Shinobu Hashmoto just died at age 100. His original screenplay for the greatest movie ever made in Japan was initially written while he was recovering in a Japanese hospital for war veterans.with him having tuberculosis. It is famous for showing how different observers of reality may have different views of that reality. The film's director was Kurowsawa, who worked closely with Hashimoto on many of his films. Regarding the greatest of them all, "Rashomon," even though now many see it as the ultimate inside view of Japanese culture, not to mention its far broader philosophical implications, when the film was being made,three assistant directors objected to the making of as they "did not understand" what the film was about. The following is an English translation of Kurowoawa's reply to his assistant directors, as reported by Harrison Smith in his WaPo obit of Hashimoto:
"Human beings are unable to honest with themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such individuals - the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel better than they really are...You say you can't understand this script at all, but it is because the human heart 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."
Barkley Rosser
The film is great, but I think “Ikiru” and “Tokyo Story” are better...
ReplyDeleteI do appreciate this memorial.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/movies/shinobu-hashimoto-dead-screenwriter-for-kurosawa.html
ReplyDeleteJuly 20, 2018
Shinobu Hashimoto, Writer of Towering Kurosawa Films
By Margalit Fox
Whatever this is, it is NOT economics
ReplyDeleteComment on Barkley Rosser on ‘Screenwriter Dies at Age 100, Of “Rashomon,” 1950, Greatest Film of Japan Ever’
The representative economics professor has not grasped what the state of current economics is#1 and what, by logical implication, his most urgent mission should be.
Fact is that economists have messed up
• profit theory, for 200+ years,
• microfoundations, for 140+ years,
• macrofoundations, for 80+ years,
• the application of elementary logic and mathematics since the founding fathers.
Instead of doing his proper job, the representative economist sooner or later turns to journalism, op-eding, propaganda, agenda pushing, attention management, reputation management, social media trolling, and mystifying the history of economic thought through the erection of False-Hero-Memorials.
Curiously, economists do not restrict their opinion management to economics proper but expand it to every walk of life.
How is it to explain that an economist who has not gotten the foundational concepts of his discipline straight, who has never grasped that utility-maximization and supply-demand-equilibrium is proto-scientific garbage, who does not understand how the actual economy works, who has not produced one iota of original scientific knowledge ― how, indeed, is it to explain ― that such a loser comments on the death of the screenwriter of a Japanese film and his trivial philosophy (“the human heart is impossible to understand”)?
Whatever Barkley Rosser and the other incompetent scientists are attempting to communicate ― it is NOT economics.
Egmont Kakarot-Handtke
#1 The miracle cure of economists’ micro-macro schizo
http://axecorg.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-miracle-cure-of-economists-micro.html