DAVID BORDWELL'S FAVOURITE FILMS

By: Kenji

David Bordwell is a tremendous writer on films, with a very instructive website. He is an expert on the details of staging and the film-making process. I especially like his book Figures Traced in Light, which concentrates on Feuillade, Mizoguchi, Angelopoulos and Hou and which makes pertinent observations on the recent development of Hollywood’s “intensified continuity”. He particularly admires Mizoguchi, Ozu and Renoir. However, his hackles are likely to be raised by mention of Slavoj Zizek! Below is his top 10 for the Sight and Sound poll of 1992, in alphabetical order, and also films chosen in his top 10 for Facets, kindly provided by our very own Angel. Early Summer, Playtime and Sansho the Bailiff were picked in both lists. From 18 to 23 on this list are 6 films he has also cited as among his favourites.
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wikipedia:

“David Bordwell (born 23 July 1947) is a prominent American film theorist, film critic, 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 may be the most widely used introductory film textbook in the United States.

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.

Neoformalism
Bordwell has also been associated with a methodological approach known as neoformalism, although this approach has been more extensively written about by his wife, Kristin Thompson. 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: to show us familiar objects or concepts in a manner that encourages us to look at them in a new way.

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. Bordwell and Carroll coined the term “SLAB theory” to refer to theories that use the ideas of Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and/or Barthes. Many film scholars have criticized neoformalism, notably Slavoj Žižek, of whom Bordwell has himself been a long-time critic. Their criticism is generally not based on any internal inconsistencies in neoformalism; rather, they argue that neoformalism is an overly limited approach that does not incorporate cultural approaches.

Bibliography
Bordwell, David (1974). French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style (Reprint 2002 ed.). North Stratford, NH 03590: Ayers Company Publishers, Inc.
Bordwell, David (1981). The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer. Berkeley: University of California 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 (1985). Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Bordwell, David (1988). Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Available online at the Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan
Bordwell, David (1989). Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bordwell, David (1993). The Cinema of Eisenstein. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bordwell, David; Kristin Thompson (1994 (2002)). Film History: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill.
David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, ed (1996). Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Bordwell, David (1997). On the History of Film Style. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bordwell, David (2000). Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bordwell, David; Kristin Thompson (2003). Film Art: An Introduction (Seventh edition ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Bordwell, David (2005). Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bordwell, David (2006). The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bordwell, David (2008). Poetics of Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press.

David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema.