On age: I wish! Lola<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 17 January 2011 17:29, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mccaskem@georgetown.edu">mccaskem@georgetown.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
I do agree with you that Kurosawa may have made up having seen the film back<br>
then. The thing is that I'm around the age Kurosawa was when he put together<br>
his Gama no abura magazine article series.<br>
<br>
It's true that if one outlives some others, there's a "window of opportunity" to<br>
make up reminiscences. In fact, a field of interest of mine is "collective memory,"<br>
in the tradition of Halbwachs.<br>
<br>
But old guys making up stuff doesn't really work out, unless there's no<br>
evidence/no witnesses, left behind to contradict it. Kurosawa was still creating<br>
movies then, so he's not likely to have been senile enough to say he saw a film<br>
as an invention of imaginative memory, at a time when he must have known that<br>
most of his educated readers/listeners could easily find out the truth. If he didn't<br>
know about the lifting of the Potemkin Ban, then he must have started to mislay<br>
some cards in the deck of his memories, both longer and shorter term.<br>
<br>
Since these younger people themselves (my contemporaries) had been forbidden<br>
to watch Potemkin until the late 1950s, when that ban was reversed as the<br>
result of public protest in film circles, it's likely they would know quite well that<br>
Kurosawa only could have seen the film back then under some quite exceptional<br>
circumstances. Unless Kurosawa, like Stalin in his old age, was in the habit of<br>
making up early stuff regardless of what people might secretly think.<br>
<br>
My perspective is more like that of a person around the age Kurosawa was then.<br>
Prof. Martinez and most other colleagues on this list have some decades to go,<br>
thank goodness.<br>
<br>
mmcc<br>
<br>
</blockquote></div><br>