How many generations of film students would still have a book somewhere on their shelves Film Art: An Introduction (1979)? David Bordwell, who died last week after a long illness, was probably the most influential film scholar of our time. Last fall, the thirteenth updated edition of what started as a textbook was released. How do you watch film? What do you see? And what does it mean? Simple questions to which he spent a lifetime finding answers.
Bordwell was amiable, open-minded and enthusiastic: a true teacher. But he was also precise and methodological: the popularity of shot-by-shot analysis is due to his pioneering work. He made dozens of video essays for it Criterion streaming channel, the American distributor of re-releases of classic films. In the blog davidbordwell.net, which he kept up to date with his colleague and husband Kristin Thompson (1950) from 2006, he also joined the current debate – the last contribution dates from last month. He then generously shared complete articles and chapters from books that would otherwise remain hidden behind an expensive academic paywall.
Democratization
In this way he not only contributed to the popularization, but also to the democratization of his field. His influence extended far beyond the walls of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he served from 1973 until his retirement in 2004. Bordwell and Thompson were important for research into film production, spectatorship and the role of film festivals. He defended film as an art form, but also explained that you cannot understand film without considering film as a technology, entertainment and industry. That’s why Movie Art and his successors MovieHistory (1994) and On the History of Film Style (1997) are still the best overview books in the field of film.
David Jay Bordwell was born in 1947 and grew up on a farm outside New York, far from movie theaters; he belongs to the first generation of cinephiles who fed themselves on American classics on television. He then read everything he could to inform himself: a hodgepodge of German film theory, history, magazines, reviews. As soon as he got his driver’s license, he went out to see it all in real life. In an interview he would later say that he actually learned more about film by reading about it than by watching it. His favorites were the great film authors: Orson Welles, the French impressionists Abel Gance, Germaine Dulac and René Clair, the great stylists Yasujiro Ozu and Carl Theodor Dreyer and the Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, known for their controlled, observational style of filmmaking and overall shots.
Eye movements and data analysis
By the end of his life he had probably seen more films than anyone else. So he sometimes missed the mark. That’s how he found Christopher Nolan’s dark Batman film The Dark Knight (2008) nothing at all, and he made a case for it Premium Rush (2014) with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a bicycle courier in Manhattan. He also had blind spots, for example for the psychoanalytic view of films that emerged in the 1970s, led by Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the ‘male gaze’. Bordwell was more interested in research into eye movements, shot lengths and data analyzes and could be rigid in this. He found political and cultural-sociological interpretation too speculative and he did not like reviewers who reduce everything to an opinion or judgment.
To unravel the secret of film, he returned again and again to film history, to individual films and his knowledge of tradition and conventions. Yet sometimes the cinephile won over the scientist. He was extremely curious about the future of film culture. In his collection Pandora’s Digital Box: Movies, Files, and the Future of Movies (2012) he concluded: “As our cinematic experience changes, so too will our understanding of what cinema has been, and can be.”