"Potemkin" in Japan - Kurosawa citation locus

[Peter Larson]

I don't think one would forget Potemkin, but I can only speak for 
myself, my film memory is probably the least dependable of all.  I watch 
multiple films a week and often am at a loss even when people ask me 
what I saw the previous weekend. I even write a review potion on my blog 
and have to sometime wrack my brain as to the movies that I have to 
choose from.

That being said, autobiographies should be somewhat loose affairs, as it 
is usually a document of the writers perception of his or her life, 
rather than a factual and verifiable documenting of events.

Pete

  On 2011/01/15 8:01, Dolores Martinez wrote:
> I do think we have to be careful with personal memories and how we 
> might want things to have been.  Especially when it comes to film.  
> I've just finished Mark Kermode's It's only a movie and he is very 
> good on this.  As a film critic (and scholar, he has a PhD) he notes 
> that he sometimes goes back to films to find that he has mixed 
> sequences up with other films, other characters, the trailer just 
> before, or his fantasy of what would have been a great film.  He 
> applies the same rule to his life (as it is a memoir) and warns us 
> against trusting his memory since he can't.  If you read the more 
> careful works on Kurosawa, it is clear he has reworked his past 
> somewhat -- and he warns us of this in the very title and in his 
> introdiuction...
> Lola
>
>
> On 14 January 2011 21:31, <mccaskem at georgetown.edu 
> <mailto:mccaskem at georgetown.edu>> wrote:
>
>     "Potemkin" is listed as a movie seen ca. 1926 by Kurosawa, on p.73 of
>     "Something Like An Autobiography," along with Pudovkin's "Mother"
>     the same
>     year, and Pudovkin's "Storm Over Asia" ca. 1928 (p. 74). Kurosawa
>     says that
>     there may be a time lag of a couple of years past the year he
>     gives, before they
>     were shown in Japan (p. 74).
>
>     In the English translation, the list looks like a long footnote,
>     but it's actually a 4-
>     page table, a full  of the regular text, in the Japanese original,
>     Gama no abura,
>     138-141. The parenthetical synchronous event comments - e.g. "Hara
>     Assassinated," "Japanese Communist Party Established," "Peace
>     Preservation
>     Law," "First Radio Broadcast," etc., were all put in by Kurosawa
>     in the original, by
>     the way. I had somehow once thought that Audie Bock might have put
>     them in
>     the Eng. version for comparison, but they were already there in
>     the Japanese
>     version.
>
>     It's hard to understand why Kuroswa would say he saw it back then
>     if he didn't.
>     It seems to me that seeing the Odessa Steps scene for the first
>     time is not an
>     experience he (or at least I) would likely be absent-minded or
>     abstract about.
>
>     Regards,
>
>     Michael McC
>
>
>

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