Rashomon effect

Tajōmaru the bandit and the wife of a samurai, two characters who offer different perspectives of events in the film Rashomon

The Rashomon effect is the phenomenon of the unreliability of eyewitnesses. The effect is named after Akira Kurosawa's 1950 Japanese film Rashomon, in which a murder is described in four contradictory ways by four witnesses.[1] It has been used as a storytelling and writing method in cinema in which an event is given contradictory interpretations or descriptions by the individuals involved, thereby providing different perspectives and points of view of the same incident.

  1. ^ Davenport, Christian (2010). "Rashomon Effect, Observation, and Data Generation". Media Bias, Perspective, and State Repression: The Black Panther Party. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 52–73, esp. 55. ISBN 9780521759700.