Makino essay collection

[Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow]

ESSAY COLLECTION IN HONOR OF MAKINO MAMORU

The name of Makino Mamoru has come up a number of times in the last month 
or so on KineJapan as a collector, scholar, and gentleman who has proved 
a god-send to many of us studying Japanese film.  His openness to new 
ideas, dedication to film studies, and kindness to young scholars mark 
him as a rare and dignified figure in world of cinema studies, not only 
in Japan, but world-wide.

Many of us owe a great debt to Makino and it is in that spirit that some 
of us at Kinema Club have figured that one of the ways to best honor him 
would be to produce a collection of essays in his honor.  The "Essays in 
Honor of" practice may seem to some an old-fashioned way of paying 
tribute to a 
senior scholar, but for someone like Makino, a bibliographer in the true 
sense of the term who values the production of books, creating a book 
for him would be an excellent expression of our gratitude.  And given 
that he has spent so much of his energy trying to get us to write top 
quality work in film studies, producing examples of such research in his 
name would be the natural way to prove that his efforts have been 
fruitful.

While Makino's health has not been the best as of late, we want to stress 
that this is not a volume to say good bye to him.  We want to produce it 
when he is still active in order to further encourage him in his efforts 
to promote the study of cinema.

We thus ask all of you who have been helped by Makino or who share our 
respect for him to consider submitting an essay or other contribution for 
this volume.  In our conception, the collection would be an international 
one, with contributions in both English and Japanese.  To further honor 
Makino, we also conceive of printing some translations of Makino's 
representative essays and a bibliography of his writings.  Contributions 
can thus be of several kinds:

   1) An original piece of research on cinema (preferably Japanese 
cinema, but since Makino has interests in Chinese and Korean film, as 
well as in larger issues like censorship, other topics are also 
permissable).  Length would be between 10 and 20 pages.

   2) A translation into English of one of Makino's representative works. 
 
(Translators can choose which ones, but we also hope to have Makino 
recommend works.)

   3) Help with other aspects of the production: creating the 
bibliography, editing, translation checks, design, etc.

We originally thought about approaching a university press with this 
project, but given how much time presses can take and how unlikely they 
would be to accept such an "unprofitable" proposal, we have decided to go 
the route of private publication (though we will approach some friendly 
companies about helping with distribution, etc.).  This would be the best 
way to produce a volume quickly (probably in a limited run of 200 or so 
copies) in the format that we want it.  Given how good desktop 
publication software has become, we can produce a quality book with not 
too much work or expense.  Printing would cost money, only some of which 
would be recouped by sales.  This is why we also ask contributors to be 
prepared to share the cost of preparing such a publication.  (Nothing is 
set for sure, but we imagine the average cost per person would be about 
20000 yen.)  We hope contributors can consider that as another aspect of 
their act of honoring Makino.

In the future, we plan to post the entire publication on the Kinema Club 
site so that it can reach the maximum readership.

In the same spirit of doing it ourselves, we stress that this is a volume 
which will be left to the contributors.  While we will offer comments and 
suggestions and act as general editors, in general, we will accept all 
contributions and leave it up to the contributors to produce work they 
think is suitable for honoring Makino.  (Size considerations, however, 
may lead to some cutting and trimming depending on how many contributions 
there are and our budget.)  Those of you who are busy or worried about 
tenure may have a hard time putting effort into an essay that would 
probably 
do little for your CV, but we hope the spirit of honoring Makino will 
help make this a top-notch collection of cinema scholarship.

At this point, we want to set the DEADLINE for contributions as SEPTEMBER
30, 1998.  Those interested in contributing should contact us as soon as 
possible.

We hope that many of you are interested in participating in this project 
and look forward to hearing from you.

Aaron Gerow       Abe Markus Nornes

All correspondence with regard to this project should be directed to 
Aaron Gerow: onogerow at angel.ne.jp