The Vagaries of Film Viewing (Started re: Potemkin)

[mccaskem at georgetown.edu]

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