"Potemkin" in Japan - Kurosawa citation locus

[Dolores Martinez]

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> 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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