1) Main Contact Info

Name: Abé Mark Nornes
a.k.a. A. M. Nornes, Abe Mark Norne, Mark H Nornes, Mark Nornes

Title/Department:
Associate Professor of Film and Video, Associate Professor of
Asian Languages and Cultures and Faculty Counselor, Center for
Japanese Studies, College of Literature, Science and the Arts
at the University of Michigan

Snail Mail:
Film And Video Studies
2008C Frieze (Office is 3098 Frieze)
105 South State St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285

Email: amnornes@umich.edu

Phone: +1 734 763 1144 (office)

(for more contact info, see
http://directory.umich.edu/dirsvcs-bin/search?search_text=amnornes)

2) Work
Taken from web: Nornes is co-editor and contributor for
Japan/America Film Wars: WWII Propaganda and its Cultural
Contexts. He has published on a number of topics - especially
on wartime documentary - in anthologies and journals. "The
Body at the Center: The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki," appeared in Hibakusha Cinema (KPI,
1996). "Tainting National Space - The Enola Gay and What is
Missing," was in Hiroshima 50 ans: Japon-Amerique, memoires au
nucleaire (Paris: Editions Autrement, 1995). Forthcoming
articles include "Poru Ruta and the Politics and Practice of
Translation" in Cinema Journal, and "Toward an Abusive
Subtitling: Illuminating Cinema's Apparatus of Translation" in
Film Quarterly. Online, see "Narrating National Sadness:
Cinematic Mapping and Hypertextual Dispersion," at CinemaSpace
(co-written with Yeh Yueh-yu).
He also help set up a Japanese film studies web site, back in
the day when setting up websites was innovative.
http://pears.lib.ohio-state.edu/Markus/

Anime-related work?
Presented a lecture at Western Michigan University in March
of 2003 -- "The Abusive Subtitling of Anime Fandom"
According to AnimeNewsNetwork, "Despite the apparent bias
against fansubbing in the title of the lecture, the lecture
itself will not necessarily be so. According to the outline,
'fansubbers provide a positive example for professional
translators who want to keep up with the times.' Nornes
explains that the 'abuse' lies in the fact that fans have
hijacked the institutionalized method of anonymous
professional translating, thereby abusing the standard.
However he feels that this abuse is in fact something to be
celebrated." (for more info, see
http://www.wmich.edu/wmu/news/2003/0303/0203-254.html)

Academic acclaim rating? saaa

3) General Impressions
He's published in English and Japanese, and he seems to have
a pretty extensive record for being out of grad school for
only nine years. Also, he did say "Yu-Gi-Oh is incredibly
un-artful compared to most anime. It's dull. It uses limited
animation. Yu-Gi-Oh, like Pokemon, is mostly about making
money." (http://edition.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/TV/06/26/yugioh/)
On the other hand, it seems like he's only peripherally
interested in anime. He seems to have a little of the Thomas
Lamarre Otaku-labor-power idea going on, but because his
background is in film and not social theory in general, I
don't know how eloquent he'd be... But he certainly knows a
lot about film.
And doing something about World War II propaganda would be
really REALLY cool!

4) Brief Bios (optional)

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RESEARCH INTERESTS:

Japanese documentary film

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Abe Mark Nornes teaches Asian cinema at the University of
Michigan's Program in Film and Video and the Department of
Asian Languages and Cultures. He received his PhD from the
University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television.
He has also been a coordinator for the Yamagata International
Documentary Film Festival in Japan since 1990. Nornes has
published articles about Asian cinema in American and Japanese
film journals, and is co-editor and contributing author of The
Japan / America Film Wars: WWII Propaganda and its Cultural
Contexts (Harwood, 1994). His current project is a book on the
first 50 years of Japanese documentary film and theory. On the
WWW he has spearheaded Kinema Club, a website devoted to the
study of Japanese moving image media. Forthcoming articles
include an analysis of multiple translation of Paul Rotha's
Documentary Film in 1930s Japan (Cinema Journal), and a look
at the history of subtitling from the perspective of
translation theory (Film Quarterly).

---

Abe' Mark Nornes teaches Asian cinema, specializing in the
film and video of Japan. Before coming to the University of
Michigan he was a coordinator for the Yamagata International
Documentary Film Festival, where he programmed large events on
Pacific War filmmaking, on film and video by indigenous
people, and a major retrospective for the centenary of
documentary in 1995. This interest in the documentary form has
led to the preparation of a manuscript on nonfiction film in
Japan. Covering the period from the beginning of cinema to
1946, this book will introduce how artists and critics
conceptualized documentary during these crucial years. He is
also exploring the possibilities of digital technology for
film scholarship, writing hypertextual criticism and managing
a website dedicated to the study of the Japanese moving image.
When he's not sitting at a desk, he's moving: hiking, mountain
biking, climbing, snow shoeing, and skiing. Most recently, he
has freed his heels and started telemarking.

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