Criterion Collection essay on Rashamon, excerpted from Something Like an Autobiography as translated by Audie E. Bock (1982) http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/196-akira-kurosawa-on-rashomon
Context: Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings — the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave — even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.
“I know at the same time that you will be sympathetic to the point of view that public psychology, and for that matter, individual psychology, cannot, because of human weakness, be attuned for long periods of time to a constant repetition of the highest note on the scale.”
Letter to Ray Stannard Baker (20 March 1935), quoted in My Own Story: From Private and Public Papers (ed. Donald Day; Little, Brown & Co. 1951), p. 239
1930s
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Franklin D. Roosevelt 190
32nd President of the United States 1882–1945Related quotes
Source: The social psychology of groups. 1959, p. 81
Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 371.
Source: Mind, Self, and Society. 1934, p. 1 , lead paragraph
Quoted in "Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time" - Page 26 - by Alan Rosenberg, Gerald Eugene Myers - History - 1988.
Source: "Does the history of psychology have a future?." 1994, p. 475
c. 25 years later
Quote from Duchamp's letter to fr:Jean Suquet (art historian), New York 25 December 1949; as cited in The Duchamp Book, ed. Gavin Parkinson, Tate Publishing, London 2008 p. 163
1921 - 1950
Quote from Denis's essay 'Les Arts a Rome', 1898; as cited on Wikipedia: Maurice Denis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Denis - reference [22]
Denis made Jan. 1895 his first visit to Rome, where the works of Raphael and Michaelangelo in the Vatican made a strong impression upon him.
1890 - 1920