DB:

My 1988 book, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, is available again, I’m happy to report. There’s a little backstory, probably of interest only to those who follow the zigzags of academic publishing.

Around 1990 the British Film Institute declared the book out of print. The US copublisher, Princeton University Press, agreed to keep it in print under two conditions.

First, I would have to pay for the cleaning of the preprint material (the sheets of plastic on which the master copies of the pages were printed). Cost: $1000. Second, I would receive no royalties. I agreed to the terms, since I wanted to have this book, for all its faults, available.

So for about a decade, the book was still out there. I enjoyed the anecdotal value of getting royalty statements reading: Your royalty payment is $000.00. Still, all those decimal places sort of rubbed it in. Wouldn’t $0 have been enough?

As Ozu’s centenary approached in 2003, I contacted Princeton to alert them. Maybe there’d be a bump of interest in Ozu, and they might want to do another printing. But the Press replied that, um, they had some months before declared their edition out of print.

Publishers have a habit of not telling authors about decisions like this. There’s no fun way to announce that a book is orphaned, or maybe slain. Then too there’s the somewhat awkward matter of returning a piece of intellectual property that might become an asset some day. Anyhow, Jerry Bruckheimer wasn’t likely to pick up the movie rights to Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, and so after regaining copyright control, I took the book on the road.

No surprise: Other publishers were not crazy about reprinting a big fat book with lots of pictures, published fifteen years before and probably bought by every soul who might ever want a copy. I’d hoped that a book on very likely the greatest film director who ever lived might be worth keeping around. But no, alas.

Every month or so, as the Ozu touring program roamed greater North America in 2003 and 2004, a fan would email asking me to sell a copy of the book. Web booksellers were demanding up to $600. The thought of selling one to a book dealer at a jacked-up price, perhaps with a signature affixed, did cross my mind, but I had only two copies of my own.

Eventually I learned of the publishing program launched by the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies. The Center had begun posting out-of-print books on Japanese cinema online. I contacted Markus Nornes, who generously sponsored and oversaw the project.

I learn from a correspondent that the book is now available in pdf form online.

Now you can read the book, and can even buy a print-on-demand copy if you want. (I look forward to the $000.00 checks from Ann Arbor.) The downside: The 500-plus pictures range from tolerable to terrible. I also planned to write an introduction with updates and corrections, and I still hope to do that. There’s even talk about replacing some stills, perhaps with color frames.

So if you’re interested in Ozu, Japanese film history, or the poetics of cinema, you might want to check this out. Of course you can instead crack your piggy bank and order the single copy of the original I’ve found on what our President calls the Internets.

If I were in an Ozu film, I’d probably now emit a sigh mixing satisfaction and resignation. Then I’d reach for a beer. Or at least an orange drink. No, a beer.

Update, November 10: I’d thought that print-on-demand copies would be available, but Carsten Czarnecki points out that the Center site doesn’t seem to indicate that. I’ll check further.

Update #2, same day: Our keen-eyed web tsarina Meg has found still other copies of the original book available, at prices starting at $118.95, here. Please remit 10 % finder’s fee to her.

Update #3, November 11: Markus tells me that we hope eventually to offer print-on-demand copies, but the technology doesn’t yet meet the Center’s standards. Good! We want nice-looking images, when we can finally get ’em.

David here:

At a yard sale you find a really nifty yellow ray gun. You had one just like it when you were six. You loved that ray gun. Your hand tingles as you heft this one. It evokes memories of you and your pals playing in the schoolyard.

It’s only $2.50. You buy it.

When you get home, you examine it closely and find that it’s a brand-new replica, made by a company that specializes in retro toys. Suddenly you don’t like it so much.

But why? It’s identical to the ray gun you owned. It’s made from the same plastic and in the same colors. It’s definitely in better condition than an original would be. So why do you feel dissatisfied?

This is the sort of question philosophers of art ponder, though they usually put it more abstractly. Art, we might say, is about appearances–the way something looks (or sounds). People enjoy Leonardo’s Mona Lisa because of the way it looks. If an artist today could make a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa, right down to the individual brush strokes, then that copy should be as enjoyable as the original. Yet a lot of people have the gut feeling that today’s copy somehow can’t offer the same experience as the original.

So aestheticians ask whether there is more to the enjoyment of art than just the appearance of the work. Maybe part of our experience of art involves our sense of the history of art works, an appreciation of where they came from and what they’ve been through. Such a sense isn’t just background information but an integral part of the properly aesthetic experience we have.

The authors and their books.This was one of the themes that surfaced regularly in my stay at the annual convention of the American Society for Aesthetics. (My first blog on this event is here.) There was a tribute to Arthur Danto, who formulated this problem twenty-five years ago in his trailblazing book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. (He coined the term “indiscernibles” in his discussion of Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes.) The day after the Danto session, a panel discussion of two new introductory textbooks, Stephen Davies’ Philosophy of Art and Robert Stecker’s Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, raised issues that intersected with this concern.

Both Davies and Stecker discuss how recent conversations in the field move toward the idea that our experience of a picture or poem or play brings into play assumptions about the work’s historical existence. As I understand it, this is one of the differences between traditional aesthetics, concerned with apprehension of beauty as something immediately apparent, and philosophy of art, which asks about all the factors that go into our understanding and enjoying art.

By the way, this panel was punctuated by hilarious comments throughout. Philosophers definitely have a sense of humor. One of the panelists, Ted Cohen, has even written a philosophical study of jokes.

Part of the crowd for Carolyn Korsmeyer’s ASA presidential address.

Curtis Carter, Director of the Haggerty Museum, with Professor Stephanie Ross behind. The theme of indiscernibles was central to the fascinating talk by ASA President Carolyn Korsmeyer of SUNY–Buffalo. She argued that genuineness isn’t just a property we add on to artworks that beguile us. Central to the experience of many artworks is the sense of what she called age value, a “palpable contact with the past.” Her examples ranged from historic “reconstructions” of public spaces (e.g., the Erie Canal terminus in Buffalo) to recipes that include non-synthetic ingredients.

How far can we get from the original? Professor Korsmeyer plotted out a continuum, starting with a worn original through stages of repair (using glue from the same period, say, to patch up a cathedral window), restoration, rebuilding, and replication (making a copy in a comparable substance) to end in multiple reproduction (a photo of the Mona Lisa). As we go along the continuum, the age value decreases and what we can appreciate narrows ever more to surface qualities. We move, she suggests, toward “aesthetic deception,” where we risk losing the original altogether. That’s what happened at the yard sale with your ray gun.

The talk set me thinking about how cinephiles appreciate the various versions of films we encounter. Would you rather watch a 1941 35mm print of How Green Was My Valley, a recent 35mm print from the negative, a version taken from the restored negative, or a DVD reproduction? An original, which Kristin and I have seen, can be unbelievably beautiful. Shot on nitrate stock, it has a luster and a fine grain that isn’t captured on safety stock, which came into use after World War II. (Projectionists accustomed to the sharpness of nitrate claimed that safety film was soft and hard to focus.) So there were definite aspects of sheer appearance that contributed to our enjoyment of the film.

But the print of How Green that we saw was a bit worn, with scratches and missing frames. Can we argue that these added age value? Did our knowledge that this was a print that might have been watched by a 1941 audience deepen our sense of the film’s worth? Likewise, even if a sparkling, cleaned-up DVD could adequately capture the look of the nitrate original (it can’t), does its distance from the original take away some of the film’s appeal?

I’m tempted to answer yes, but it’s hard to generalize. Who’d prefer an original, faded-to-pink print of a 1950s Eastmancolor movie to a DVD copy with the colors more or less restored? The pink puts us all too palpably in contact with the past, but what it adds in age value overrides what it takes away in surface qualities.

And sometimes cases are just mixed, I think. For some years I had access to an original Technicolor release print of The Godfather. I loved watching it because the color was never approximated in any other versions I’d seen: the dreadful rereleases, the laserdiscs, even the different DVD versions. Kay’s Republican topcoat lost its ripe light burgundy color in all the video versions.

But at the same time, I was perpetually shocked by how grainy the original Tech print looked. Gordon Willis’s famous enveloping blackness was teeming with grain. (He really pushed the film stock, it’s evident.) The newer prints and the anamorphic DVD versions yield a smoother texture. The film’s harsh graininess is part of age value, but even if the restoration seems guided by contemporary tastes (in this case, our fondness for crisp digital imagery), you could argue that purging the grain enhances the film’s visibility, and hence its sensuous appeal.

The issue is about to crop up again. I learned from the film cadre at ASA that we’re about to get yet another version of Blade Runner, some final director’s cut, in both theatrical and DVD release. Again, I had access to a 35mm print of the original theatrical version, complete with voice-over and enigmatic origami unicorn. That print was monophonic and fading. But the original theatrical version was evidently never released on video or re-released theatrically,so the print has purely documentary value.

There’s more, however. Call it fetishism or nostalgia, but watching that crummy print made me feel I was in contact with Blade Runner as a historical entity, the thing that people (too few) saw back in June 1982. So I think there’s something intuitively right about the philosophers’ idea. Maybe André Bazin anticipated this argument when he argued that when we look at photographs, our knowledge of their origins is an inescapable part of their beauty.

Professor Korsmeyer’s talk took place on the Marquette University campus, and was followed by a reception at the lovely Haggerty Museum there. The museum was hosting a screening (on video) of Hockey Seen, a multimedia dance piece by philosopher Nelson Goodman, and several artists, including the composer then known as John C. Adams. The fact that a philosopher collaborated with several artists on the work seems a good emblem for the goal of the American Society for Aesthetics. These philosophers stay in close touch with the subjects they ponder–art, artists, and audiences.

Seen in a Milwaukee T-shirt shop:
Guns don’t shoot people.
Dick Cheney shoots people.

Today the Virginia senatorial campaign seems to revolve around whether you reveal yourself to be a bad person if you write a novel with disturbing or naughty scenes. It’s the sort of question routinely considered, more dispassionately, by the members of the American Society for Aesthetics. The Society consists mostly of professors, mostly of philosophy, who try to understand the most basic principles of how art works. I’ve been at their annual conference in Milwaukee since Wednesday night.

The Milwaukee Hilton Hotel

The event is held in the Hilton, an opulent building finished in 1928 (that is, just before opulence went away for quite a while). It’s an overpowering, somewhat eerie place, a little like the hotel in The Shining. Chandeliers hang from high ceilings. Corridors stretch on forever, silent and empty. Around any corner you may find a painting, a throne, or a signpost pointing you in several directions. You don’t exactly get lost, but the sheer size of the place, along with the occasional touch of Midwestern kitsch, suggests Last Year at Marienbad redecorated to suit the Amberson family. The same aesthetic principles, blown out to a more humungous scale, gave us The House On The Rock, one of Wisconsin’s great contributions to grassroots Dada.

In my first day here, there were intriguing papers and discussions. I couldn’t go to all of them, but I did visit a session on artistic genius. Peter Kivy’s paper, “Mozart’s Skull,” argued that an artist we acclaim as a genius raises some problems for ordinary mortals. Genius disturbs us, especially genius in very young people, like the prodigy Mozart. Genius is also very mysterious; we don’t know how someone like Mozart could produce so much music of such high quality—indeed of perhaps the highest quality in the Western art-music tradition.

Kivy believes, as I understood it, that genius is a real quality that we can’t explain by trends in taste or strategies of careerism. He castigated what he called “political deconstructionists” who want to deny that genius exists. In his account, they try to show that praise for gifted artists is actually PR: the reputation is constructed by historical circumstances and has nothing actual at the center. Kivy insisted that, regardless of how his career was promoted, Mozart was truly gifted by orders of magnitude beyond nearly all composers. So how to explain those gifts?

Kivy suggests that genius is a mystery that we may never be able to solve. He compares his argument to one floated by philosopher Colin McGinn, who suggests that consciousness is the sort of problem that we may never resolve, because it’s just not in the cards for creatures like us. That’s not to say that the explanation would be supernatural, as if, say, Mozart was truly kissed by God. (The play and movie, Amadeus, use his middle name to play with this possibility.) Maybe there are non-supernatural factors that create a genius; but we might not ever be able to detect them.

The questions raised in the discussion period were fascinating, with a couple of people saying that one could study how Mozart’s reputation was constructed through social institutions of the time without denying that the basis of the reputation was the genuine excellence of the music. Another listener pointed out that Mozart’s reputation is something of a special case. He was praised and understood instantly, but the music of the late Beethoven puzzled people who had acclaimed his earlier work; it took later generations to see the “genius” embodied in the Ninth Symphony and the late string quartets. Maybe the standard of genius does indeed change with time.

I began to muse over whether we cinephiles ever talk about great filmmakers as true geniuses. Even the directors that are most admired across film history—Renoir, Ozu, Welles, Hitchcock, Dreyer, Eisenstein, Hitchcock, etc.—don’t usually get called “geniuses.” Perhaps this way of talking about artists is part of a classical-art tradition that film never joined…or came too late to join.

A longer session was devoted to comments on my old friend Paisley Livingston’s book Art and Intention. I’ve mentioned this book elsewhere on this site, and it seems to me a remarkable attempt to show how an idea of intentional action can help explain creative processes in art. For students of film, his ideas about collective artistic creation—several people pooling efforts to make a film or some other work—are particularly interesting. In this panel, several other distinguished philosopher of art analyzed, praised, and criticized the views expressed in the book.

That night, after my own talk on early CinemaScope, we went to a reception at the lovely Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. (Animator Bill Plympton will be visiting it soon.) Across the evening, I met several people keenly interested in cinema–actually, who isn’t? Our talk about movies went on for a long time, continuing in a pub in the hotel. There was a reunion of former Madison philosophy students, all protégées of Noel Carroll, and it was fun to talk movies with them. I don’t think I convinced them that Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves are excellent screen actors, though they were more sympathetic to my case for Sandra Bullock.

Next day I skipped the ASA sessions to go book-hunting with Paisley. Among other stops, we visited the Renaissance Bookstore, another Wisconsin monument. Several stories high, the collection of old books and magazines is monumentally daunting. This is where all books go to die, in dust. Still, I found mysteries by my new passion, George V. Higgins. Earlier that day, I picked up Scott McCloud’s Making Comics, which looks like a worthy successor to his superb Understanding Comics and his followup, Reinventing Comics. Film scholars can learn a lot from comic art (graphic novels, comic strips, etc.), and McCloud is the best guide to the aesthetics of comics I know. Come to think of it, he should be invited to the next ASA convention. . . .

Kristin here–

There was a time when studying film fans was something sociologists or film-industry marketing people did. Sociologists wanted to find out why fans behaved the way they did because it was interesting and often strange, and the industry wanted to figure out fan behavior so they could sell movies to them more effectively.

Then, a couple of decades ago, a new kind of expert came along: the fans themselves. People who had gone to the university to study film, television, literature, or other aspects of popular culture gradually realized that they could study themselves, their kids, and the people they met at fan conventions and later on the internet.

Prof. Henry Jenkins did not originate the study of fandoms, but he has been perhaps the most influential “aca/fan,” as he terms himself on his blog. (The term “fan academic” also gets used to describe this new field of study.) These days books and articles and web publications about fandoms are proliferating, but just about any of them will cite Henry’s seminal 1992 book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (Routledge).

Henry doesn’t study fans to find out what makes them tick. He knows that. He’s one of them, a participant in fan cons, a player of video games, an explorer of the multimedia sagas like those of Star Trek and The Matrix that have grown up in the age of franchise culture. He received his doctorate here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where David was his dissertation advisor, and we have followed his career, as they say, with great interest. Straight out of the gate he was hired by MIT, where he is now the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. (Read more about his prolific and wide-ranging activities at his blog.)

This year two books by Henry appeared: Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (both New York University Press). Given that my The Frodo Franchise has chapters on Lord of the Rings video games and fan culture on the Internet, I thought I’d start with the first. Henry assured me, however, that Convergence Culture represented a more current and probably more relevant overview, so I started with it instead.

This terrific book uses a series of case studies to give an overview of how digital media have expanded the possibilities for participatory fan culture. It also shows how the producers of popular culture have reacted to this new empowerment of the consumers. Only two chapters focus on films: “Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling” and “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Industry.” In the modern entertainment industry, however, films are increasingly linked to other media, and no one has a better grasp of the overall relationship among popular media than Henry.

Convergence Culture is unusual, perhaps unique, in offering an overview of the entertainment industry from the perspective both of the big corporations that control popular media creations and of the fans, who often appropriate those creations for their own purposes. Much of the book depends on interviews with fans and executives alike. Henry is evenhanded in dealing with both points of view—except when the big firms try to stifle fan creativity through intimidation and the invocation of copyright and trademark control.

Here Henry is firmly on the side of the fans. The chapter on Star Wars mentioned above reviews the love-hate relationship George Lucas has had with fan websites that post innumerable works derived from his saga. Another chapter, “Why Heather Can Write,” details how Warner Bros. attempted to squelch fan creativity based on the Harry Potter series. Henry provides a cogent argument for rewriting fair-use laws to accommodate amateur, not-for-profit activities that utilize characters and situations from copyrighted works.

So am I an aca/fan, too? I wouldn’t exactly describe myself as one, though in this new book I have dabbled in that approach, meeting many fellow Lord of the Rings fans in person and in cyberspace. One has to admire members of the various fandoms and the amount of time and effort they are willing to put into keeping themselves and others informed about the objects of their fascination. They also lovingly create their own works (fanfiction, fanart, machinema, RPGs, and so on) derived from their favorite books, games, movies, TV shows, and comics. Most of the results aren’t masterpieces, of course, but that’s true of “real” artworks created by professionals and aspiring professionals as well. If enough of just about anything gets made, some of it is bound to be good. I’ve found some excellent Lord of the Rings fanfiction among the many conventional, sometimes nearly unreadable tales I have sampled. And Chocolate Cake City’s Brokeback to the Future demonstrates what David likes to describe as “the spontaneous genius of the American people” (usually in reference to the speed with which any significant event generates a body of tasteless jokes, or, in this case, parodies).

For all the attempts to analyze audiences through questionnaires and interviews and other traditional methods, Henry shows that the best way to understand fans is as an insider. The aca/fan approach is spreading as the study of popular media and fandoms gains legitimacy within academe, and it is lucky to have an enthusiastic, intelligent pioneer in Henry Jenkins.