A small tribute to the titanic David Bordwell, “a real cinephile”

Remembering the film scholar, theorist, professor, and, most significantly, enthusiast.

GP here: As I first began to write about film professionally, and even before I decided to move to Madison from Pennsylvania in 2010, I knew the name of David Bordwell. My introduction to him and partner Kristin Thompson was not through any edition of their ubiquitous film-studies text, Film Art: An Introduction. Rather, it came in concentrated doses on the life and art of Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu through Bordwell’s essays in the 2003 and 2004 Criterion releases of Tokyo Story (1953) and Early Summer (1951), and in video-essay featurettes with Thompson on the 2010 dual box release of The Only Son (1936) and There Was A Father (1942).

Bordwell’s aimable presence loomed larger the further I independently trekked into film studies for routine blog writing and periodic publications in the mid-2010s. I was not a former student of Bordwell’s, but almost felt that I was as I witnessed the mass outpouring of love and appreciation online for the Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at UW–Madison after he died at age 76 on February 29. And while I acknowledge that feeling of his influence in the abstract, my few encounters with Bordwell left me humbled and enlightened by his presence, especially as he actually mistook me for one of his former students at the last local screening of Isao Takahata’s final feature, The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya (2013), at the Sundance Cinemas 608 of yore. (But maybe that can be somewhat attributed to me addressing him as “professor,” lol.)

In the mostly empty theater, Bordwell wasn’t seated front and center, as he often preferred, but a few rows back, by himself, and I just happened to sit in the row directly behind him. My memory has unfortunately let strands slip away from our brief conversation; but before the trailer reel, I know we touched upon favorite films of that year. After traveling in Europe, he noted how audiences didn’t quite jive with or understand the geography of Richard Linklater’s lauded Boyhood (2014), which fascinated and amused me. I had recently binged on the native Texan’s philosophical filmography, but had no personal context as someone who hadn’t ever left the United States.

Just a month prior to this chance meeting, Bordwell introduced a 3D presentation of Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye To Language (2013) as a benefit for UW Cinematheque out at Marcus Point Cinema, and emphatically led a post-screening discussion to elucidate its plot (or at least make some narrative sense of Godard’s approach) after five viewings in different parts of the world. A few months later, in February 2015, I found out he wasn’t so shy about expressing dissent and disappointment with Godard either, summing up my excruciating experience of enduring the director’s liberal interpretation of King Lear (1987). As the credits rolled, Bordwell plainly got up from his Cinematheque seat—front and center this time—and quickly uttered, almost deadpan, “Not my favorite.”

In July 2016, I remember feeling exhausted after a day of work, but absolutely did not want to miss Bordwell’s hour-long campus talk and presentation on his new book, The Rhapsodes, which details the pivotal contributions of 1940s film critics like Otis Ferguson. I read and underlined various excerpts, but never ended up finishing the book (at least in going cover to cover), and I didn’t even stick around for that summer evening’s 35mm screening of John Huston’s Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (1948). However, I picked up the book and talked with Bordwell for a few moments as he signed my copy. He didn’t recall my name but knew my face instantly, calling me “a real cinephile,” sensing my interest in the scope of film history (which has, perhaps, interestingly narrowed and widened equally since that time). But, between us, I knew the actual, real cinephile was standing before me so bountifully and joyfully conveying his admiration for the medium, in this casual exchange and, moments prior, orating for an enraptured audience.

This would further prove true a few months later, in November, when my grasp of Bordwell’s depth of knowledge sort of came full circle, in that I was able to hear him talk in person about the director he most admired, Ozu, whose films I first read about in my 20s. Bordwell made himself available after a public screening of Ozu’s Equinox Flower (1958) at the Marquee Theater in Union South, and joined then-student programmer Kris Johnson-Salazar in conversation, as many of the WUD Film committee attentively filled the back of the theater center section’s red-cushioned rows, sporadically pitching Bordwell, while he indulged their curiosity.

Bordwell’s appreciation extended into the more modern cinema of Hong Kong as well, in his publishing of a substantial book, Planet Hong Kong, in 2000, which was later reissued in full color in 2009. While I also haven’t read that at length, I recall a few stray quotes on the landing page for the book after his 2019 Wisconsin Film Festival closing-night introduction to the Jackie Chan vehicle, Police Story (1985). They include this incredibly lucid distillation of his resistance to gatekeeping and pure love for expanding the boundaries of film dialogue beyond academia:

I suggest that Hong Kong shows us how important regional and diasporan networks are in creating and maintaining a film culture. To the claim that films reflect their societies, I reply that Hong Kong films suggest a different way to think about such a dynamic, using the model of cultural conversation. Readers interested in fandom should find something intriguing in the story of how cultists around the world helped establish Hong Kong film as a cool thing in the early 1990s. I also argue against the tendency in film studies to assume that when a film tradition doesn’t follow the rules of classical plot construction it must be based on something called “spectacle.” I suggest instead that we need to study principles of episodic plotting, which are probably quite common in popular art generally. In these and other areas, I wanted to use this cinema as a way into thinking about popular moviemaking as a whole.

I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who passed through UW–Madison’s Communication Arts Department, or even a certain random screening at 4070 Vilas Hall, in the past 40 to 50 years who doesn’t have a tiny tale or two to tell about Bordwell’s unbridled enthusiasm for the movies, just as I’ve done here. (If you’re a student of film, then you are, by some extension, a student of Bordwell.) Despite Bordwell’s prominence and status as a scholar, it never undermined his affability, or his willingness to plainly talk with literally anyone who wanted to celebrate the value of the movies on broader art generally.

May his work live on through his comprehensive and collaborative blog with Kristin Thompson, Observations On Film Art. His last post, on February 26, is a primer for the works of New Taiwanese Cinema pioneer Hou Hsiao-hsien (who I remember Bordwell providing a video lecture on some nine years ago, and whose early 1980s films are available through the Criterion Channel as of March 2024). On that very platform, younger audiences and newcomers to film studies might find great value through the accessibility of the 50-part Criterion Channel video essay series that shares the title of Bordwell and Thompson’s blog, and further features other UW–Madison scholars like Jeff Smith thoughtfully breaking down the technical and thematic elements of our beloved art form.

Of course this is simply scratching the surface of Bordwell’s reach. If you’d like to submit a short remembrance of Bordwell, whether you studied under him or met him only once, we’re glad to include them below. Email me at grant@tonemadison.com or editor@tonemadison.com. (I’d also direct readers to a touching March 3 message by Kristin Thompson on their blog.)

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Diane Bordwell Verma: Thank you, Grant, for sharing your personal views of and interactions with my brother. It has been so heartwarming and comforting to learn how many lives he influenced with his work and eagerness to share his love of movies with everyone.

I will miss David and our family and political conversations, which always included his movie and streaming recommendations for us “lay people.” He did widen my knowledge of many film techniques as well as foreign film directors. While I may not have seen the aspects he pontificated on, it was a treat to have “personal screenings” with him.