David Bordwell Wrote for You

A Salute to The Good Doctor

David Bordwell wrote for you.

He wanted to know how you watched movies, whoever you were. Why were you able to follow that story? Why did you react to that plot twist as a surprise? How did you understand the characters’ motivations?

The good doctor wrote about what movies were. These are weird things after all. How are we supposed to make sense of a movie?

My relationship with David, who passed away last week, came down to a handful of meetings in Madison (plus a few screenings at Bologna) and some email correspondences and collaboration.¹ But his influence on my work and so many other I consider close friends and colleagues will remain insurmountable for decades to come. He pushed so many to stop talking around the movies and instead look at the screen.

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As has been pointed many times, while so much of scholarship around cinema before the 1970s came out of other fields, David, Kristin, and others were scholars of film first. Their questions were one of first principles: what exactly were the movies?

This question might sound quite common for studies by anyone who has taken a film theory class: Hugo Münsterberg, Sergei Eisenstein, Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, and André Bazin.

But unlike that first era, Bordwell was hardly interested in whether cinema could be proven to be an art form. Instead of debating its artistic merit, he simply began studying it as an art form. What were its dimensions, its patterns, its boundaries, and most importantly, its style?

Because the movies were for everyone, and at least until recently everyone watched them, he wanted to know why they worked for so many people. One of my favorite small posts, David was watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with a friend’s young daughter, who immediately clocked the final shot of the film as the last shot before it was over.² For David, this was an innovative question worth researching: how could she know that kind of shot represented the end of the story?

For those outside the academy, it might be surprising to learn that David Bordwell’s writing could be controversial. One of my quals exams—the final test before writing my dissertation—a skeptical professor directly challenged me to defend the entire Bordwell project and its existence.³ None of the scholars on my committee were particularly committed to the project, and it was my job to prove it was interesting to study and relate innovation in film style as a historical project.⁴

As someone who was not present at the time, it can always seem interesting to see how vehement the battles in film studies may have represented in the 1980s and 1990s—you could turn colleagues blue in the face throughout the 1990s by admitting you read Post Theory according to some sources. David perhaps took no favors by reducing 1970s film scholarship to the acronym SLAB,⁵ but sometimes an old midwestern heart can do a bit of straight shooting.⁶

My sense is David cooled on his interest in rehashing the same debates (though get him in a room and he’d slip a coded remark or two). While he was hardly going to make any hot takes, he became more interested in the kinds of film criticism that grew on the internet where he became an active participant. And because he could be blunt sometimes with admitting certain biases, others took that as dogma.⁷ Read any post, and you’ll see each one—even the ones taking on issues like Antonioni vs. Bergman, Christopher Nolan or the Marvel Cinematic Universe—is driven by curiosity about the debate, not a chance to prove anyone right.

That being said, I would say there were three issues Bordwell took to what much of film scholarship became that I think are still essential worth discussing today.

The first was that Bordwell wanted to champion audiences rather than see them as rubes. In the most blunt terms, there are now decades of writing that assumes watching mass entertainment essentially controls our emotions, our political thoughts.⁸ Even if some of this line has shifted from debates between art cinema and popular cinema to now championing populist films (or more often, television), there is still a sense of essentially policing what people watch. The scholarship, often done at the individual film level through interpretation of a scene, creates an immediate appeal to the authority of the scholar, and often because of the politics often involved, a moral authority.

Bordwell’s goal wasn’t to show the viewer what they missed; it was to show them what they already saw and knew. Audiences were smart; they followed complex stories. That was the interesting part of the equation.

In our discussion on my old podcast The Cinephiliacs while discussing Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon, he remarks upon the final scene that Crawford has already poured two glasses by the time Henry Fonda returns. She knew he was coming back, David explained excitedly. I had seen this, I just had not registered it in the same way.

Two glasses, already full. All while her back turned to Fonda.

So much of David’s writing, his warm and friendly style, is simply asking questions of the reader. It’s his book or blog, but you’re invited to see as well. And as many have mentioned, the blog meant that David no longer had to be in debate with just academics or even critics. If you watched movies, he wanted you to read his blog. You didn’t need to have a degree in rocket science in David’s mind. In fact, better to have one in rocket science than mid-century continental philosophy.

The second element that I think defined David’s work was trying to create an underpinning and a place to build material research. While other scholars were claiming whole industries or countries as ideological one way or another, David was trying to understand first principles or as he called it, preconditions. Interpretation has always been a popular part of filmgoing, but David was curious about why so few were interested in determining what was actually there on the screen.

We can debate The Gaze back and forth—in fact, we should ask for example why so many female stars of the 1930s negotiated for contract clauses about controlling their cinematographers so they could design their own looks—but as David once asked, how come we never focus on eye glances in film narration? They seem pretty essential to storytelling.

His focus was to make descriptive calls first. “By centering our inquiry on film style, we are trying to come to grips with aspects of cinema that matter very much to how films work.” Others could determine the value judgement.

David did not necessarily disclaim that some of those choices were certainly made by some sort of ideological guidance, but that both Hollywood and art cinema practitioners had to make choices first and foremost on narration.⁹ If a film is incomprehensible, it probably won’t work that well as propaganda. As Janet Staiger joked with me years ago about writing The Classical Hollywood Cinema, “We didn’t realize we needed to amend ‘because capitalism’ to every sentence.” In David’s challenge for what he sometimes called middle-level research, it was about creating building blocks for other scholars to jump further and further. It need not reach a totalizing statement around all of human nature.

That did not mean abandoning research outside of film—storytelling traditions in every community certainly have an effect on the cinematic storytelling, and Bordwell’s final book focused as much on 19th century books as much as film (and advocated for others to take up other global traditions)—but it was about trying to focus on devices and norms rather than cherry-picking a single film. Bordwell admits that his Ozu book would have never been possible without having seen dozens upon dozens of early Japanese films only available at the Library of Congress so he could understand the norms first (it would have been silly to dedicate dozens of pages to Ozu’s pillow shots if they were in every Shochiku production). More so, I remember reading CHC cover to cover once and becoming fascinated with David, Kristin, and Janet’s 100 film “sample size” of non-masterpieces to make their claims. Has any other film book since CHC actually included a methodology section? As David wrote, “Amassing facts and exploring ideas in a responsible way—making distinctions, checking counterexamples, anticipating objections, nuancing broad statements—takes more time.”

It’s not that the humanities need to be a science with all the ideology now entangled with STEM, but it is worth having a project and a goal, to build on each other rather than simply drift apart.¹⁰

The final issue at core in the Bordwell project is believing in Film Art rather than simply Art Film. Radical film style, we are often told, is only by those who reject the conventions of the mainstream. But David saw innovative film style everywhere. As he told one interviewer, “We tend to think of Hollywood as a standardised, routine, repetitive cinema, but every decade of American cinema is full of experiments in narrative, pictorial design, sound experiments.” How can we claim Pasolini is making radical choices if we see those same choices being made in a 1960s mid-budget pablum film made by a studio trying to write off taxes?

When David asked me to research into an odd 1940s film entitled Desire Me (the film’s director changed about four hands and remains uncredited), we were researching a curious opening sequence in which who we believe is the protagonist is not who they are. I looked at what turned out to be thirty-three versions of the script, most of them switching up scenes and film style in different ways to achieve different goals. Was this radical narration? No, the good doctor declared. They were simply “a compromise born of two years spent fiddling with expository alternatives.”

That is not to say David was a populist; hardly so. He championed countless art filmmakers as well as many experimental films. He remains one of the key gateway critics for anyone interested in Hong Kong Cinema. In perhaps the most measured response to an infamous piece on cultural vegetables (a debate still seared in many of our minds a decade onward), he simply suggested, “These films have opened windows for many of us. Why should we keep them to ourselves?” Remembering this piece, I could only smirk when David’s advisor, Dudley Andrew, wrote within his remembrance that “David digested films nutritionally.” Cinema diets need protein and grain too.

This is why the core of a filmmaker like Ozu interested David so much. Although Ozu’s films are now part of a canonized art cinema, he was by all accounts a mainstream filmmaker throughout his life, only crossing into art cinema spaces in the West in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And yet here was a filmmaker who seemed to break so many conventions without an audience ever taking up arms against him.

Or consider this quickly written blog post at a festival on Christian Petzold’s Undine: “No lyrical drone vistas, no establishing shot, no title telling us where and when we are, no voice-over trying to lure us in. Just bam, here it is, deal with it. Any movie that starts with a reaction shot in OTS (over the shoulder) of a fiercely downcast woman gets points automatically.” Sometimes the most banal kind of shot can become pretty unique when you put it in the context of narrational devices. It never mattered what kind of movie the interesting choice came from; he wanted to explore it.¹¹

Rather than look for innovation, a key issue for David was how often cinema really did stay the same. The norms established within Hollywood around 1917 really still are all around. After seeing the “desktop” film Unfriended, I hurriedly emailed him because I found it how such a “radical” departure from film style still found ways to keep narrative devices specific to the genre alive. “Damn—those classical norms just keep reviving themselves,” he jestingly remarked back.

I’ll leave the good doctor to summarize: “Once a student called me perverse: ‘You look for the innovative parts of conventional films and the conventional parts of innovative films.’ Not the complete truth, but a good part of it, I must admit.”

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There is of course so much more, and he had so many potential projects he could have accomplished.¹² After all, the cinema remains deep and unexplored as much as we might believe otherwise.

Luckily, there are so many of us willing to keep his footsteps moving forward. And as long as some of you are interested in understanding the forms of movies, maybe we can have a purpose too.

My deepest condolences to Kristin, the Bordwell family, and the many others he touched. We’ll keep watching for those norms.

1. If you listened to my podcast The Cinephiliacs, you might remember that every episode asked the listener to “grab a seat in the front row.” That’s because David was famously always sitting front row center. He wrote about the practice here.

2. An original version of this post noted I could not find the blog or remember which film, but thanks to Alberto Villaescusa Rico for finding it.

3. I’ll give the professor some credit: both of us were highly interested in aesthetics, but how and where aesthetics emerged in film was essentially our debate.

4. I’ll shoutout J.D. Connor for at least being able to be just as smart as David at his best, as he did in a recent post here.

5. Saussurean Semiotics, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism, and Barthesian Textual Theory. It’s a bit funny to see all the words next to each other.

6. In a different career, I thought of writing a tri-person biography (triography?) looking at the intersecting careers of Bordwell, Roger Ebert, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. All three were born in small towns and became cinephiles at local cinemas before relocating to the American Midwest. Their most defining positions in film criticism would take root in the 1980s with a second revival with the birth of the Internet. They became central figures in their own sects of criticism (academia, popular criticism, art cinema-inclined criticism).

7. When David wrote about his own limitations with prestige television, so many took it as dogma. But as television scholar—and Bordwell mentee—Jason Mittell wrote at the time, this was just mostly being misunderstood. After all, the same post included a lengthy analytical study on a TV show most had never even heard of

8. This is why scholarship that has studied audiences and attempted to demonstrate the birth of new kinds of film culture is actually quite interesting to me. What if Hollywood liberated spectators? Perhaps then, the form of Hollywood storytelling might be less ideological than some would assume.

9. I believe some of the Bordwell controversy was coded in the idea that he was somehow being conservative by not opening space for these ideas. In reality, he was often diagnosing how and why certain norms pervaded despite potential spaces for innovation. Moreover, he used his blog often to write about the politics of Wisconsin as well as the media campaigns and narration devices used by politicians.

10. I think at this point it might be worth suggesting how many filmmakers were fans of David Bordwell even though film studies is often considered in opposition to filmmaking classes. If there was an argument to fund film studies as a discipline, perhaps if it was seen as useful to filmmakers might be a pretty good place to start.

11. A friend remembered a story that he had been told about David seeing a new Godard for the first time when it came available on 16mm, and how he was jumping in his seat over a camera movement he had never done before. “This guy’s body moves by camera motivation!” After all, if Godard thought camera movements were moral choices, shouldn’t this be what excites those interested in ideology?

12. Two things here: first, Pandora’s Digital Box is perhaps still the most essential text about the DCP revolution. Second, he told me that he had to politely decline an offer from Johnnie To to go through the entire Milkyway Image archives, something that could be as rich as any of the major texts on the Hollywood studio.