There are three sides to every story, the saying goes: yours, mine and the truth. But in Akira Kurosawa’s first international hit, there are at least four sides – that of a bandit, the woman he may have raped, the husband he may have murdered, and a woodcutter who witnessed everything – and all of them have reasons to obscure or lie about what really happened. The conflicting testimonies in Rashômon underscore how subjective and even self-serving memory can be, but this wasn’t Kurosawa’s last word on the subject; consider his follow-up Ikiru (1952), which culminates in a series of testimonies that add up to a collective memory that is greater than the sum of its parts.
—Peter T. Chattaway