"Potemkin" in Japan

[ryan.cook at yale.edu]

Looking back at Yamada Kazuo's Potemkin book, he does say that the film was
brought to Yokohama port in 1926 and screened by customs authorities, but not
permitted to enter the country (his book includes a satirical cartoon from a
Purokino publication in 1929 which portrays Japanese officials fortifying
themselves against an approaching Soviet battleship).  He mentions that the
September 1927 issue of Kinema Junpo contains an account of the film by a JCP
member who had attended a screening in Moscow, and that from this point the
film became legend in the proletarian culture movement.  He also cites a 1929
mention of the film by Kobayashi Takiji in the newsletter of the Sapporo
Shochikuza in which Kobayashi imagines Potemkin to be the film that will place
cinema on a "throne" to reign over the other arts.  This is the same year that
Kobayashi published Kani kosen, so it's interesting to see that he had (an
imaginary) Potemkin on the brain.

Yamada also notes that it was not until 1966 that Potemkin was finally 
released
commercially in Japan (by ATG) in the form of the reduced 1950 print that was
in circulation at the time (the complete restored version was released in
1977).

Ryan


Quoting Aaron Gerow <aaron.gerow at yale.edu>:

> The best works so far on the influence of Soviet silent cinema and  
> montage theory are of course Yamamoto Kikuo's Nihon eiga ni okeru  
> gaikoku eiga no eikyo, and Iwamoto Kenji's "Nihon ni okeru montaju  
> riron no shokai" (Waseda Daigaku Hikaku Bungaku Nenshi 10). I just  
> glanced over them and both clearly state that Potemkin was not shown  
> at the time. Neither offers any report of anyone (other than perhaps  
> censors) who saw it in Japan through any other means. As Naoki notes, 
>  and Yamamoto and Iwamoto detail this, there was a lot of publishing  
> about Potemkin and other Soviet films, some involving reports from  
> Japanese abroad and some articles which were essentially screenplays  
> with a lot of pictures. At least at the time, a lot of people were  
> walking around talking as if they had seen the films because they had 
>  read these accounts. There was also a lot of translating going on,  
> including Eisenstein's piece on Japanese culture and montage, which  
> appeared in 1930.
>
> I think Kurosawa just misremembered. And that the discipline of  
> Japanese film history has not always been that rigorous, I doubt he  
> feared being called on it.
>
> Aaron Gerow
> Associate Professor
> Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
> Director of Undergraduate Studies, Film Studies Program
> Yale University
> 53 Wall Street, Room 316
> PO Box 208363
> New Haven, CT 06520-8363
> USA
> Phone: 1-203-432-7082
> Fax: 1-203-432-6764
> e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu
> site: www.aarongerow.com
>
>
>
>