upcoming activities for 2008

[25.sep to 10.oct]
Kristin and I will be attending the Vancouver International Film Festival, which runs from 25 September to 10 October. We expect to stay for most of it.

Otherwise, I’ve held off accepting speaking requests and visits in order to start work on a new book and finish off production tasks on the third edition of Film History: An Introduction. I want to keep my schedule flexible for writing and research travel. If anything develops, I’ll post here.

news

Selected posts from our blog will appear on open.salon.com. For our regular readers, there'll be nothing there you don't see here, at least for the present, but there may be other blogs on open.salon.com that appeal to you.

Several years ago I provided an audio commentary for the Criterion release of Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon. The DVD is slated for release in early autumn 2008, or perhaps late summer.

A mainland Chinese publisher, Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House, has scheduled a translation of On the History of Film Style for early 2009.

From blog to book: The entry, “New Media and Old Storytelling,” appears in Italian translation in Matteo Bittanti's new anthology on the relation between film and videogrames, published by Meltimi of Rome.

The eighth edition of Film Art: An Introduction has been translated into long-form Chinese and published by McGraw-Hill’s Taiwan division. The cover quotation beside the Oscar is from Ang Lee: “David Bordwell is someone I am very familiar with. The books he writes—go read them, absolutely!”

Film History: An Introduction has just been translated into Czech, in a beautiful hardbound edition with a string bookmark. As you can see, Chaplin would have approved of the cover, since he liked to watch the ladies.

And here is the second edition of the Spanish-language version of Film Art (Barcelona: Paidós, 2006) which we also just received.

A new essay, “The Hook: Scene Transitions in Classical Cinema,” is now online.

Figures Traced in Light has been acquired for Portuguese translation by Papirus Editora of São Paolo.

Figures Traced in Light was reviewed, with great generosity, by Jacques Aumont in Film Quarterly 60, 4 (Summer 2007), pp. 76-77. Not available online at filmquarterly.org, but articles can be found in ProQuest and other electronic publication databases.

Last summer, I wrote an online essay, “Hearing Voices,” on M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water and Michael Bamberger’s book on its making, The Man Who Heard Voices. Mr. Bamberger asked to use my piece as a foreword to the paperback edition of the book; I provided a mostly new essay for the purpose. The paperback has now appeared, though in a gesture of unsportsmanlike behavior the publisher has changed the subtitle. The original read “How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale”; to this the publisher added “and Lost.” I thought the film, which definitely had its problems, significantly better than most American critics did, so I take a little satisfaction in the fact that Lady in the Water appeared on Cahiers du cinéma’s list of the ten best films of 2006.

A Hungarian translation of Film History: An Introduction has just been published. Thanks especially to András Kovacs for his support in making this happen!

A simplified-character Chinese translation of The Way Hollywood Tells It has just been begun; it’s slated to be published by Nanjing University Press.

Poetics of Cinema
Routledge
October 2007
[about the book]

links

fredcamper.com
Passionate cinephile Camper collects his essays and reviews; a must for those interested in classic and experimental cinema.

Scanners
Jim Emerson’s energetic and witty commentary on the current movie scene.

davekehr.com
Thoughtful weekly comments from one of our best critics.

rogerebert.com
Ebert’s page, packed with information, opinion, and archival resources.
See also: Awake In The Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert, a terrific collection of essays and other pieces; I’m proud to have contributed a foreword to this book.

andyhorbal.blogspot.com
Andy Horbal offers a fine mix of recent links, comments on current releases, and subtle reflection on larger issues of film culture.

zoom-in.com
A wide-ranging discussion of professional media technology and creative activity. Reid Rosefelt’s blog on independent cinema is always worth reading.

daily.greencine.com
A great clearinghouse for breaking film news, along with perceptive commentary.

filmmakermagazine.com
The premiere source for independent American cinema, and more.

girishshambu.com
Intriguing and unpredictable links to many other movie sites.

kaijushakedown.com
Variety’s Asian film blog

Butterflies and Wheels
Humorous and pointed critiques of current humbug, both inside and outside Academe, with a great deal of commentary on psychoanalysis, Intelligent Design, and similar topics.

Cinemetrics
A valuable website mounted by Yuri Tsivian. Thanks to a program created by Yuri’s son Gunars Civjans, you can develop a detailed profile of cutting rates and other variables in a film.

Hungry Ghost
David Chute’s acute commentary on unusual films and filmmakers, from India and elsewhere.

The Way Bordwell Tells It
The Norwegian Journal of Media Studies presents an English-language interview with me (in Word format)

School’s Out? Never!: David Bordwell Keeps Working the Room
An interview with me in the Canadian journal Cinema Scope.

Risk and Renewal in Danish Cinema (2007)
and
A Strong Sense of Narrative Desire: A Decade of Danish Film (2004)
Essays on trends in contemporary Danish cinema.

My essay for a Festschrift for Thomas Elsaesser, focused on staging in Hal Hartley’s Simple Men. In German originally, the English translation appears on the Danish film studies website 16:9.

Bordwell on Bordwell
A four-part interview with me in the Danish online journal 16:9.

Part I – Hitchcock, Hartley and the Poetics of Cinema

Part II – Functions of Film Style

Part III – Writing on Film Style

Part IV – Levels of Engagement