author's note: Scott has since posted his own thoughts here. jsWhen I finally received a copy, I was deeply touched and so proud of everyone's hard work that went into the collection. Let me be very clear that
Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Vol. 1, is an excellent collection of work by film scholars and critics uniformily of the first order. And yet I am never so kind to myself.
Every time I look back at my work after its been published, whether its a book, a collection, or a lowly article in an obscure journal no one will ever actually read, I recall screenwriter Howard Koch's observation about his own work on co-writing
Casablanca (in some ways still my all-time favorite film):
"looking back now, I see only its flaws."
I suppose that might help frame the following personal comments (and I speak only for myself, and only about my own contributions).
I'd like to think of this as an open thread for folks--friends and strangers alike--to post some of their responses, complimentary and 'constructive' to the collection. It will help shape Volume 2 and it will, I hope, help people better frame and negotiate responses to the ideas in the book itself. Since it is a book intentionally, if distractedly at times, about cinephilia in an age of participatory culture, such a thread as this only makes sense.
I will, of course, start with myself, since I am at this point as much an audience member as anyone else. I co-wrote the introduction with Scott and contributed two essays to it--one a republished article from
Film Criticism ("Sensing an Intellectual Nemesis", which originally appeared in 2007), the other an article written solely for the book ("Deja Vu for Something that Hasn't Happened Yet"). I also read every chapter of the book at least 3 or 4 times in the course of the editing process, which itself took over two years. And yet I claim no inside truth or ownership of anything now that the words have been published and sent off in circulation.
I will say, for my limited part in the collection, that I do not like the "Nemesis" essay--it is too tentative in getting where I wanted to go in theorizing cinephilia. It is more a recounting of cinephilia scholarship and less an intervention into digital effects--the opposite of how I would write that if I were doing it today. Ironically, I very much want to write
that paper now, as the asethetics of digital cinema is slowly emerging as my next area of focus, but do not have any time as I finish revisions on my dissertation (which is a reception history of Disney's
Song of the South, and an all-together different matter).
I was devastated recently to read a comment on an
internet forum discussing the aesthetics of Blu-Ray (the particular area I want to write about eventually) where one person commented that they had ordered the book:
"A disdain for grain apparently is a normal reaction for an audience that is used to watching reality television. I love grain myself, its part of the aesthetics of cinema. I've just ordered the book Cinephilia in the age of digital reproduction, which will no doubt touch on this subject, as it seems to be a pretty major issue for a vast portion of the audience."
I was devastated because the book doesn't discuss this anywhere, and because she/he's probably not the only one hoping that it will. There is talk about the digital image's panoramic nature in the work of Ng, Burgoyne and myself, but not in the way that the poster was referring to--the grain of the image which Blu-Ray intensifies.
I was also devastated because of course the collection
should. Its a fascinating subject for the cinephile and for a theorist of the ontological nature of film, and absolutely falls under the umbrella of "digital reproduction." On the other hand, in fairness to us, Blu-Ray was non-existent other than as a niche hypothetical when the idea for our project first began (mid-2005/early-2006), and still largely an emergent unknown by the time the essays were commisioned in late 2006.
Yet still this comment points to how a big problem with the collection's focus is that it conceives of cinephilia's influence in such a wide scope of possibility that invariably many people will not find what they are hoping to find in the collection, because they are defining "cinephilia in the age of digital reproduction" much differently than Scott and I originally did (and honestly, that wasn't even originally the book's title--another story for another day).
The alternate definitions are every bit as valid, just different. For instance, I feel compelled here to reiterate something Scott and I brush upon in the introduction--this project began as a panel at the international meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Vancouver 2006 that was dealing exclusively with digital visual effects, where Tobey Crockett and Jenna Ng forst presented their work. The collection then spread out from there.
So the project
began as a study on visual imagery and that explains the CGI-heavy emphasis of the articles (likely to be a not invalid criticism of the book). Girish and Zach's excellent collection of letters was intended partly as a later addition explicitly to help correct this imbalance, and later volumes will, I hope, be less digital effects-oriented.
I am saddened, for example, that my second essay (of which I am somewhat more proud as it better lays out my own theory of cinephilia as I've come to believe in it) is one of the only ones to take up the issue of cinephilia and DVDs--or how home viewing and movie collecting affects being a cinephile (Zach's first of two excellent contributions, in this case on "Ghosts before Breakfast", does talk about watching movies on a computer).
Most of the essays are either about blogging or CGI, with the exception of Burgoyne's wonderful essay on avant-garde artists, and cinephilia related to home viewing and private collecting sort of falls in the cracks between. I suppose I like my second essay better in part because its one of the few on cinephilia to touch on theatrical experiences, genre, affect, blogging, and DVDs, as well as offer a more heftly theoretical framework than "Nemesis" does (how come more people don't use Barthes when writing about cinephilia?).
"Deja Vu" better accounts for a film's "life-cycle," as it were, in its circulation and personal duration as a cinephiliac text. (Truth be told, I only included the "Nemesis" essay in the collection because, as the one previously published work in it, I felt it would have made the project more "marketable" to a press at a time when--as second year PhD students then--neither Scott nor I had built up the scholarly credibility or cinephiliac authority that we perhaps have now).
I'm starting to ramble. Anyway, this collection is a strong compilation of distinguished and promising scholars, as well as a vital contribution (a crucial snapshot in time) from some of the leading cinephiles in the English-speaking world. But I see how some will be disappointed, and not without good reason.
But that's okay, and that's--in part--what this is for: "the unlimited possibilities of digital culture reminds us that, in short, cinephilia has not yet been invented!"
Your thoughts?
Best,
Jason
Jamais Vu
