each in AuRon's he's a one-dimensional dragon hunter, in Wistala's he's a Noble Demon , and in the Copper's he's a straight Knight Templar.

The history of A Song of Ice and Fire is filled to the brim with conflicting accounts of the same events thanks to gossip and biased historians. The Stonemongers claim the Ironskins stole the shield after giving it as a gift to the Stonemongers two thousand years ago for rescuing an Ironskin daughter from trolls, while the Ironskins insist that they had traded the shield to the Stonemongers in exchange for mining rights that were subsequently never given and had simply taken the shield back as recompense. Gotrek resolves this by taking the shield, hacking it to pieces and throwing the pieces into the fire.

It cancels the clans' grudges, in that they now have a grudge against Gotrek. The same footage of apparent paranormal phenomena gets replayed with small differences in order to undermine the viewer's sense of reality - being broadcast in the pre-DVR days, the audience couldn't rewind and replay their own recording to check whether they really had seen what they remembered seeing. In one episode Patrick recalls his first meeting with Sally, in which they had a conversation that didn't entirely seem to make sense.

Sally's recollection is that Patrick was staggeringly rude to her overweight friend, who didn't even appear in his version; the implication is that he's such a Jerkass Kavorka Man that the existence of unattractive women doesn't even register. Likewise, Sally's recounting has her and Patrick making out to something from Madame Butterfly , whereas Patrick's account - somewhat more accurate - has them making out to the Spider-Man theme. This happens in the Ugly Betty episode, "Crimes of Fashion" where Betty interrogates Christina, Amanda, Marc, Claire and then Alexis in order to find out which one of them pushed Christina down a staircase.

Each suspect supplies a piece of the story which helps Betty build up to the final conclusion that it had to have been Daniel however, later on Betty discovers it was really Alexis who had done it, which also explained her noticeably vague and shorter story. To Archie the plumber acts and dresses like a Mafia Don while the assistant is a menacing, Black Power sign throwing street thug with a giant afro and chip on his shoulder. To Michael the plumber is a submissive blue collar flunkie while the assistant is a modern-day Stepin Fetchit; an archetype of Uncle Tomfoolery.

Naturally, Edith tells the real story. Perfect Strangers had an episode involving an encounter with a thug at a camping lodge. There was a minor subversion in that the first two stories were so over the top, nobody believed them. The police officer then asked if someone could tell him what happened without trying to sound like Indiana Jones.

Everyone pointed to Balkie. Diff'rent Strokes had an episode like this involving a burglary. Appropriately enough, the episode title was "Rashomon II". Also used in The X-Files , usually as the basis for a comedic episode. In season 3 episode " Jose Chung's From Outer Space ", a famous author attempts to find out the truth behind an alien abduction by interviewing the abductees, witnesses, and FBI agents on the scene. Notable in that the story somehow gets more confusing with each successive version of the story, and every detail added not only fails to clarify anything but actually manages to make things even less clear , and by the end of it all that's been established is that absolutely nobody involved has even the faintest idea what actually happened, up to and including the audience Likewise, in the season 5 episode " Bad Blood ", Mulder and Scully have to corroborate their stories on what to tell Skinner about why a guy who most certainly wasn't a vampire but turned out to be anyway got staked through the heart — by Mulder.

And we get an inside view on how both Mulder and Scully see each other, which is generally comically different than how we normally see them. The Dick Van Dyke Show: Oddly, we get the real story from their pet goldfish. Used in a March episode of Alias , in which hilarity does not ensue - only ass-kicking. Farscape , " The Ugly Truth ", in which Crichton, Aeryn, Zhaan, D'Argo and Stark have to give their testimony of a conversation with Crais that ended up with a Plokavian merchant ship being blown up- each one being distorted for one reason or another.

Hilariously enough, all the characters in Crichton's recollection refer to Plokavians as " Plokavoids. All Plokavians perceive things in exactly the same way , with a Photographic Memory and no personal colouring of memory or false memory syndrome. To them, subjectivity is a foreign term. Afterwards, they compared their stories and figured out that it wasn't any of them, Stark had hit the fire control panel but Crichton had just disabled it, which put the cannon back under the control of the Trigger Happy Living Ship.

In this example, the characters' perspectives differed mainly in what they were able to see and how they interpreted certain lines of dialogue as is the norm for misunderstandings on this show , rather than blatantly skewing things in their favor as in most comedic examples. In general, they have a tendency to present themselves as being a bit more wise, thoughtful, and put-upon than they probably would be in the real situation — and the other immediately calls them on it.

There's also a rather amusing bit where Niles recounts a story Daphne told about a couple who would frequently experience The Immodest Orgasm right next to her bedroom wall at night, and her over-the-top efforts to show them up, culminating in this exchange: Niles, you know full well that Daphne merely told us that story, she did not act it out!

The Major's version of what happened was, to say the least, fascinating. It was, to say the most, perjury! No, to be fair, I have no doubt that he remembers it that way. And there was some truth to the story. It was October 11 and we were in Korea. Dean, this is a very serious investigation. We don't have time for any of your blablablablah. Blah , blablabla blah. And that's how it really happened. I don't sound like that, Dean! That's what you sound like to me. But I want you to know I'm here for you. I acknowledge your pain. I never said that!

The Dark Angel Chapter's history in Warhammer 40, has two distinctly different perspectives. From the Loyalists' point of view, the Fallen betrayed their Primarch Lion El'Johnson, and the Emperor, by staging a Traitor rebellion on their home planet while Loyalists were away fighting in the Horus Heresy. Having come home, El'Johnson was furious at seeing his planet seized from him, by his own forces no less, and bombed them into submission before a freak warp storm sparked into existence probably sent from the Traitor's daemonic masters , and destroyed the besieged planet and whisked the surviving away.

In the other version, some of the Fallen claim that they uncovered evidence that their Primarch wasn't as loyal to the Emperor as he appeared, and was deliberately holding back his forces to join the winning the side. The Fallen were then subsequently attacked and nearly exterminated in order to keep them quiet.

The freak warp storm rose up, perhaps by chance or divine intervention, and saved the lives of the true loyalists. The novel Fallen Anges just makes things even more confusing. At the very end of the novel we get the Cult's view of events: After the cult's defeat the planet of Caliban declares their independence from both the Imperium and El'Johnson, with a huge multitude of possible reasons as to why.

As a matter of fact, this could apply to 40K's fluff as a whole, with all of it being written by the various factions and allowing any continuity errors to be explained away as propaganda. Used in The Master Builder. Ten years before the play takes place, Solness the title character finished building a church tower in Hilde Wangel's hometown. After its dedication ceremony, something happened between them.

Hilde says Solness basically made out with her; Solness says he doesn't remember anything like that happening. He later agrees that it happened, but it's not clear if it really happened, or if he's just agreeing because she's a Yandere. Launcelot, Shylock's servant, complains to his father that he's so starved in Shylock's service that his ribs are visible.

However, Launcelot just spent the whole scene practicing deceptions on his father's blindness—which means that nothing he says about his appearance can really be trusted. This is open to interpretation, since actors of all sizes have played Launcelot over the years—but even if he is skinny, you could chalk that up to a high metabolism. The way Shylock tells it, Launcelot is a "huge feeder" who was eating him out of house and home.

Of course, Shylock is a miser, so he can't really be trusted either. And so it goes Bear in mind that it is likely that Shakespeare himself cast William Kempe in the role, who, shall we say, was not thin he probably also played Falstaff ; of course, which actor played which part in the original productions of Shakespeare's plays is not known for certain. Noises Off is a variation on this. First we see them performing ''Nothing On'' during rehearsal.

Then we see the play again from back stage as everything starts to fall apart between the actors. Finally we see Nothing On on its final day as the burnt out performers start to forget the lines and blocking until the whole thing descends into chaos. The Norman Conquests is similar — three separate plays on three separate nights about the same party, each set in a different place in the house. An independent theatre piece called The Wedding Pool.

Various scenes are reenacted a couple of times, often with only minor variations in what's actually said and done, but with radically altered pacing and tone of voice. Tommy's narration implies he plucked Bob out of obscurity until Bob takes over as narrator and reveals that he already had a hit single with another band "Short Shorts" by The Royal Teens.

Bob makes it appear that everything with the band was smooth sailing until Tommy's gambling debt was revealed. Once Nick takes over, it's shown that there were actually several incidents that created tension between the members and that one was just the straw that broke the camel's back. Invoked in Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3 , where each Cast Herd get information from similar sources that directly conflicts with each other.

The Big Bad was intentionally doing this, to forces all the characters to realize they need to stop fighting each other and realize they have to work together against whoever's behind the false information in order to get home. Each has a number of consistent elements, but offers many contradictory details as well. In the series' famous Mind Screw fashion, these tend to be treated as All Myths Are True , regardless of the conflicts and contradictions, or at least that all are Metaphorically True.

The number of Time Crashes and Cosmic Retcons also plays heavily into this trope, at several points merging two contradictory timelines to make them both true. This allows contradictory interpretations of the same figure to simultaneously exist due to various religions believing different versions. In Morrowind , the details of the Battle of Red Mountain and it's aftermath the disappearance of the Dwemer , the death of Lord Nerevar , the ascension of the Tribunal and Dagoth Ur as Physical Gods , and the transformation of the Chimer people into the modern Dunmer are recounted differently by each of the surviving parties — Dagoth Ur , Azura , the Tribunal Temple which worships Vivec , Vivec offering a different account that the Temple's version , the Ashlanders and the Dissident Priests.

The Dissident Priests alone have several differing accounts — that is, one of the things they criticize the Temple for is being so sensitive about different accounts of the events at Red Mountain, so they've taken it upon themselves to gather as many different accounts as they can. They don't make any claim to know which account is true , though they phrase things in a way that make clear that they find something off about the Temple's story. Ultimately, even upon completing the main quest, you are never told what actually happened at that time. However, by speaking to all of those involved and doing your own research with in-game documents and books , you can at least rule a few of the options out.

Nova has an interesting method of this. By the time the player arrives on the scene, a good amount of the story has already happened, and the only way to learn all of it is to play every faction's storyline But since you can only play one faction per playthrough, the only way to learn the full story is through Alternate Universes where the player chose different paths, resulting in wildly different outcomes and effectively making the player have different accounts of the backstory.

Throwing a spanner into it is the fact that not all facts learned during a storyline applies to all the other storylines. Override Nova's predecessor in the series has a more standard version — though in a twist it isn't apparent in the game itself, and it took Word of God to reveal it. Several of the storylines are mutually exclusive to do, but all of them happened it just wasn't the same human that was involved in all of them, obviously. The original game, Last Order , Before Crisis and Crisis Core all offer greatly differing accounts on the Nibelheim Incident, building on the original game's landmark use of Unreliable Narrator.

Within the compilation, there are no less than five different tellings of the incident: Cloud, Tifa, Zack, Sephiroth, and Shinra soldiers all remember it differently. The retellings all tend to hit the major points Sephiroth finds out about JENOVA, burns Nibelheim to the ground, Tifa gets slashed, Cloud throws Sephiroth into the Lifestream, and Zack dies fighting off Shinra's army , but lines are changed and interpretations vary greatly.

The first game has you solve a murder mystery that plays out like this. The Locksmith's and The Pickpocket's stories amount to this in Monaco. Both explain the same events that occurred over the course of the game that is, the events you're playing , but each has considerable conflicts in the other's story, something Inspector Voltaire tries to press The Pickpocket on during interrogation. Made worse by The Lookout's prologues; while her stories take place before The Locksmith's and The Pickpocket's story, they still have unresolved discrepancies , most important of which being how she claims The Cleaner is still on the loose, when the end of the Pickpocket's story shows he as The Hacker was captured with the rest of the crew.

Carbon uses this one to tell how the character's career got suddenly cut off. One occurrence happens in Neverwinter Nights during the judge quest in Charwood. You are asked to find out what really happened that fateful night the children were murdered.

Both lords, Jhareg and Kharlat, will tell slanted accounts of the event absolving themselves of the crime and blaming the other fully, unless you have found their respective diary, which lets you force them into telling the truth, that they were guilty in part of the crime. However, to find the real truth, you must force a confession from the demon who manipulated them both. Odin Sphere toys with this. The game has five separate main characters who interact at various points throughout the game.

That said, the game's presentation of events does not change with a different character, but in learning their story you often discover reasons for seemingly inexplicable actions. In Resident Evil 2 , the player can experience the first half of the story from one of the two main characters' perspectives and then play through the other character's account of the same events.

In Rift , it's difficult to say whether the Blood Storm got into Telara because the Vigil fucked up as the Defiant would like you to believe , or if people should have known better than to mess around with magitek as the Guardians would claim. To further confuse matters, each side's starting experience has the other just generally getting in the way out of sheer cussedness and brainlessness.

While Shovel Knight's own story is a straightforward heroic journey to defeat the Order of No Quarter and the Enchantress, the three other Campaigns seem to tell the same story, but from other perspectives. Plague of Shadows features Plague Knight , a hyperactive and slightly psychotic alchemist and former Knight of the Order of No Quarter, on his own quest to craft the Ultimate Potion to become the most powerful alchemist in the land. This story runs more-or-less parallel with Shovel Knight's story, and even changes a little bit to reflect on Plague Knight's own perspective; for example, Shovel Knight is shown to be more of a Jerk Ass to the Knights than in his own campaign, though this is speculated to be because Plague Knight has Jerk Ass tendencies himself, and so sees Shovel Knights actions as as unheroic as he himself is.

It also reveals certain unexplained parts of the the main game as the results of Plague Knight's doing. One hint that Plague Knight might not be telling the whole truth about what happened lies in his fight against Shovel Knight—who's using relics he could not have had at that point in the course of normal gameplay. Specter Knight's campaign, Specter of Torment , is a prequel to the other two, and therefore is less related, and we are currently in the dark regarding King Knight's campaign. Sonic Adventure does a watered-down version.

It has six different main storylines which intersect every so often, and at every intersection point the dialogue is slightly different between the versions used in each character's story. Sometimes this is used more like other examples, in which multiple characters are present at the same event, and whichever character you're playing as ends up being the one to take charge. The battle against E Gamma. In Sonic and Tails' storylines, the character you're playing as is about to beat Gamma but Amy steps in to stop him. In Gamma's storyline, Gamma is about to beat Sonic but Amy stops him instead.

Amy's storyline goes with Sonic' interpretation of events, but with Gamma still holding ground beforehand. In Super Robot Wars Z , there's an interesting example. The priest says that he saw the samurai with his wife traveling the same day the murder happened. In the grove he tied the samurai to a tree, then brought the samurai's wife there. She initially tried to defend herself with a dagger, but was eventually "seduced" by the bandit. The woman, filled with shame, then begged him to duel to the death with her husband, to save her from the guilt and shame of having two men know her dishonor.

At the end of the story to the court, he is asked about an expensive dagger owned by the samurai's wife: She begged her husband to forgive her, but he simply looked at her coldly. She then freed him and begged him to kill her so that she would be at peace. He continued to stare at her with a look of loathing. His expression disturbed her so much that she fainted with dagger in hand. She awoke to find her husband dead with the dagger in his chest. She attempted to kill herself, but failed in all her efforts.

The samurai then killed himself with his wife's dagger. Later, somebody removed the dagger from his chest. The woodcutter had actually witnessed the rape and murder, he says, but just did not want to get too involved at the trial. She spurred the men to fight one another, but then hid her face in fear once they raised swords; the men, too, were visibly fearful as they began fighting. After some hesitation he killed the samurai, who begged for his life on the ground, and the woman fled in horror. At the gate, the woodcutter, priest, and commoner are interrupted from their discussion of the woodcutter's account by the sound of a crying baby.

They find the baby abandoned in a basket, and the commoner takes a kimono and an amulet that have been left for the baby. The woodcutter reproaches the commoner for stealing from the abandoned baby, but the commoner chastises him. Having deduced that the reason the woodcutter did not speak up at the trial was because he was the one who stole the dagger from the scene of the murder, the commoner mocks him as "a bandit calling another a bandit. These deceptions and lies shake the priest's faith in humanity. He is brought back to his senses when the woodcutter reaches for the baby in the priest's arms.

The priest is suspicious at first, but the woodcutter explains that he intends to take care of the baby along with his own children, of whom he already has six. This simple revelation recasts the woodcutter's story and the subsequent theft of the dagger in a new light. The priest gives the baby to the woodcutter, saying that the woodcutter has given him reason to continue having hope in humanity.

The film closes on the woodcutter, walking home with the baby. The rain has stopped and the clouds have opened revealing the sun in contrast to the beginning where it was overcast. The name of the film refers to the enormous, former city gate "between modern day Kyoto and Nara ", on Suzaka Avenue's end to the South.

Kurosawa felt that sound cinema multiplies the complexity of a film: Real sound does not merely add to the images, it multiplies it. I wanted to restore some of this beauty. I thought of it, I remember in this way: Accordingly, there are only three settings in the film: The gate and the courtyard are very simply constructed and the woodland is real. This is partly due to the low budget that Kurosawa got from Daiei. When Kurosawa shot Rashomon , the actors and the staff lived together, a system Kurosawa found beneficial.

He recalls "We were a very small group and it was as though I was directing Rashomon every minute of the day and night. At times like this, you can talk everything over and get very close indeed". The cinematographer , Kazuo Miyagawa , contributed numerous ideas, technical skill and expertise in support for what would be an experimental and influential approach to cinematography. For example, in one sequence, there is a series of single close-ups of the bandit, then the wife, and then the husband, which then repeats to emphasize the triangular relationship between them.

Use of contrasting shots is another example of the film techniques used in Rashomon. According to Donald Richie , the length of time of the shots of the wife and of the bandit are the same when the bandit is acting barbarically and the wife is hysterically crazy. Rashomon had camera shots that were directly into the sun. Kurosawa wanted to use natural light, but it was too weak; they solved the problem by using a mirror to reflect the natural light.

The result makes the strong sunlight look as though it has traveled through the branches, hitting the actors. The rain in the scenes at the gate had to be tinted with black ink because camera lenses could not capture the water pumped through the hoses. Robert Altman compliments Kurosawa's use of "dappled" light throughout the film, which gives the characters and settings further ambiguity.

About the Author

However, Professor Keiko I. McDonald says the film conventionally uses light to symbolize "good" or "reason" and darkness to symbolize "bad" or "impulse". She interprets the scene mentioned by Sato differently, pointing out that the wife gives herself to the bandit when the sun slowly fades out. McDonald also reveals that Kurosawa was waiting for a big cloud to appear over Rashomon gate to shoot the final scene in which the woodcutter takes the abandoned baby home; Kurosawa wanted to show that there might be another dark rain any time soon, even though the sky is clear at this moment.

Unfortunately, the final scene appears optimistic because it was too sunny and clear to produce the effects of an overcast sky. Stanley Kauffmann writes in The Impact of Rashomon that Kurosawa often shot a scene with several cameras at the same time, so that he could "cut the film freely and splice together the pieces which have caught the action forcefully, as if flying from one piece to another.

This is more than twice the number in the usual film, and yet these shots never call attention to themselves". The film was scored by Fumio Hayasaka , who is among the most respected of Japanese composers. Due to setbacks and some lost audio, the crew took the urgent step of bringing Mifune back to the studio after filming to record another line.

The stories are mutually contradictory and even the final version can be seen as motivated by factors of ego and face. The actors kept approaching Kurosawa wanting to know the truth, and he claimed the point of the film was to be an exploration of multiple realities rather than an exposition of a particular truth. Later film and TV uses of the " Rashomon effect " focus on revealing "the truth" in a now conventional technique that presents the final version of a story as the truth, an approach that only matches Kurosawa's film on the surface.

Due to its emphasis on the subjectivity of truth and the uncertainty of factual accuracy, Rashomon has been read by some as an allegory of the defeat of Japan at the end of World War II. Davidson's article "Memory of Defeat in Japan: It also briefly mentions James Goodwin's view on the influence of post-war events on the film. However, " In a Grove " the short story by Akutagawa that the film is based on was published already in , so any postwar allegory would have been the result of Kurosawa's editing rather than the story about the conflicting accounts.

Symbolism runs rampant throughout the film and much has been written on the subject. Bucking tradition, Miyagawa directly filmed the sun through the leaves of the trees, as if to show the light of truth becoming obscured. Rashomon was released in Japan on August 24, Although it won two Japanese awards and performed well at the domestic box office, [18] most Japanese critics did not like the film. When it received positive responses in the West, Japanese critics were baffled; some decided that it was only admired there because it was "exotic," others thought that it succeeded because it was more "Western" than most Japanese films.

In a collection of interpretations of Rashomon , Donald Richie writes that "the confines of 'Japanese' thought could not contain the director, who thereby joined the world at large". The film appeared at the Venice Film Festival at the behest of an Italian language teacher, Giuliana Stramigioli , who had recommended it to Italian film promotion agency Unitalia Film seeking a Japanese film to screen at the festival. Despite these reservations, the film was screened at the festival and won both the Italian Critics Award and the Golden Lion award—introducing western audiences, including western directors, more noticeably to both Kurosawa's films and techniques, such as shooting directly into the sun and using mirrors to reflect sunlight onto the actor's faces.

The film was released in the United States on December 26, , by RKO Radio Pictures in both subtitled and dubbed versions, and it won an Academy Honorary Award in for being "the most outstanding foreign language film released in the United States during " the current Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film wasn't introduced until The following year, when it was eligible for consideration in other Academy Award categories, it was nominated for Best Art Direction for a Black-and-White Film.

The Academy Film Archive preserved Rashomon in

• Making Marmalade - A Selection of Recipes and Articles
• They Dont Have Horses on the Moon : Daisylands
• Hanner Amser (Welsh Edition)
• The Hearts Choice (Mills & Boon Love Inspired)
• Die Akkumulation des Kapitals (German Edition)