Suffice to say that neither the CBC (dir. Adrienne Clarkson, 1993) nor the BBC documentary is anything like Kurosawa's Rashomon. Both documentaries claim to be objective, and both assume that Artemisia's trial testimony was the whole truth.

The CBC sequence dramatizing Artemisia's rape follows shots of the painting and is in turn followed by a close up Holofernes and then a closeup and tilt down the painting on the blood dropping from the bed. A later Judith then follows.

Through an odd cross-gender equivalence, the documentary implies a one-to-one correspondence between Holoferne when he is beheaded n in Artemisia's painting (matching Holferne's s facial expression with Artemisia's) and Artemisia when she is raped by Tassi rape (as her revenge on Tassi--he bleeds as she bled). A pathological view of Artemisia's paintings is thereby reproduced.