Eye on the Screen: David Bordwell (1947&2024)

David Bordwell was a teacher who became a friend. He opened my eyes to what cinema actually is. His influence on multiple generations of filmmakers, scholars, critics, and movie buffs is incalculable.  David wrote books on aspects of film style and genre, and how they intersected. He wrote about form as well as content, and the impact of one on the other—an increasing rarity in an anemic media landscape where film and TV criticism are increasingly uninterested in how things are said; which is to say, the art part of storytelling. Never in a million years would David publish a “take” on something, much less a “hot take.” He made arguments. More often, he explained things, or asked questions.  David reached people first through the books he published solo and in collaboration with his wife and fellow University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Kristin Thompson; after the turn of the millennium, he adapted to new technology, re-inventing his work for the CD-Rom format and starting a blog, davidbordwell.net, where he and Kristin published one-off essays. I don’t think David began to grasp the totality of his impact until the last few years of his life, when multiple generations of cinema appreciators quoted him, reached out to him, and got to know him. I was one of them. I’ve loved movies all my life, but didn’t begin to understand their language until I was assigned Film Art: An Introduction in a basic film studies class in college, circa 1987, an illustrated scholarly text that explained how movies work in easily graspable language. Nothing was the same for me after that. Cowritten with Kristin and first published in 1979, Film Art is probably the most important book in the entire film studies canon, and has been in print continuously since the 1970s and translated into many languages. It’s about the language of pictures in cinema, i.e. how a filmmaker can say something about the story, characters, themes (or all three) through camera placement and editing.  The section of the book that has lived in my mind ever since is the one where Bordwell and Thompson analyzed the scene in Jaws (released just four years before Film Art!) where Hooper and Chief Brody confront the mayor of Amity over the shark problem. It hadn’t occurred to me before that part of the reason this scene and others are so effective is because Steven Spielberg blocks the actors in a way that reveals the shifting power dynamics between the characters.  Notice how Brody and Hooper are either standing together or separated by the mayor depending on whether the mayor is on defense or offense. Notice also how characters are diminished in size by the placement of the camera at key points. as when Brody rushes offscreen or into the background in frustration, or at the very end as they all stand beneath the vandalized billboard. This kind of stuff isn’t just garnish on the entree of story; it’s the means by which the entire meal is prepared. It affects you subconsciously even if you don’t know the slightest thing about filmmaking—much less neoformalism, the water Bordwell and Thompson usually swam in: a method of study that focuses on the formal characteristics of cinema in order to demonstrate what makes it different from other art forms.  We take for granted how important that kind of textbook was, and how hard it was to create in the pre-digital era. There were no desktop computers in 1979, and no home video to speak of. You couldn’t make screenshots. Maybe you could point a camera at a low-resolution TV showing a Betamax cassette of a movie, but that wouldn’t yield a good enough quality image for a college textbook. David told me that up until the 1990s, when laserdiscs and DVDs and home computers came into common use, he had to get ahold of actual 35mm prints of movies he wanted to include in his work, screen them in an actual theater or screening or editing room, and take actual photos on actual film with an actual camera on an actual tripod and develop them with actual chemicals in an actual darkroom.  I used “actual” excessively on purpose here, to drive home that each of these steps involved its own process and constituted a task (or tasks) that required training and skills, whether it was threading up a 35mm projector and fixing any problems that arose or calibrating a still camera to yield quality images of a movie flickering away in front of you. (It was possible to stop a film and go backwards, but not advisable because it could chew up the celluloid in the projector’s gears.) David was about as polite and cheerful a person as I’ve ever met in my life, but he was ferocious, and seemingly tireless, when it came time to commit and see a task through to the end.  The image of a young David standing for two hours in the back of a dark theater taking photos of a movie screen, day after day for weeks on end, is one that I think of often. It’s inspiring. He often went to those lengths, because it was the only way to gather the data he needed to c