Bordwell Ozu reprint

[amnornes at umich.edu]

Michael and David both beat me to this. I guess I better write 
something, but swiftly. The next film is starting in minutes.

I have to say, Bordwell's Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema is one of the 
best books on a single director i can think of. I sense that something 
clicked with David. Aside from the talents of both director and author, 
I suspect David found a strange and strong affinity with Ozu. Both love 
intricasy. Finding it in the world, in cinema, and building it into 
their respective works. There is great power in these close textual 
analyses. Many people had written on the major features of Ozu's style 
at the time of his writing. However, no one had unpacked the films with 
such care. I remained stunned at some of the analyses, the way they 
uncover the spectacular and peculiar logic built into his films. Aside 
from this, it is also one of best introductions to the potentials of 
Bordwell's historical poetics. I have found many of the criticisms of 
the book unconvincing, and often informed mostly by unreasonable 
expectations for what someone like Bordwell can (or should) do.

So I:m proud that I have had a hand in keeping the book alive. As David 
explains in his new introduction, which is definitely worth reading, 
the book went out of print and no press was interested in reviving a 
tome with some 500 images. We were, tho. Unfortunately, some 
entrepeneurial netizen discovered the draft site and it went public 
before we were ready. David had yet to write his introduction. And 
there were ongoing discussions about what to do about the photographs. 
This was Princeton's first book produced digitally, in pay layout 
software. This helps explain why the images are so grainy and hard to 
read. As you probably know, one impressive and precious aspect of his 
publications are the images----frames snapped in an analog fashion and 
not grabbed digitally. His original photos were of very high quality, 
but you'd never know it from the book.

So the new UM Center for Japanese Studies electronic reprint has 
replaced all the images with high quality scans----David went the extra 
mile and helped us with both the financing and actual scanning of these 
materials and we are forever grateful for this help. We also added 
color----why not? It's the internet and easy. On top of all of this, we 
decided to  play with a new interface developed by the people in our 
library (the same office that has been collaborating with Google for 
all these years). You will find tabs for each frame blow-up to the side 
of each page. If you click the tab, a window will open with a new 
interface allowing you to study the image at various sizes. You can 
also download it, or any page, or the entire book for that matter.

I'd like to thank David Bordwell for allowing us to republish his work 
and offer the book for free. It makes it all the easier to return to, 
search a key word, and also to assign to classes on Japanese cinema.

Enjoy!

Markus