Remembering the Film Scholar David Bordwell

Anton: David Bordwell, one of the giants of Film Studies, passed away almost a month ago, on 29 February 2024. You can read his obituary here, at the blog he maintained for years with his spouse, the film scholar Kristen Thompson.  

Others have written personal tributes and substantial assessments of Bordwell’s contributions to Film Studies. Why I thought it was important to talk with you, Anders, after his passing, is because I think Bordwell was a scholar who left his mark on us brothers, as critics and scholars. We have mentioned Bordwell’s ideas on podcast episodes, and I use his insightful book, Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages (second edition, 2019), regularly in my university course on Nolan and originality.

Roger Ebert is the popular critic who has left the deepest impact on my writing about film. I didn’t have as formative an intellectual connection with Bordwell—I don’t know his entire body of scholarship, and I didn’t read his blog every week—yet some of Bordwell’s ideas have really lodged themselves in my mind. I would say that he is foremost in the small handful of film scholars who I regularly return to in my popular, non-academic writing about film.

Obviously, Anders, you have a more real-life connection to Bordwell.

Anders: When I began studying film academically, that’s when I got to know David Bordwell, both intellectually and personally. One of my own Film Studies mentors was herself a student of David and Kristin’s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so he was more than just a distant scholar or object of reverence to me. She often remarked on not only the generosity that they extended to students in scholarly matters, but also on their hospitality in hosting and entertaining. Theirs was a great model of scholarly mentorship.

I only met him once, briefly, when Bordwell and Thompson came to Waterloo for an academic conference. At that same conference he gave a talk on Joseph Mankiewicz’s A Letter to Three Wives, a film that he examined for its example of how classic Hollywood film narration was able to contain much more experimentation and ambiguity than is often noted, while still being an entertainment commodity. To me, that talk sums up Bordwell’s gift: the ability to examine the formal structures of a piece within its historical context, enriching our appreciation and strengthening our interpretive schemas. His book, Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), was a key text for me in writing my dissertation, which looked at the way that films frame and structure memory and flashbacks in different production modes, including Hollywood film and art cinema.

Another time, before the meeting just mentioned, Aren and I saw Bordwell give a talk at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1986 film, Dust in the Wind. Bordwell’s interest in Asian cinematic traditions, including the works of Hou, Yasujiro Ozu, and Hong Kong cinema, was invaluable for me as a scholar. When I taught a course on Hong Kong cinema a few years later, Bordwell’s Planet Hong Kong (2000) was my textbook. 

Anton: I’m not the first to say this, but I think Bordwell was remarkably lucid when breaking down and explaining formal, and other, features of film. I teach courses on communication and analysis to first-year students from a range of Arts Faculty disciplines. Although none of my students are going into Film Studies (as that’s not a major at my university), they do find his writing accessible, understandable, and, most importantly, useful. He wrote scholarship which didn’t just add to the body of knowledge and engage in the scholarly conversation—as important as that is. Bordwell’s scholarly writings also provide practical frameworks for grasping and better understanding pretty much any movie anybody happens to watch.

Part of this achievement is Bordwell’s essential role in writing many of the standard textbooks that Film Studies students read in their introductory courses.

Anders: To this day, I use Film Art: An Introduction, the textbook he authored with Kristin Thompson (now in its 13th edition, and having added one of his own proteges, Jeff Smith, as co-author). It’s such a great introduction to cinema, breaking down the elements of film into cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, and sound, in a way that uses great examples from across film history. I’ve also used his Film History: An Introduction (again co-authored with Kristen Thompson) when I taught that subject. No question, he’s the scholar I assign the most in my film classes.

We’re also really lucky that we have the “Observations on Film Art” series of videos he, Thompson, and Smith curated for the Criterion Channel. Anyone who wants to experience first hand the way he approaches film can check that out here.

Anton: Are there any ideas or writings of his that you want to highlight for our readers? I will reiterate that Bordwell’s book on Christopher Nolan has been very helpful to me in articulating Nolan’s particular innovations within film. You come away really understanding how Nolan is committed to a formal project that primarily innovates in terms of film narrative—how do you tell a good story in a novel way? Bordwell’s analytic framework helped me write my review of Oppenheimer from last summer.

Bordwell’s idea of the “network narrative”—which Aren and I applied to Contagion in our 2020 conversation about the film—is a good example of someone precisely and usefully defining a trend one notices in films over a decade or two.

As well, Bordwell and Thompson’s breakdown of the classical Hollywood style is just so useful for articulating those features of classic American film that we all sense but might not have identified and defined.

Anders: Yes, illuminating continuity editing and other formal features of classic Hollywood cinema helps us see the way those films work much clearer. I would say that one of Bordwell’s ideas that I’ve used comes from his 1979 essay on “Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” in which he articulates a concept of art cinema that goes beyond a vague “foreignness” and modes of distribution and exhibition, and instead identifies “authorship, ambiguity, and realism” as the formal techniques that distinguish the art cinema mode.

In a different vein, Bordwell was always interested in the ways that film production modes adapt to changing times, such as in his notion of “intensified continuity” in more contemporary Hollywood films. He might not see it exactly this way, but I feel that the rigor with which he explored all these styles made me feel more free to write about the films of Michael Bay with an eye to figuring out why they work, rather than simply judging them as bad.

Anton: I also always appreciated Bordwell’s honesty in his blog postings. He could explain, even if he didn’t particularly like a movie, aspects of what was going on in it. This approach—can I understand something and not just state my opinion about it?—is certainly more scholarly, but something I think we’ve tried to do with 3 Brothers Film.

Any final words, Anders, on the late, great David Bordwell?

Anders: His scholarship was valuable, but his love of film was palpable. Often one encounters academics who either sacrifice rigour for fandom, or, conversely, who seem to barely enjoy their subject matter. In contrast, Bordwell’s writings made it clear that cinema was not only important, but a passion for him.

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