The Makino Blog is a place to share interesting materials and announcements about the Makino Mamoru Collection on the History of East Asian Film (牧野守コレクション, Makino Collection) as it is processed.
The Makino Collection is a vast treasure chest of things I have only begun to uncover. Those who have been fortunate over the past 20 years to use the collection at Mr. Makino’s home in Tokyo, know what I mean, but it is full of so much information that I felt a blog might give me the opportunity to let you know where I am at in the processing as well as to give you a peek at some of its holdings. To use the archival materials that are already processed, patrons can contact me to use them in the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Kress Rare Books and Special Collections Reading Room. Since some items are off-site, it is best to allow time for their retrieval. As I process, I am creating a finding aid which will eventually go online.
Here are some goals for my blog:
1. to cover processing status
2. to give you an insiders view at processing
3. to make announcements related to the Makino Collection
4. to allow reader comments
Collection Overview:
Mr. Makino’s Collection of approximately 80,000 items are mostly located at our off-site facility in New Jersey (ReCAP) and are processed at C.V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University. The Collection focuses on print materials related to Japanese film that Mr. Makino collected over the course of fifty years. Mr. Makino began collecting materials related to Japanese documentary film, and then expanded his collection to cover film theory, movements, censorship, and other non-film film-related materials. Many of the print materials in the Collection – books, magazines, film scenarios, company documents, ephemera – date to the 1910s and 1920s, when books and critical reviews about cinema proliferated.
For more information about the collection, see the Makino Collection website http://library.columbia.edu/indiv/eastasian/special_collections/makino_mamoru.html
Symposium Announcement:
We will hold our first daylong symposium to examine research in the field of Japanese film studies emerging from the rich holdings of the Makino Collection.
"The Makino Collection at Columbia: the Present and Future of an Archive"
Date: 11/11/11
Time: 9am-5:45pm, with a reception afterward
Place: 403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (at the corner of 116th and Amsterdam Avenue, NYC)
The symposium is open to the public, but please R.S.V.P. to bsk9@columbia.edu
For a list of panelists and their presentations, check the Makino website.
To start us off with an item from the collection, here is a poster for the film, A Thousand and One Nights in Tokyo (Tokyo sen’ichiya), a 1938 film directed by Uchida Tomu/内田吐夢 (1898-1970). There are about 50 posters in all in the Makino Collection.
There are many Uchida related materials in the Collection, including 6 scrapbooks created by Mr. Makino that contain photographs and photocopied scenarios pasted together in a storyboard type format all concerning Uchida’s film, Earth (Tsuchi/土), which was made in 1939. Tsuchi was a story of peasant life that was shot in northern Japan.