Rashomon, Rape, or Rethinking Cinema as Women’s Hearings?

As a critical response to ongoing realities faced by the global #MeToo generation, this paper explores the speaking out genre (women's firsthand, first-person accounts of sexual violence) as multimedia artifacts and examines how it is trans-mediated on, off, and across screen in Asia. The paper focuses on the Japanese classic Rashomon (1950) and Ming Ghost (1990), considered a Taiwan remake of Rashomon with queer or feminist elements, as well as the repackaged version of Ming Ghost in Hong Kong, titled The Desire of Holy Woman. The goal is to move beyond the celebration of the Rashomon effect and to problematize assumptions about the Chinese-language remakes, whether experimental or pornographic, simply challenging or reinforcing the patriarchal mode of storytelling. The paper recognizes these films as symptomatic tales of rape, where female witnessing remains a troubling mode of self-declaring innocence through chastity. It uncovers the mechanism of slut-shaming embedded in the audiovisual rhetoric and cinema’s silencing techniques that allow only selective narratives to be composed, heard, and judged while diluting and denying others. The paper also includes a postscript briefly touching on women’s speaking and mutual listening in Parched (India, 2015) and Shards of Her (Taiwan/USA, 2020), along with the feminist reception of both in China.

Overall, the paper seeks to propose a potential perspective through which trans-Asian media engagement enables our reflection on how cinema judges women and serves as hearings overshadowed by structural blindness and deafness, thus putting us, the audiences, as well as cinematic medium itself, on trial.

Keywords: rape, truth making, witness, genre, slut-shaming