> watch the movie.
>
In the scene representing the the priest's account of the medium's account of the man's account of his own death, the man is shown stabbing himself with a dagger. In the scenes representing the accounts of the bandit and the firewood dealer, the bandit is shown killing him with a sword. There might be "subject positions" from which film representing a man stabbing himself with a dagger would be misperceived as representing someone else stabbing him with a sword, but that wouldn't be because human experience is necessarily a construction that makes it impossible to know truly from watching it whether a filmed representation of a man stabbing himself with a dagger is in fact a filmed representation of a man stabbing himself with a dagger.
The firewood dealer's is the only version represented as a first-hand account. The others are reports by the dealer and the priest of the accounts of the bandit, the woman and the medium channeling the man. The dealer and the priest are represented as present together in the prison courtyard witnessing these accounts. There is no indication from their reporting that they don't agree with each other about what they've witnessed together let alone that such disagreement is inevitable because human experience is a construction that makes reality an unknowable thing-in-itself.
It seems to me that the point of the movie is to explore whether, given human "horrors," there is any rational basis for hope, for "faith in mankind" as the priest puts it at the end.
The answer hinges on the insights into personality provided by the four different versions of the original event and by what goes on between the firewood dealer, the priest and the commoner during and after the story telling.
Ted