My Remaining Drawings

My remaining drawings Understanding meaning making

Hayakawa (1990)

Geertz (1973)

Bourdieu

Meaning making & Roshomon

Film Critic of Roshomon A group of us (in ETD) viewed Roshomon last week for critic. I am still trying to make connection between the film and the idea of perception-conception driven by motivation and interest.  I copy a description of the film in the next slide 

Description of Roshomon 

Rashomon is a 1950 Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa, working in close collaboration with cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa. The film depicts the rape of a woman and the apparent murder of her husband through the widely differing accounts of four witnesses, including the rapist and, through a medium, the dead man. The stories are mutually contradictory, leaving the viewer to determine which, if any, is the truth. The story unfolds in flashback as the four characters - the bandit Tajōmaru, the samurai's wife, the murdered samurai and the nameless woodcutter - recount the events of one afternoon in a grove. But it is also a flashback within a flashback, because the accounts of the witnesses are being retold by a woodcutter and a priest to a ribald commoner as they wait out a rainstorm in a ruined gatehouse identified by a sign as Rashōmon.

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Rashomon introduced Kurosawa and Japanese cinema to Western audiences, and is considered one of his masterpieces. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and also received an Academy Honorary Award at the 24th Academy Awards.

Our critics        

Acting is theatrical and "talkie". Scenes/Sets - minimalist. Strong storyline (effective with no computer graphics), dialogues are social commentaries'. Some scenes like the woodcutter walking in the forest is rather long. Scenes build up to the climax. There are many sides to a story, same story is seen from different perspectives. Sometimes humans want to justify their actions and push the blame onto others. Can relate story to "honour-killing" which existed in certain countries today. Quote: "Women use their tears to fool others, sometimes they fool themselves."

3 big questions still bothering me 

I can’t sleep tonight if I don’t get answers to these questions. : )

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If two or more persons cannot construct the same meaning (at best just an approximate of the other), how do we explain culture artefacts as socially constructed and having meaning “sedimented, accumulated or deposited” (p. 23) in them? How does social construction of meaning take place? How can the process be explained from the idea of abstraction from Korzybski?

Tyvm!