David Bordwell
David Jay Bordwell is an American film theorist and film historian. Since receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1974, he has written more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including Narration in the Fiction Film, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, Making Meaning, and On the History of Film Style.
With his wife Kristin Thompson, Bordwell wrote the introductory textbooks Film Art and Film History. With aesthetic philosopher Noël Carroll, Bordwell edited the anthology Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, a polemic on the state of contemporary film theory. His largest work to date remains The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, written in collaboration with Thompson and Janet Staiger. Several of his more influential articles on theory, narrative, and style were collected in Poetics of Cinema, named in homage after the famous anthology of Russian formalist film theory Poetika Kino, edited by Boris Eikhenbaum in 1927.
Bordwell spent nearly the entirety of his career as a professor of film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he is currently the Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies, Emeritus in the Department of Communication Arts. Notable film theorists who wrote their dissertations under his advisement include Edward Branigan, Murray Smith, and Carl Plantinga. He and Thompson maintain the blog for their recent ruminations on cinema.
Career
Drawing inspiration from earlier film theorists such as Noel Burch as well as from art historian Ernst Gombrich, Bordwell has contributed books and articles on classical film theory, the history of art cinema, classical and contemporary Hollywood cinema, and East Asian film style. However, his more influential and controversial works have dealt with cognitive film theory, historical poetics of film style, and critiques of contemporary film theory and analysis.Neoformalism
Bordwell has also been associated with a methodological approach known as neoformalism, although this approach has been more extensively written about by his wife, Kristin Thompson. Neoformalism is an approach to film analysis based on observations first made by the literary theorists known as the Russian formalists: that there is a distinction between a film's perceptual and semiotic properties. One scholar has commented that the cognitivist perspective is the central reason why neoformalism earns its prefix and is not "traditional" formalism. Much of Bordwell's work considers the film-goer's cognitive processes that take place when perceiving the film's nontextual, aesthetic forms. This analysis includes how films guide our attention to salient narrative information, and how films partake in 'defamiliarization', a formalist term for how art shows us familiar and formulaic objects and concepts in a manner that encourages us to experience them as if they were new entities.Neoformalists reject many assumptions and methodologies made by other schools of film study, particularly hermeneutic approaches, among which he counts Lacanian psychoanalysis and certain variations of poststructuralism. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, Bordwell and co-editor Noël Carroll argue against these types of approaches, which they claim act as "Grand Theories" that use films to confirm predetermined theoretical frameworks, rather than attempting mid-level research meant to illuminate how films work. Bordwell and Carroll coined the term "S.L.A.B. theory" to refer to theories that use the ideas of Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and/or Barthes.
Many philosophers have criticized neoformalism, notably Slavoj Žižek, of whom Bordwell has himself been a long-time critic. Their criticism of neoformalism is generally not based on any internal inconsistencies. Rather, critics like Žižek argue that neoformalism understates the role of culture and ideology in shaping the film text, and that analysis should reveal the problematic values of the societies in which these films are produced.
Influence
Bordwell's considerable influence within film studies has reached such a point that many of his concepts are reported to "have become part of a theoretical canon in film criticism and film academia."Archive
The David Bordwell Collection of over one hundred 35mm film prints is held at the Academy Film Archive and is particularly noteworthy for the strength of its Hong Kong holdings.Select articles
- “” Film Criticism 4:1 ; revised for Poetics of Cinema
- “Textual Analysis, Etc.” Enclitic 5:2 / 6:1 ; see also “Textual Analysis Revisited” Enclitic 7:1 written in response to Lawrence Crawford
- “Lowering the Stakes: Prospects for a Historical Poetics of Cinema” Iris 1:1
- “Mizoguchi and the Evolution of Film Language” in Cinema and Language, eds. Stephen Heath and Patricia Mellencamp
- “” Wide Angle 6:1
- “” “The Velvet Light Trap 21
- “A Salt and Battery” Film Quarterly, 40:2 ; from a polemic between Bordwell/Staiger/Thompson and Barry King regarding King's two-part review of The Classical Hollywood Cinema
- “” Iris 9 ; see also “” Iris 11 written in response to Dudley Andrew
- “A Cinema of Flourishes: Japanese Decorative Classicism of the Prewar Era” in Directions in Japanese Cinema, eds. David Desser and Arthur Noletti ; reprinted in Poetics of Cinema
- “” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 6:2 ; revised for Poetics of Cinema
- “” Film Criticism 17:2-3 ; written in response to critics of Making Meaning
- “The Power of a Research Tradition: Prospects for a Progress in the Study of Film Style” Film History 6:1
- “Visual Style in Japanese Cinema, 1925-1945” Film History 7:1 ; revised for Poetics of Cinema
- “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory” in Post-Theory
- “Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision” in Post-Theory ; reprinted in Poetics of Cinema
- “” The Velvet Light Trap 37 ; revised for Figures Traced in Light
- “Aesthetics in Action: Kung Fu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressivity” in Fifty Years of Electric Shadows, ed. Law Kar ; reprinted in Poetics of Cinema
- “Richness through Imperfection: King Hu and the Glimpse” in Transcending the Times: King Hu and Eileen Chan, ed. Law Kar ; revised for Poetics of Cinema
- “Transcultural Spaces: Toward a Poetics of Chinese Film” Post Script 20:2
- “” Substance 97 ; reprinted in Poetics of Cinema
- “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film” Film Quarterly 55:3 ; revised for The Way Hollywood Tells It
- “Who Blinked First? How Film Style Streamlines Nonverbal Interaction” Style and Story: Essays in Honor of Torben Grodal, eds. Lennard Hojbjerg and Peter Schepelern ; reprinted in Poetics of Cinema
- “” in Poetics of Cinema; an expanded revision of "Schema and Revision: Staging and Composition in Early CinemaScope" in Le CinemaScope Entre art et industrie, ed. Jean-Jacques Meusy
- “Rudolf Arnheim: Clarity, Simplicity, Balance” in Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, ed. Scott Higgins ; an expanded revision of from davidbordwell.net''
Select video essays
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Select journal issues
- Iris 9 “Cinema and Cognitive Psychology”; issue edited by Dudley Andrew, featuring essays by Bordwell, Julian Hochberg, Virginia Brooks, Dirk Eitzen, and Michel Colin; in Iris 11 Bordwell responds to Andrew's characterization of cognitive film theory, followed by Andrew's reply
- Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 6:2 “”; supplement edited by Edward S. Small, featuring essays by Bordwell, Joseph Anderson, and Calvin Pryluck, as well as Noël Carroll's response to Warren Buckland's review of Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory, a response which the editors of Screen supposedly refused to print
- Film Criticism 17:2-3, "'Film Interpretation, Inc.': Issues in Contemporary Film Studies", issue dedicated to Making Meaning, featuring essays from Edward Branigan, RIck Altman, David A. Cook, Thomas Elsaesser, Robert B. Ray, and Robin Wood; Bordwell responds in length at the end
- Style 32:3, “”, issue edited by Bordwell, complementing On the History of Film Style and featuring essays by Noël Carroll, Lea Jacobs, Charles O'Brien, and Scott Higgins