The New York Times this past weekend ran a celebratory article (and you should read it) about film professor and critic, David Borwell. Bordwell teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; he composes a huge compilation of analytical essays at his blog; and he’s the former mentor to one of my academic mentors, Henry Jenkins.
Bordwell has been a film critic for practically FOREVER, and he’s written some impressive and influential film criticism texts, such as “The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960″, in which he explains the history of film through the lens of technological development in relation to the Hollywood style.
Now, I’ve been thinking (also FOREVER) about media criticism and how I should apply it to both my thinking and my writing (specifically for this blog).
If we think about the fan response to Japanese animation (opinionated and published, by word, voice, video, etc.), the leading voices tend to have been reviewers: the trio from Anime World Order for a contemporary example, or — as an classic illustration — writers for old fanzines (such as through the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization) who compiled episode synopses and shared opinions about series to progress the knowledge that, basically, anime exists.
However, I want to push back against the concept of “the reviewer,” because the position sits as an odd point between objective journalism and subjective personal grandstanding. I appreciate the wonderful breadth of series that, for example, Anime World Order explores, because the number one rule to being able to talk about anime is to watch it. However, I feel that to gain a more detailed and elaborate understanding of anime, fans need to move beyond their position as reviewer and advance toward that of “critic.”
I bring up the Bordwell article, because the author describes Bordwell’s approach to film in exactly the terms that I want to approach analyses of Japanese animation:
Counting blinks is just one of Mr. Bordwell’s strategies for understanding movies, the fundamental goal of the critic. Rather than just gassing on about his interpretations (as reviewers can do) or starting with a theory and finding a set of movies that support that theory (as scholars will do), he looks to the movies first, analyzing what is happening at the level of sight and sound, then extrapolating meaning.
Now, the author also critiques academics, who can tend to analyze their subject in terms of their own ideas, rather than develop ideas based on their subject (one example might be the “X and Philosophy series,” of which anime has one). But I think that the core bit of appreciation that the article promotes is that the critic analyses the media and then extracts the meaning. Of course, to move beyond the reviewer, this meaning says something about how the media operates rather than simply what the media contains (and maybe the impressions that the media evokes).
I’m trying to push this blog (when I release more content habitually) toward the perspective of a critic, which is why I tend to avoid writing reviewer-ly articles. If you’re looking for more prolific authors, you should check out:
- Awesome Engine
- Anipages Daily
- Ani no Miyako
- Welcome Datacomp
Your mentor is Henry Jenkins? I’m star-struck. :)
The article’s implicit advice is pretty good for all of us, in print or in the blogosphere. Trying to fit Card Captor Sakura into an existing philosophical framework isn’t so different in principle from calling K-ON! a “moeblob” show and proceeding from there. Watch first, then analyze.
What I keep hoping for is for writing about anime to become more kind of like the sort of essays that are published at Flow, where the content takes a kind of engaged, yet still analytic approach, and is done on a timely basis.
I would actually love to see a similar approach. Perhaps that’s a project that some dedicated bloggers could put together, where there’s a (very mild) form of peer review with a dedicated group of authors.
I think there was an attempt along these lines by a scholarly fellow who calls himself Cuchlann. His vision was more along the lines of a semi-regular e-journal. I expressed some interest early on, but I never knew what came of that.
Good article, many thanks for pointing it out.
I can certainly understand your desire to come at anime from a roughly formalistic or new critical perspective. But I have a negative gut reaction to this, and I state it here not to be contrary, but to give you an idea of the kinds of opposition you might encounter (because you know there’s one petty academic out there who will call you out on it in a context that matters in terms of tenure or publication).
It’s not that I dislike the approach of deep, intense reading (I can’t say I dislike any particular approach, really, barring the “if you don’t agree with me, you’re dumb” variety). But I tend toward the position that texts or art objects only mean anything in the context of a consumptive act — thus, one can’t examine textual elements and extrapolate meaning because there isn’t any meaning there; one gives these elements meaning in accordance with one’s knowledge and experience. Considering 2DT’s objection, the “problem” is that every act of consumption is necessarily an attempt to fit textual elements into our existing frameworks (and, as always, I resent the implication that people who simply enjoy playing with overarching frameworks must not bother to pay much attention to art objects themselves).
But, insofar as my position gets me marginalized somewhere between the reader response critics and the now unforgivably unstylish poststructuralists, it may not really matter. A more likely complaint will come from cultural materialists: the text gets its meaning by virtue of existing at a particular place and time, and thus there’s little point in examining discrete textual elements without connecting them to the idiosyncrasies of some intended or practical audience. And I suppose there’s some value to this insofar as the only way to predict how consumers might interpret a text is to figure out their habits.
Of course, I’m not saying you should throw your hands up and be a reviewer. That wouldn’t do any good, either. Hell, I think formalism and new criticism are interesting approaches — but, considering how long they’ve been around, people have been taking pot shots at them for quite a while.
Alex,
Thanks for posting this. I wrote a piece against theory-driven, academic writing. It’s nice to know I’m not alone in wanting scholars to start with the subject matter before all else.