Nakai and Egypt

[Nornes, Markus]

This is, indeed, a perplexing and fascinating problem. I've wondered the same thing and have meant to do some searching in Google Books. Quite a few Japanese books have been scanned already. I have no idea how well the OCR works for characters these days, but searching some key phrases with date delimitations might turn up something interesting. The same might be true for keywords in German. Let us know what you discover.

Markus






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A. M. Nornes
Professor
Department of Screen Arts & Cultures
Department of Asian Languages & Cultures
University of Michigan
6525 A  Haven Hall
Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1045
Phone:  734-647-3456
Fax:  734-936-1846
Homepage: www.umich.edu/~amnornes<http://www.umich.edu/~amnornes>



On Jun 8, 2010, at 6:08 AM, Mathieu Capel wrote:

Dear Kinejapaners,

Those of you who have approached Nakai Masakazu's theory may know that he often seemed reluctant to fully quote his sources. The realm of his interests is actually known, more or less, and can be linked, for instance, and besides other japanese fellows who were his contemporaries, to german thinkers from the end of 19th century to the beginnig of the 20th.
Nonetheless, when reading Nakai's "Introduction to Aesthetics" (Bigaku nyûmon), it may be far from easy to locate his sources. In the chapter "Eiga ni kûkan", Nakai talks about the pyramid of Egypt, and the "fear of space" they symbolize : this idea actually was borrowed from " one critic" (p. 298 in the Iwanami Bunko edition), but who that critic is, that's something I wouldn't know.
Being something as a detail of small significance, where he took that idea may seem of minor importance, but I have the feeling that knowing the name of that very "critic" may help to rebuild a little further Nakai's network of influences, thus, to evaluate what was the novelty of his thinking in the field of "iconology", and then, in the theory of cinema.
I tried to find the answer in Takahashi Naoyuki's "Nakai Masakazu to sono jidai", but wasn't lucky enough. I have been searching until now around Burckhardt and his followers too, such as Wölfflin, for Nakai's theory seems close to the idea of "Zeitgeist" ; around Panofsky's iconology also, after Warburg, and Cassirer. Anyway, I couldn't find yet the proper quotation...
Would someone know the answer ? Many thanks.

Mathieu Capel
Paris



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