Suffice to say that neither the CBC documentary nor the BBC documentary A Reputation: The Rape of Artemisia Gentileschi (1997) is anything like Kurosawa's Rashomon; rather than give the different versions without allowing us to decide which is true, the documentaries claim to be objective while us9ing editing techniques and teelvisual convetions to establish as firmly as possible that Artemisia's trial testimony was the whole truth. The BBC documentary is particularly egregious in contradicting its own claim for telling the truth. An intertitle saying the words are taken from the transcript follows a female voice-over prologue (reproducing the sme kind of authority established thorugh he more frequent male voice-over) with Artmeisia painting and intercut with shots of an actor who turns out to be Tassi talking with a friend, looking like the elders in Artmeisia's Susannah and the Elders and a talking head shot of Artmeiisa in which she directly addresses the camera. The sequence ends with Tassi and Artemisia looking at the camera in an eyeline match, as if they meeting each other's gaze as wel as our own. The film also includes talking heads shots of a woman art critic who gives her account of the events.

The participants are not seen giving their testimony in a courtroom but all adopt televisual documentary conventions and directly address the camera. Artemisia is given dramatizations of her testimony(essentially flashbacks the truth of which the viewer is supposed to take to be entirely accurate) intercut with her direct address shots as well as direct address Tassi, while Tassi is not, thereby establishing her account as the truthful one. Tassi is clearly shown to be a liar. Artemisia's testimony is given in full while Tassi gets brief moments (her shots are held at least ten times as long as Tassi's). The camera moves wildly during the dramatization of the rape, a further attempt establishing the truth value of Artemisia's account through the televisual immediacy of the shot. The realism is undercut by having the same (rather corpulent) actress play Artemisia near the end of her life and as a seventeen year old. (The CBC documentary does the same thing in a manner that seems ridiculous).

The documenary does not include Artemisia testimony about her violent response to Tassi in defense of her honor, including pinching off a piece of his penis nor does it show her throwing a knife at him. Artemisa's story is recoded / censored to broght into line with contemporary cultural assumptions about rape in which honor is no longer an issue.