Three takes on laws, by Akira Kurosawa, The Prodigy, and Aleister Crowley

Rashomon breaks cinematic laws in a tale about the limits of law

Truth and justice are admired in our modern, ethics-based society, but sometimes laws have to be broken.

When it comes to moviemaking, the conventions set down by cinema's forefathers aren't always meant to be followed - despite what film professors will tell you. Visionary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa knew this when he conceived , his breakthrough 1950 film that put him on the world circuit.

In feudal Japan, a gruesome murder has taken place: a fallen samurai has been found in a dark, gloomy forest. At the murder trial, four testimonies are heard: that of the bandit who confesses to killing the samurai; that of the samurai's white-veiled widow who insists she was raped; that of the deceased samurai, summoned by a medium; and that of a seemingly impartial witness to the events.

All accounts follow a strikingly similar path, but each story differs in the whodunit details. And as the tales are told again and again, the film begins to play out like a backwards courtroom drama, where each testimony only serves to see the truth retreat further from view.

's innovative four-person flashback structure might be greatly admired among film critic circles, but more impressive was the way Kurosawa brought the audience's subjective viewpoints into play. Taking inspiration from two early 20th-century short stories, the director infused the film with then-exceptional melding of Eastern and Western philosophies, both inside the cinema and out.

Through the Western-tinged examples of ethical courts of law, alongside a Hollywood-like aesthetic of shadowy visuals and urgent editing, Kurosawa opened up Japanese films to the greater intellectual world, where cinema was starting to be seen as a medium of ideas and values.