Information, reception and film: A reader-response analysis of Rashomon

Abstract

The dissertation is aligned to current changes in the academia, notably the transdisciplinary interpretation and understanding of human phenomena. Grounded in communication, the dissertation has drawn on concepts from information science, film studies, and cognitive science as well as philosophy and other disciplines. The objective of this research is to unravel the way film as an environment is observed, marked, and indicated by spectators and thus how meaning is assigned to a film. This transdisciplinary approach draws on autopoiesis, laws of form, reader response and cybernetic communication. The research employs a constructivist approach to understand how viewers assign meaning to the films they watch. The research is based on two premises: information emerges from people’s indications of an environment as they observe it, and film is an environment for observation that attains meaning, in other words become informative as spectators make indications of their observations of film. Rashomon, the celebrated film of Akira Kurosawa, is the vehicle to understand the process of sense-making as constructing form. Viewers’ comments at Amazon.com provide evidence of how these individuals observe the film and make sense of it by making distinctions. A reader-response analysis was used to interpret the comments; this researcher’s analysis is yet a higher scale of indication of observation.In the process of reader-response, the researcher as an observer is cued or perturbed to indicate that Rashomon, an impressionistic film noted for its cinematic style, has taken an expressionist form because of the discourse constructed, and being constructed, by various observers generating meaning over an open-ended palette. This research stresses the functional necessity for transcending disciplinary borders in order to understand communication as multistage observation constructing meaning and thereby constantly generating forms for observation. Such forms are made intelligible by virtue of our having structural coupling, i.e. a shared set of tokens such as language. Humans as observers are constant producers of forms and diligent generators of tokens that expand our horizon. Communication is thus an ever-emerging, meaning-construction process. We observe the world—tangible and intangible—that we interpret, make distinctions, and externalize through indication; these are in turn observed, distinguished, and indicated by other observers. This observational understanding of communication in fact facilitates the unending emergence of horizon and therefore communication is emergent, sense-making, and horizon-expanding.