"Potemkin" in Japan

[Aaron Gerow]

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
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Phone: 1-203-432-7082
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e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu
site: www.aarongerow.com