Twenty five years ago, Jem Cohen completed Lost Book Found, a semi-fictional diary film that draws from his experience as a pushcart vendor in lower Manhattan. The work is crafted from what such a vendor might have seen and heard: bits of paper and plastic swirling ghostlike in eddies of wind; weathered storefronts; window displays crowded with tchotchkes; enigmatic notes taped to streetlights; disassociated recordings of sales pitches, passing conversations, and the sounds of machines at work; unlovely aggregations of cardboard; evening skylines glowing in fog.

Except for a sequence at the film’s end, the images in Lost Book Found are recorded entirely on Super 8, framed at times with a skyward tilt, canting everyday pedestrians into oneiric angles, as if snatches of an expressionist film of the 1920s were transposed onto late-capitalist America. This is not the authoritative, acquisitional mode of conventional documentary, but a view from below, from one of the street’s own participants. “Its beauty is quite ineffable. It’s the sort of visual experience that transforms everything seen by the viewer for several hours afterward,” Luc Sante observed of the movie. “What it actually does is capture the subconscious of the city itself, the dream state of the whole past existing in simultaneous disarray.”

Looking at Lost Book Found today, on the other side of the millennium and in the midst of a global pandemic, one cannot help but think of the depopulated streets of Manhattan and its newly muted rhythms. Now, in the relative absence of both bustling commuters and slow-moving tourists, a layer has been peeled back, revealing what Cohen has trained us to see: the city as a vast reliquary of its own history.

For our week-long run of Lost Book Found, we brought Cohen together in conversation with filmmaker and fellow New Yorker Jeff Preiss.

Jem Cohen + Jeff Preiss on Lost Book Found

Film theory is fundamental to understanding cinema: it attempts to answer questions about the what, how, and why of cinema. The history of such questions is long and global, yet the canonical histories of film theory have centered on Europe and America, tacitly assuming that those regions can speak for all of film theory. Japan has a rich history of film theory that matches its superlative cinema, but that history is largely unknown. Perhaps under the influence theory’s Eurocentrism, this history is also generally ignored in Japan, and the practice of pursuing theory but refusing to call it theory is an element of what I call the “theory complex.” There are many things to learn from reading film theory from Japan, but I contend one is a tendency that, likely because of theory’s perceived “Westerness,” critically questions theory as a discipline. As a fascinating example of this tendency, I would like to introduce the film writings of novelist Osaki Midori (1896–1977). Through her concept and practice of eiga mansō—wandering thoughts and jottings on cinema—Osaki enacts a different relation between film and spectator, one that is simultaneously intimately sensual and detached, corporeal and ghostly. Often analyzed in terms of her lesbian sexuality, Osaki’s eiga mansō could be called a queering not only of cinema, but also, I would argue, of theory as well.

- AG

Aaron Gerow is Professor of Film Studies and of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He is the author of Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925 (University of California Press), A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan (Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan), and Kitano Takeshi (British Film Institute).

Aaron Gerow on Osaki Midori and the Film Theory Complex in Japan

Recently, in the midst of preparations for Light Industry’s reopening, we had a chance to talk with Jurij Meden, one of the most interesting curators working today. He modestly refers to his new book Scratches and Glitches, the subject of our conversation, as a “somewhat personal collection of pieces on film preservation and exhibition in the 21st century,” and the essays that comprise this slim but potent volume, written over the span of a decade, grew out of events and discussions that occurred during Meden’s time at institutions like the Slovenian Cinematheque, the George Eastman Museum, and, his current home, the Austrian Film Museum. He engages numerous internal debates that rage within the international network of film archivists and programmers, yet Meden’s observations speak to questions that extend far beyond this particular community. Indeed, they’re highly relevant to anyone concerned with the fate of the moving image as an art form. Darting nimbly around the digital versus analog divide, addressing the fear of lost media, and pondering the fate of moviegoing after the pandemic, Meden offers an array of provocative philosophical ruminations that embrace the contradictions and complexities of cinema’s present.

A Conversation with Jurij Meden

Is There Sex after Death? Radio Spot

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