David Bordwell (1947-2024) (Patreon)

Few academics in the humanities have had the impact, in their field and beyond it, that David Bordwell had. He and his partner Kristin Thompson essentially created a whole new discourse within film studies, one that has influenced several generations of scholars but also film critics, filmmakers, and ordinary cinephiles. His work was erudite but accessible, his argumentation clear as crystal and always, always supported by the available evidence on the screen. "Bordwellian" is shorthand for formalism in film analysis.

When I was a grad student in the 90s, Bordwell was sort of a controversial figure. At Berkeley, we were fiercely devoted to a post-structural regime, where conjecture and theorizing were the coins of the realm. Bordwell and his program in Madison, WI, were the enemy, or at the very least our rival team, our intellectual Stanford. When Bordwell's work came up in class, Anton Kaes would form a cross with his index fingers, as if warding off a vampire. It was a joke, of course, but it was also true. 

While a handful of professors at Berkeley would engage seriously with Bordwell's work (most notably Scandinavian studies Prof. Mark Sandberg), the main players at Berkeley -- Kaes, Kaja Silverman, Linda Williams -- had no use for Bordwell, and Trinh Minh-ha acted like he didn't even exist. But, to be fair, Bordwell made enemies with these folks by writing broadsides against so-called "SLAB Theory" (Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, Barthes), essentially arguing that film analysis based in French and German critical theory was not "knowledge," but a series of unverifiable flights of fancy, and that academic film studies needed to be rescued from this sorcery.

Like most turf wars, the Madison Formalists vs. the Berkeley / NYU Theory-Heads seems painfully silly now. The difference always struck me as one of focus, rather than quality, rigor, or legitimacy. Bordwell, Thompson, Noel Carroll, and others were producing what they called "middle-level" research, making very specific, empirical claims about observable phenomena: editing patterns, shot length, staging in depth, the Studio System as a production mode. Changes across time could be traced by simply looking closely at the films.

I have found Bordwell's work incredibly valuable, because it articulates formal characteristics that most film studies intuitively grasped but didn't know how to talk about, like planimetric composition, or movement within master shots. Bordwell and the Madisonians cranked through films and found their formal parameters, and for them, that was more than enough. But their scholarship provides a solid basis for any number of theoretical arguments. I am devoted to meaning. I see cinema as a subset of culture, which is itself a subset of human existence. And that's something philosophy helps us to make sense of. Butin order to do any of that, we have to have some fundamental agreement on what the thing under discussion actually is. For this, Bordwell's work is peerless.

I never met David Bordwell, but I corresponded with him twice, briefly. The first time was to thank him for an appreciative note he'd posted on his website, regarding my discussion of the films at Views from the Avant-Garde in, I think, 2007. The other time, he reached out to me about a tweet I'd posted, where I expressed my admiration for his formal work but my irritation with the polemical works, like Making Meaning and parts of The History of Film Style. He asked me to elaborate, and I did, with a more succinct version of my assessments above. He expressed a gentle skepticism that anything productive would result from my hybrid approach, but he was encouraging, and wished me luck. This brief interaction is but one example of the cordial, gentlemanly demeanor that everybody who knew him commented on. At the end of the day, everyone committed to the ongoing existence of cinema is one big contentious tribe. And we lost a chieftain today.