Kameari and the end of meigaza

[Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow]

Michael offered some nice comments to one of my posts (thanks for getting 
back to posting on the list!), but the end-of-the-semester rush prevented 
a quick answer.  It's all probably out of people's memory by now, but 
here we go:

>why stop there? watching a film at the Kameari meigaza is not the same as
>watching a film at a first run cinema in Yurakucho, is not the same as
>watching a film at the ACT mini-theater, the Ooi Musashinokan (pre and post
>renovation) etc. Also, as Christopher Zeeman has demonstrated, the myths
>about "renaissance perspective" we've been hearing since the 60s are just
>that: we see a different film depending on which seat we sit in. Not to
>mention sound: DTS and SDDS may be hard to tell apart, but anyone can tell
>it's not in stereo any more. The point is, most people speak of a film as a
>single text not because "it" is always phenomenologically the same but
>because there's no end to the distinctions one could make between their
>receptions. Of course, film vs video has been a convenient punctuating mark
>in the last couple of decades, though that may be changing: the New York
>Times today had an article about new digital projection systems that
>produce "film-like" images ("light valves" and "micro-mirrors"!). 

The recourse to phenomenology here is a very interesting one and I think 
partially true, though I would add that a good cognitivist would argue 
that our "schema" help us ignore the difference between the points of 
view of different seats in the theater.  But given that, I'm still not 
sure this answers the question about how our language is functioning.  
What exactly are the phenomenological conditions which prompt these 
perceptions and why do they produce distinctions in some cases but not in 
others?  For instance, I've always wondered why we usually do make a 
distinction between seeing a dance or theater performance in the theater 
and seeing it recorded on film or TV, but not between seeing a "film" in 
the theater and on video. Is this difference explainable totally through 
recourse to phenomenology?  True, there are differences in media, but is 
the theater vs. film difference with dance essentially that distinct from 
the theater vs. video difference with film?  There are arguments that can 
be made in this area, but I do want to add that there are other, more 
socio-economic explanations, such as the place in the artistic hierarchy 
of theater and dance (the aura which frowns upon its reproduction) and 
the question of sales (at this time, the legit theater industry does not 
depend much on video sales and in fact would probably want to avoid that, 
given the aura they wish to preserve).  Just citing phenomenological 
economy does not account for either for these differences, or for 
historical shifts.  As I said in my first post, I really don't think 
anyone in the 1910s, for instance, when cinema was largely defined by the 
space of reception/exhibition, would have conceived of a "text" which 
could equally be "seen" in a completely different space of reception like 
video at home.  What interests me are the historical processes which 
created this conception of the text, and the conditions which have made 
us able to say we are seeing the same "thing" on film and on video.
 
>But it seems to me more important to connect specific
>*types* of reception to specific explanations (not just cinemas so crowded
>that people stood within 50cm of the screen to see _Arashi o yobu otoko_
>but the culture of celebrity that absorbed Ishihara Yujiro; not just seeing
>the same film with 6 other people in the Ginza Seiyu 40 years later, but
>the contemporary decline of Japanese film exhibition) than to make absolute
>distinctions between film and video. Unless we have a "text" -- some kind
>of regularity that we think exerts a tendency on reading (this doesn't have
>to be made of celluloid, of course) and that we can discuss with students
>-- then what are we teaching? To get back to Japan; what is the relation
>between Sawato Midori's impressive benshi performances and the history of
>benshi exhibition that they (or we), perhaps, fetishize? 

Michael is very right here.  I certainly prefer to look at specific 
explanations, too, especially when they account for particular historical 
distinctions in the history of reception and discourse on cinema.  That's 
why I am suspicious of arguments which reduce the distinction between 
film and video to mere technological or media differences.  But I don't 
see where any of my comments argued we should get rid of texts.  Michael 
seems to be mistaking me with some others who have latched onto reception 
studies as a way of explaining everything about texts, to the point of 
refusing to talk about the text anymore.  Heck, I'm Dudley's student too. 
 I've always taught my students to see reception as a complex interplay 
between textual factors (Michael's regularities), the discourses which 
shape texts (intertexts, publicity, etc.), exhibition (the theater, 
programming, etc.), how audiences behave, and how audiences are prompted 
to behave, to name a few.  But it also interests me as a historian to 
explain how conceptions of the text, reception, and their interplay have 
changed over time.  That, I think, is also part of cinema studies.

>Having said that, is
>film exhibition so superior? The lost films are still lost and there's a
>trade-off between the number of films you could see in the cinema and the
>attention you can pay to a video. And you more than anyone know that film
>reception, and the propensity for intertextual reference, are not
>determined simply by film viewing. Having a poor memory, I'd rather rent
>Kawashima's _Sports-O_ and _O shimin shokun_ (a great satire on postwar
>democratic-enlightenment, by the way) from Tsutaya Shinjuku than try to
>remember when I saw it in the cinema, if I ever had.  

I was merely trying to pose a question: I do not have an easy answer.  
And I never said film exhibition is superior.  My query was mostly based 
on the knowledge that, in the heyday of the meigaza in Japan (the 1970s 
and early 1980s) when there were at least two dozen in the Tokyo area 
alone, you really could regularly see a wider range of films over a 
period of time than you can today on video.  That is one reason, I think, 
you've seen critics like Yamane and Hasumi who can cite small scenes and 
gestures in hundreds of very obscure films which have no chance of ever 
making it to video, as well as filmmakers like Shinozaki Makoto and 
Aoyama Shinji who, even if it doesn't always show in their films, have 
seen five or six times the number of films I've ever seen.  Hasumi (who, 
being a film snob, would never resort to showing a video in class) ran 
his film classes by having his students go to meigaza each week; he can't 
easily do that any more.  I'm just wondering what these changes will 
produce in terms of shifts in the way films are studied, made, and talked 
about.

Again, sorry for the late response.

Aaron Gerow
(who bought "Dango 3-kyodai" on the first day)