ABSTRACT
To fulfil earlier promises a final preliminary set of remarks before discussing particular films. The idea is to make explicit questions of method and of interpretation. In considering the films philosophically, I am going to impose upon them interpretations; I am going to give them cognitive readings, such as that Rashomon concerns the problem of truth. This is undertaken in full awareness of the earlier argument that to cognize works of art is to do violence to their unity of form and content. My answer was to diagnose that claim of unity as coming from a superstition that beauty and truth go together and so, if one appreciates the beauty of a work of art, one must also hold that it contains truth, possibly deep truths. However, truths are not truths because they are beautifully expressed. They are truths because they correspond to the facts. The problem of truth is one of the knottiest in philosophy and not one to be entered here. It must suffice to say that I shall adopt a relatively widely-held view (associated with Bertrand Russell and Alfred Tarski) that ‘truth’ is a relationship between statements and the world. When a statement is true it is said to correspond to the facts; when it is false, it does not. We can assess truth claims only of statements, hence some method must be found of extracting statements from works of art, statements that can then be defensibly attributed to those works, to the characters in their drama, or to their creators. Hence my earlier insistence that the doctrine of the unity of a work of art must yield when we wish to analyse.
