Jessa Crispin at The American Scholar:
Arguments about the way history (or ancient literature) is depicted in entertainment can get surprisingly heated, as recent controversies over the casting, the costuming, and the characterization in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey prove. But what many people fail to understand is that the past itself is an uncanny place. We look backward to tell us something about now, but the act of looking distorts both the past and our own sense of self. As William James’s observed, when we remember a moment from our past, what our brain is producing is a memory of the last time we remembered that moment. It’s a copy of a copy. Each callback creates a new copy that overwrites the original, distorting the distortion.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai and the Prisoner is an attempt to fill in a historical blank. We open in 1578 during Oda Nobunaga’s campaign to unify Japan. Araki Murashige, one of Nobunaga’s former allies, refuses to join him. A messenger arrives at Murashige’s castle to warn him that he has chosen the wrong side: if he doesn’t join, his kingdom will be destroyed.
more here.
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