# David Bordwell

David Jay Bordwell (/ˈbɔːrdwəl/; July 23, 1947 – February 29, 2024) was an American film theorist and film historian. After receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1973, he wrote more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (1988), Making Meaning (1989), and On the History of Film Style (1997).
With his wife Kristin Thompson, Bordwell wrote the textbooks Film Art (1979) and Film History (1994). Film Art, in its 12th edition as of 2019, is still used as a text in introductory film courses. With aesthetics philosopher Noël Carroll, Bordwell edited the anthology Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (1996), a polemic on the state of contemporary film theory. His largest work was The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (1985), written in collaboration with Thompson and Janet Staiger. Several of his more influential articles on theory, narrative, and style were collected in Poetics of Cinema (2007), named in homage to the famous anthology of Russian formalist film theory Poetika Kino, edited by Boris Eikhenbaum in 1927.
Bordwell spent nearly the entirety of his career as a professor of film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, retiring in 2004 and becoming the Ledoux Professor of Film Studies, Emeritus in the Department of Communication Arts. Film theorists who wrote their dissertations under his advisement include Edward Branigan, Murray Smith, and Carl Plantinga. He and Thompson maintained the blog "Observations on film art" for their ruminations on cinema.

## Early life

Bordwell was born in Penn Yan, New York, on July 23, 1947. He was educated at the State University of New York at Albany and the University of Iowa.

## Career

Drawing inspiration from film theorists such as Noel Burch as well as from art historian Ernst Gombrich, Bordwell contributed books and articles on classical film theory, the history of art cinema, classical and contemporary Hollywood cinema, and East Asian film style. However, his more influential and controversial works dealt with cognitive film theory (Narration in the Fiction Film being one of the first volumes on this subject), historical poetics of film style, and critiques of contemporary film theory and analysis (Making Meaning and Post-Theory were his two major contributions to this subject).

### Neoformalism

Bordwell was also 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 observations first made by the literary theorists known as the Russian formalists: that there is a distinction between a film's perceptual and semiotic properties (and that film theorists have generally overstated the role of textual codes in one's comprehension of such basic elements as diegesis and closure). One scholar has commented that the cognitivist perspective is the central reason why neoformalism earns its prefix (neo) and is not "traditional" formalism. Much of Bordwell's work considers the film-goer's cognitive processes that take place when perceiving the film's nontextual, aesthetic forms. This analysis includes how films guide our attention to salient narrative information, and how films partake in "defamiliarization", a formalist term for how art shows us familiar and formulaic objects and concepts in a manner that encourages us to experience them as if they were new entities.
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 poststructuralism. 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 predetermined theoretical frameworks, rather than attempting mid-level research meant to illuminate how films work. Bordwell and Carroll coined the term "S.L.A.B. theory" to refer to theories that use the ideas of Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and/or Barthes.

### Influence

Bordwell's considerable influence within film studies reached such a point that many of his concepts are reported to "have become part of a theoretical canon in film criticism and film academia."

## Archive

The David Bordwell Collection of over one hundred 35mm film prints is held at the Academy Film Archive and is particularly noteworthy for the strength of its Hong Kong holdings as well as having copies of Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan and Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books.

## Personal life and death

In 1970, Bordwell married Barbara Weinstein; their marriage ended in divorce. He married Kristin Thompson in 1979.
Bordwell died from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis at his home in Madison, Wisconsin, on February 29, 2024, at the age of 76.