The Vagaries of Film Viewing (Started re: Potemkin)

[Dolores Martinez]

On age: I wish! Lola

On 17 January 2011 17:29, <mccaskem at georgetown.edu> wrote:

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