David Bordwell

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David Bordwell (born 23 July 1947) is a prominent American film theorist and author. He is the Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies, Emeritus in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is married to Kristin Thompson, with whom he has written two textbooks: Film Art and Film History. Film Art is the most widely used introductory film textbook in the United States.[1]

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Career

Bordwell is a prolific scholar, interested in auteur studies (Ozu, Eisenstein, Dreyer), national cinemas (Hong Kong), history of film style, and narrative theory. Bordwell is considered the founder of cognitive film theory, an approach that relies on cognitive psychology as a basis for understanding film's effects. It was established as an alternative to the psychoanalytic/interpretive approach that dominated film studies in the 1970s and '80s.

[edit] Neoformalism

Bordwell has also been associated with a methodological approach known as neoformalism, although this approach has been more extensively written about by Kristin Thompson.[2] Neoformalism is an approach to film analysis based on an observation first made by the literary theorists known as the Russian Formalists: that there is a distinction between a story and the form that conveys the story. For example, in a detective story, the murder comes at the beginning of the chain of events, but we find out the details about the murder at the end of the film, not the beginning. Much of neoformalism deals with the idea of 'defamiliarization' which is the general neoformalist term for the basic purpose of art in our lives.

Neoformalists reject many assumptions and methodologies made by other schools of film study, particularly hermeneutic (interpretive) approaches, among which he counts Lacanian psychoanalysis and certain variations of post-structuralism. 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 pre-determined theoretical frameworks rather than attempting to do middle-level research that can actually illuminate how films work. Many film scholars have criticized neoformalism, notably Slavoj Žižek, of whom Bordwell has himself been a long-time critic.[3]

[edit] Bibliography

  • Bordwell, David (2006). The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press. 
  • Bordwell, David (2005). Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging. Berkeley: University of California Press. 
  • Bordwell, David; Kristin Thompson (2003). Film Art: An Introduction, Seventh edition, New York: McGraw-Hill. 
  • Bordwell, David (2000). Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 
  • Bordwell, David (1997). On the History of Film Style. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 
  • (1996) in David Bordwell and Noël Carroll: Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 
  • Bordwell, David; Kristin Thompson (1994 (2002)). Film History: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill. 
  • Bordwell, David (1993). The Cinema of Eisenstein. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 
  • Bordwell, David (1989). Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 
  • Bordwell, David (1988). Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 
  • Bordwell, David (1985). Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 
  • Bordwell, David; Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson (1985). The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press. 
  • Bordwell, David (1981). The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer. Berkeley: University of California Press. 
  • Bordwell, David (1974). French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style, Reprint 2002, North Stratford, NH 03590: Ayers Company Publishers, Inc. 

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ Back cover of (2004) Film Art: An Introduction, 7th edition. McGraw Hill. 
  2. ^ In Thompson, Kristin (1988). Breaking the Glass Armor. Princeton Univ Press. 
  3. ^ David Bordwell. Slavoj Zizek: Say Anything. David Bordwell's Website on Cinema. Retrieved on March 28, 2006.
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