Paul Taberham’s impressive study of film animation was released earlier this month. The title brings to mind a major concern of David Bordwell in studying cinema, poetics as an aesthetic approach. Taberham has indeed been influenced by David’s writings and indeed mine, as he state in his introduction:

Live-action cinema and television have received sustained critical attention within the field of poetics (see Bordwell 2007; Cavendish 2013; Mittell 2015; Çağlayan 2018), but animation has, by contrast, only been addressed peripherally. While animation and live-action filmmaking share a common formal language through shot composition, editing, colour, sound design and the like, important distinctions between the two remain underexplored. This book seeks to address that gap, positioning itself as an animation-focused counterpart to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction (first published in 1979 and now in its fourteenth edition), a pedagogical distillation of their broader project: offering a systematic analysis of film construction with particular emphasis on form, style, and narrative technique. Like Film Art, this volume offers a structured approach, while attending specifically to the affinities and divergences between animation and live-action media. [p. 5]

Taberham has accomplished his goal admirably, as the Table of Contents suggests:

Rather than an imitation of the organization of Film Art, the “affinities and divergences” are clear. Two chapters are devoted to character design, a technique that does not apply to live-action moving images. One is devoted to cinematography, which is a very different process in animation.

Another considerable difference from Film Art, one which I think works very well, is that each chapter goes through the history of its subject in the field of animation, with relevant examples. The techniques of animation have changed over time at intervals that do not always coincide with the technical changes in live-action cinema, and it helps the reader understand those techniques better by following their modifications. Moreover, the approach allows for a great many brief examples from a vast range of films and television series. I am in awe of the number of examples referred to. (Having young kids, as Taberham does, obviously helps.)

Of these examples, 134 are illustrated–though that number is misleadingly low, since many include multiple frames, as on the page below. I’m sure Taberham could have illustrated far more, but publishers tend not to like that sort of thing, especially with most in color. Speaking of color, the reproduction of the illustrations is superb. (I am judging by the e-book that I read.) See also the frame at the bottom, from the sound chapter.

The result is a justification for the application of poetics to animation. I’ll let Taberham explain why. After an excellent summary of poetics from Aristotle to Bordwell and Thompson (excellent company to be in), he writes:

This approach is especially apt for animation because the shaping hand of the artist is present in every detail. Movement, design, performance, lighting and sound are never incidental; they are authored parameters at every stage of the pipeline. That visibility turns animation into a clear laboratory for poetics: we can watch how constraints become style, how tools invite certain solutions, how studios stabilise house looks and how artists negotiate, refine or overturn those norms. [p. 40]

This book does all this admirably.

Poetics of Animation is clearly aimed both at those at those who simply want to read about the subject and those who use it as a textbook in the increasing number of courses not on making animated films but studying them as art. It should be said that because Taberham discusses the tools of animation, there are quite a few technical terms and brand names that were unfamiliar to me. Students would need a little help with these terms, but the main point is to understand how their introduction affected the making of animated films.

The book can be ordered from Amazon, of course, with the e-book at the list price, $27.95. Ordering the e-book from Berghahn directly is temporarily more advantageous, as they are having a half-price summer sale on e-books, with this one available for a mere $13.97.

Kristin here:

David’s passing was well over two years ago, and not surprisingly various tributes continue to appear. Film series, collections of essays by his colleagues and friends, many of whom he never met but whose lives were touched by him, and even the naming of institutions for him and me. (One such event will take place in September, and I shall blog about it then.) Scholars around the world have helped to explain the facets of his complex career and its impact on the field.

One major recent tribute is the latest issue of Projections, the journal of the Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image. David helped found this organization, which is still thriving. He attended the annual conferences as long as he was able to. The March, 2026 issue explores the various aspects of David’s devotion to this particular approach to cinema studies.

He has contributed to this blog before, sharing his expertise concerning the James Bond franchise. Now he has kindly written a review-article on the Projections essay.

His duty was to the question.

—Guillermo del Toro, in Leonardo Da Vinci (Burns, Burns, and McMahon, 2024)

David Bordwell’s On the History of Film Style (1997, revised 2018) opens with a floating string of tantalizing examples from film history, lavishly illustrated with frame enlargements and loosely linked via the themes of cinematic staging and editing. The examples at last touch down with an oomph:

Can we pick out plausible patterns of change running from our earliest image to our most recent one? Are there overall principles governing these differences? Disclosing such patterns and principles only sharpens our appetite. How and why did these changes take place? […] How, that is, can we explain the change we discern? We are asking the cinematic counterpart of the question that opens E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion: Why does art have a history? (pp. 2-3, emphasis in original)

It’s no small query. It’s weighty and difficult to answer. And that’s the point. Research should be a carefully calibrated, flexible, and ambitious form of investigation.

Like many artists and scholars we might admire—I, too, would mention Gombrich, of whom Partha Mitter wrote, in the volume Art and the Mind—Ernst H. Gombrich (2018), “his questioning methodology will be his enduring legacy”(p. 329)—Bordwell’s duty truly was to the question. I mean this in both literal and robust senses, senses I should explain before reviewing the recent issue of Projections: The Journal of Movies and Mind devoted to Bordwell’s contributions to the study of film.

Bordwell had many radical ideas. He argued that movies matter to the humanities, and that movie history matters, too. More than this, he argued that cinema’s development as an art, technology, and institution is best seen through the lens of historical poetics and that our everyday understanding of movies is best explained by the findings of cognitive psychology, not psychoanalysis.

Yet more radical, and less understood, was his belief that the true test of a humanist’s work is whether it poses a question—and proposes answers that improve upon our previous knowledge. By question Bordwell didn’t mean simple coverage of a theme or topic. Many of us write passionately and intelligently about things that interest us or our fields. But even passionate and intelligent writing can be redundant. It repeats what we already know or even ignores what we’ve discovered through painstaking effort. A questioning methodology is more ambitious and more exciting. It’s driven by truly open-ended inquiry that sets about filling important gaps in understanding. The researcher does not know the answer to the question from the get-go—because no one has yet to chart the terrain.

Perhaps some of this will sound rather A-B-C, but in my experience, commitment to genuine discovery is rare in the humanities. It requires a strategic form of self-discipline that isn’t often taught. Focused, question-based research means controlling for one’s preferences—in a specific way. If even one prefers an idea, method, or example—for its cultural importance, internal brilliance, laudable worldview, or timeliness—it may not fill important gaps.

Controlling for preference, and thereby fine-tuning our awareness of such gaps, can act as fundamental assumptions in a research program. Here things are theoretically loaded. “Film studies is an empirical discipline,” Bordwell provocatively writes in the 2018 Afterword of On the History of Film Style (p. 272). His research embraced the values of investigatory science broadly conceived, in particular the notions that a researcher’s level of certainty about a phenomenon should scale with the evidence adduced, and that the results of research shouldn’t be steered, conditioned, or tampered with to reflect a pet theory or worldview. Likewise, methods or examples shouldn’t be selected selectively to avoid unwanted or unanticipated counter evidence.

Other assumptions we on-board should promote a genuine need for further investigation. As Kristin Thompson puts it in Breaking the Glass Armor (1988), poetics includes assumptions “about traits shared by different artworks, about procedures spectators go through in understanding artworks, and about ways in which artworks relate to society” (p. 3). These kinds of assumptions make us inquisitive. The adventure of fine-tuning assumptions is the adventure of heightening our curiosity for the unknown—of “sharpening our appetite,” as Bordwell put it.

* * *

 Bear this in mind when reading the issue of Projections dedicated to Bordwell’s contributions to film study. My takeaway from these impressive essays, written by members of the Society for the Cognitive Study of Moving Images (SCSMI), is this. Each addresses fundamental assumptions and questions underpinning Bordwell’s research. In doing so, the authors get at something more. They implicitly highlight two sides of Bordwell’s questioning approach, his pluralism—the more questions we pursue, the richer the field—and his heurism—our methods matter to the extent that they promote and answer questions. Admittedly the second aspect isn’t as widely appreciated as the first.

The issue’s introduction, by Carl Plantinga and Jeff Smith, and Murray Smith’s short commemorative essay, “David Bordwell—A Man of Cinema,” set up these themes nicely. “He favored research that posed specific questions for which evidence and observation could establish concrete answers,” Plantinga and Smith write: “Bordwell also hoped that his work could assist studies of those topics he did not much address. And it has” (p. 1). Murray Smith amplifies the point. Bordwell, he explains, created “the space for the more rigorous, but also more pluralistic and more imaginative, intellectual community to which Projections, and its sponsoring academic society SCSMI, bears witness” (p. 5).

The issue carves up Bordwell’s contributions into three categories, “Style and National Cinemas,” “Cognitive Sciences,” and “Film Theory.” In each case, Bordwell cleared new ground, at times in the teeth of opposition from those who in practice restricted the range of questions the field could pose.

This opposition is addressed most directly in Gary Bettinson’s “Kung Fu Scholar.” Bettinson picks apart criticisms of Bordwell’s research on East Asian cinemas, especially Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (2000, revised 2011). For some critics, the book “commits a form of cultural imperialism, subjecting an alien film industry to the Western gaze” (p. 12). Bordwell has likewise been accused of “universalism” (p. 12). Critics, as I read them, assumed that because Bordwell relied on a poetics of cinema which he developed in studying Hollywood and other Western cinemas, the results of his research on Hong Kong were determined entirely by the approach. Thus the research is biased.

As Bettinson points out, these criticisms are threadbare. Critics simply asserted them with little evidence. The basic tactic, I’d add, is one of ignoring Bordwell’s research questions. Take his 1988 book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. The guiding query is something like, if we take the filmmaker’s creative choices as the bullseye of our study, what can we reveal about relationship between films and their social contexts? The question crystallizes as a model, one of concentric circles (p. 17).

The model isn’t a theory in the sense that some might assume. Its function is not to present a set of systematic, abstract principles which in themselves explain culture or cinema (or even this culture or this cinema). To criticize it as such is to miss the point. Its function is heuristic. It’s a rule of thumb to research by. The first test of such a rule is its relevancy and efficacy in achieving a task. Does it produce insights about a specific corpus of films (i.e., Ozu’s) and their formal and stylistic features?

Now, heuristics that generate knowledge could nonetheless be hampered by bias. What do we do in such cases?

If like Bordwell our duty remains to the question, then the burden isn’t simply to label the approach Western or universalist and move on. It’s to present a case for rephrasing the question—to eliminate the bias while retaining some of the inquiry’s thrust—or to develop approaches or models attuned to the bias that are better suited to answering the question.

In short, in the realm of historical inquiry, criticism shouldn’t just come from the sidelines. Critics need to step onto the field of play if they want to improve the game. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Planet Hong Kong does have some research biases. To step onto the field, other researchers would need to answer its question more effectively than does Bordwell (perhaps by using new information from archives or rediscovered films, or by accessing cultural knowledge that unlocks a distinct set of explanations, etc.). Or they would need to apply a different set of assumptions to a similar question and see it through to an answer, thereby rendering Bordwell’s findings about the same area of culture or aspect of cinematic form or style incomplete, insufficient, or obsolete.

This is the kind of critical process that expands knowledge. But it hasn’t always happened, and Bordwell could seem slightly disquieted about that. As he points out somewhat wearily in the preface to Planet Hong Kong’s second edition, recent (viz., pre-2011) Hong Kong film scholars “have not asked quite the same sorts of questions that preoccupy me” (p. vii). Indeed, they didn’t seem to be posing open-ended questions at all. Following a hermeneutic rather than an investigatory protocol, these scholars “concentrated on assigning implicit or symptomatic meanings to the movies” (p. vii).

* * *

Because many humanists appear unaccustomed to questioning investigation, Bordwell has rarely received criticisms of a question-related sort. Critics like to remain on the sidelines, poking holes in the rules of play and ignoring how these same rules can unleash generative and athletic performance on the field. (Generative and athletic—great terms for describing the research practices of our most useful poeticians.)

As the Projections issue makes clear, the question-focused inquiry Bordwell had in mind has had a positive effect on numerous subfields. In the study of style, it has encouraged many to reexamine what we think we know about familiar films and film traditions and to open fresh avenues of inquiry in media yet to be understood on formal and stylistic grounds.

In his “The Art of Rearrangement,” Todd Berliner revisits the seemingly perennial question of long takes and their effects in A Touch of Evil (1958). In particular, he tackles the second “inconspicuous” long take to make some fresh insights about the role shot duration can plays in the viewing experience. Berliner adopts Bordwell’s concept of the function of style (as discussed in 2005’s Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging, pp. 33-34) and, just as one ought to do with heuristics, stretches it a little to adjust to the question at hand.

Berliner discusses the aesthetic function, that is, the broad experiential effect a stylistic choice can have on the viewer, like engagement, immersion, or disruption (p. 24). In the end, inconspicuous long takes alert us to a faulty assumption in the critical literature. Long takes don’t always rise in the viewer’s consciousness as impressive displays of stylistic virtuosity. They can gently ease the viewer through low-key patterns of organic change—almost imperceptible transitions in camera positions, slightly rearrangements of figures, and the like. Berliner calls these captivating but subtle effect “murmurations” (p. 37). (For a study of similar “transparent” uses of longer takes and staging, see Bordwell’s blog on patterns of balancing, unbalancing, and rebalancing in the cinema of Louis Feuillade.)

Patrick Keating’s “On Classicism and Causal Clarity” outlines how Bordwell himself tended to ease his heuristics in new directions. The contours of a concept, in this case that of a classical style in Hollywood, always depended on its role in answering questions. As Keating reveals, in earlier work like Narration in the Fiction Film (1985) Bordwell attempted to isolate the fundamentals of film comprehension. The back cover reads, “How do motion pictures tease us into building what we call stories?” The very question led to a search for the baseline. “Classical narration,” especially in Hollywood, used the medium—including visual and sound style—to channel our attention in clear and simple ways to the causal chain of events that comprised the plot. Once that question was answered, Keating shows, Bordwell added more meat to the bone, reframing this narrational form as a richer classical style capable of much more, including innovation.

In books like The Way Hollywood Tells It: Style and Story in Modern Hollywood (2006) and Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (2017), Bordwell studied classicism as a range of “narrative dynamics,” “a system of manipulating expectations and emotions” (p. 41). Crucially, the widening of the heuristic encouraged greater investigatory nimbleness. Keating writes that Reinventing Hollywood, for instance, has inspired him, in his own work, to explore “how the classical Hollywood style could be lavish, odd, and expressive” (p. 48). Heurism entails enlarging the scope of an original rule of thumb to accommodate new lines of inquiry.

Styles are worth studying even if they aren’t experimental, lavish, and odd—or indeed held in high esteem. As Henry Jenkins puts it in a 1995 essay entitled “Historical Poetics” (published here), the approach aims to “denaturalize established cultural hierarchies” (p. 108)—to get us beyond the study of masterworks and cherished prototypes and explore the art of everyday production. In her Projections essay “Forms and Norms: Ken Kwapis and the Directorial Art of Subtle Deviation in Network Television,” Christine Becker does just that as she sets out to explain how television directors like Ken Kwapsis, in shows like Freaks and Geeks (1999-2000), “can achieve artistic distinction, if not from radical innovation, then through subtle augmentation of established forms” (p. 53). In surveying archival records, interviews, published writings, industry practices, visual style, and storytelling form, Becker’s essay is perhaps the fullest example of historical poetics in the Projections issue, illustrating among other things the paradigm’s largely untapped transdisciplinary potential for the study of other media and the forms they share (a point which I’ve made here).

Surveying various aspects of culture, industry, and craft is precisely the point of Bordwell’s research paradigm, as András Bálint Kovács demonstrates in his Projections contribution, “David Bordwell’s Norm.” In the 2018 Afterword to On the History of Film Style, Bordwell describes norms as

those principles of acceptable filmmaking operating in particular times and places. Tacit norms define the salient problems and the favored solutions, the standard schemas and the permissible revisions and the out-of-bounds rejections. I think that reconstructing the norms governing filmmaking practice is of paramount importance in understanding style. (p. 286)

Bordwell, in fact, fits norms into a cluster of heuristics for constructing a history of style and form. Standard ways of doing things in an industry (schemas) feed artistic problems (“forced options” within the “logic of the situation” of filmmaking) (p. 284). The schemas and solutions in turn make visible the underlying norms at work at any given moment. More pithily, “schemas help solve problems. Both solutions and schemas help instantiate norms” (p. 286).

Kovács situates Bordwell’s norms within an even larger configuration of poetics research in which style and form “are measured in the dimensions of (1) a given norm, (2) available technical apparatus, (3) a work’s idiosyncratic stylistic system, (4) cultural traditions, and (5) viewer psychology understood as a combination of biological givens and general social experience” (p. 98). Kovács sees Bordwell’s sophisticated film historiography as belonging to a long line of art historiography, exemplified by the work of E. H. Gombrich. This alternative rejected previous art-historical paradigms in which “the active agent becomes ‘history,’ the ‘zeitgeist,’ ‘kunstwollen,’ ‘the essence of the medium,’ rather than the artist” (p. 99).

Kovács’s account brings to mind an excellent series of articles by Radomír Kokeš tracing the origins of Bordwell’s concept of norms (the articles are available here and here). In the first article, Kokeš uncovers the emergence of norms as an explanatory tool in Czech literary structuralism and Bordwell’s almost immediate transformation of Jan Mukařovský “norms” into an “an empirical research tool” that drained the concept of its theoretical underpinnings so it could function as a flexible heuristic subject to a series of “rhetorical refinements” (pp. 49-52).

The Kovács essay also reminds me of a lecture Bordwell gave at my university in 2018, where he discussed Gombrich’s concept of artistic change—which, as I understand it, Bordwell had considered writing up as a short book. Evidently Gombrich became for Bordwell a means for working through some fairly intricate ideas about why art has a history. Yes, individuals are the agents. But social conditions shape developments as well. Here’s a slide from Bordwell’s 2018 presentation, which has never been published:

The difficult-to-see sentence at the bottom, in red, is the payoff. It reads, “Change any of these conditions… and styles will change.”

* * *

 Bordwell liked to point out that film style and form can change through a principle of schema and revision. Film techniques follow patterns of adoption and alteration. The same applies to knowledge itself. We see this in the sections of Projections on “Cognitive Sciences” and “Film Theory.” Cognitivist researchers have taken up Bordwell’s research schemas and tweaked them to open more lanes on the highway of film inquiry.

More explicitly than any other essay, “A Call for Interdisciplinary Research in the Psychological Sciences,” by Joseph P. Magliano, Tim J. Smith, Lester C. Loschky, and Daniel T. Levin, urges a partnership among disciplines. The authors have noticed a trend. Films are now being used as surrogates for everyday experience in psychological studies. Researchers show subjects a short film and test for response—not to the film as a film but to film as “a proxy for real-world scenes” (p. 63).

The essay’s intervention is clear. To urge psychological scientists to learn, from both film studies more broadly and fascinating developments in cognitive film studies more specifically. Learn what, exactly? A single idea, one that’s easily expressed but challenging to study. Films are not the world. They are “constructed artifacts; the stylistic practices used in creative fiction film have non-trivial effects on visual processes (attention and perception), neurological responses, and comprehension” (p. 63).

Magliano, Smith, Loschky, and Levin deftly sketch how cognitive film researchers have read Narration in the Fiction Film—and its emphasis on constructivist psychology (p. 30-31)—as seeds for further experimental investigation. Bordwell’s findings have become hypotheses subjected to testing, in other words. This is the case not because his modes of inquiry are humanistic and thus limited, but because his answers suggest new questions, even new forms of inquiry.

For instance, Tim Smith wondered whether Bordwell’s conclusions about how film directors encourage viewers to scan the space of a shot could be experimentally tracked. But he didn’t stop there. Smith wanted to know whether tracking could yield different answers. The resulting study of viewer eye movements during a sequence from P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007) refines both our language for describing the psychology of viewing and our appreciation of Anderson’s strategies for directing attention in a shot. A research schema—directors use technique to guide attention—is picked up and revised to incrementally add to our understanding.

Similarly, in their Projections piece “Making Sense of Complex Cinema,” Cynthia Cabañas, Gaia Yonah, Miklós Kiss, Mariken van der Velden, Elly Konijn, and Katalin Bálint take Bordwell’s ideas about narrative form and its complexity in books like Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder (2023) as the grounds for experimental study into the actual experience of complexity. They challenge Bordwell’s claim that contemporary forms of popular film complexity still essentially feel the same as classical Hollywood. Recent innovations in narrative complexity, for Bordwell, still rely on “tactics of accessibility” in their storytelling (cited in Cabañas, Yonah, Kiss, van der Velden, Konijn, and Bálint, p. 74).

If I have one criticism for the authors, it’s that they assume that Bordwell was interested in the study of actual viewers—i.e., in reception. This is a common enough mistake. But he wasn’t a psychologist. He was a poetician. The authors write, “Rather than viewing narrational complexity as a mere extension of classical norms, we propose that the experience it elicits is qualitatively different, requiring a theoretical model that accounts for this uniqueness, as well as how and why viewers engage with complex storytelling” (p. 74, emphasis in source). This is a worthy pursuit, but poeticians tend to look for something substantively different. Their primary focus is on a hypothetical viewing practice constructed in large part by the film (see Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 39, and Breaking the Glass Armor, p. 29). One posits such a heuristic to gain insight into how movies work by design. What real viewers feel may or may not be pertinent to the question.

Still, Cabañas, Yonah, Kiss, van der Velden, Konijn, and Bálint are onto something really exciting. It’s one of the master questions in film studies: what is the experience of cinema like? Can we describe it, even while factoring in the neuronal weather patterns (my term) that comprise the minds of individual viewers?

With Narration in the Fiction Film, Bordwell focused on one layer of cinematic experience, viewer comprehension. Keating’s Projections essay reveals that Bordwell eventually considered broader dynamics of the experience, like emotion. The authors here propose something more ambitious still, a model called the TENCo (Triadic Engagement with Narrational Complexity). It characterizes the full, rounded experience of complex movies—what they actually feel like.

The authors conclude that “TENCo clarifies distinctions between perceived complexity (viewer experience), narrational complexity (formal disruptions), and narrational complication (informational density)” (p. 84). One wonders whether these insights can be brought back onto the poetics field of play. If for example we applied TENCo to a study of formal and stylistic choices in large corpus of films over time, it may assist with some very fine distinctions between film techniques that complexify (or disrupt) and film techniques that complicate (or densify) the viewing experience—and the various creative problems and solutions filmmakers have devised for both throughout film history.

I found the Projections contribution by Kathrin Fahlenbrach, entitled “Embodied Cues in Cinematic Narration? Revisiting a Bordwellian Concept in Film Aesthetics,” among the issue’s most rewarding. Like Keating’s piece, it charts the development of one of Bordwell’s heuristics. And like Cabañas, Yonah, Kiss, van der Velden, Konijn, and Bálint, Fahlenbrach addresses how research has shifted to questions about a complete psychological picture of film viewing. Yet here, findings are tied directly to the questions of film poetics.

Poetics’ concern for hypothetical viewing comes more fully to light here: “A prominent misunderstanding of his critics has always been that this argument implies a generalization about spectators’ actual understanding” (p. 116). Fahlenbrach then maps how, in the wake of Narration in the Fiction Film, cognitive researchers have turned to emotion psychology and “more biologically anchored affective aspects of moving images” (p. 117). Bordwell’s criticisms of some of this work, as Fahlenbrach correctly states, was from a poetics perspective. Bordwell continued “searching for cinematic patterns in filmic styles and the way they were informing our comprehension of movies” (p. 118).

Yet as Bordwell’s questions about comprehension evolved, so too did his accompanying heuristic, the concept of the cue. This is especially the case in Poetics of Cinema (2008). In 1985’s Narration in the Fiction Film, Fahlenbrach argues, cues consisted of “sensorial data” which were not only “insufficient for comprehending more complex meanings; they are even insufficient for building perceptual meanings on the bottom-up-level” (p. 118). The question of Narration in the Fiction Film after all emphasizes—in Bordwell’s words now—

…how the spectator thinks. To make sense of a narrative film, however, the viewer must do more than perceive movement, construe images and sounds as presenting a three-dimensional world, and understand oral or written language. They must take as a central cognitive goal the construction of a more or less intelligible story. But what makes something a story? And what make a story intelligible? (p. 33, emphasis in source)

The state of the question at that point was about viewers making sense of stories—i.e., the process of narration. It wasn’t primarily focused on film style (i.e., techniques that shape sensory perceptions). Once Bordwell enlarged the scope of his inquiry to include a broader range of styles—in Poetics of Cinema, for instance—his heuristic understanding of cues and the questions the concept can shape enlarged as well: “Instead of just triggering cognitive inferences as incomplete data, he now argues that the online perception of cinematic cues actively feeds into cognitive comprehension and even into the (cultural) appropriation of moving images: ‘Sensory input drives perceptual processing; perceptual processing feeds into comprehension and appropriation, in the bottom-up direction’” (p. 120). Again, Bordwell adapts his tools to the needs of the question.

Fahlenbrach astutely reveals how the stylistic concept of cues—which broadens the original narrational concept of cues—might lead to some fine-grained research into culture: “Stylistic cues, then, can be so powerful in channeling our full experience and understanding of movies, because they trigger both sensorial reflexes and (film-)culturally appropriated associations and meanings” (p. 122). Her work, available in a volume she edited, has shown that visual and sound cues directly on-board fundamental cultural metaphors, some of which are so widespread that they might be classified as contingent universals, an idea to which I now turn as I wrap up this review.

* * *

Bordwell described his heuristic tools as instances of mid-range thinking—not too close to one’s objects of study as to avoid generalization, but not so distant from them either as to lose a sense of their fine-grained qualities. “We should forge mid-range concepts that are flexible and delicate tools for describing, analyzing, and explaining things about cinema,” he writes in the 2018 Afterword to On the History of Film Style:

These concepts aren’t typically general, deductively secured theories about such matters. We need concepts that are provisional, flexible tools that allow one to pose research questions and examine evidence that can answer them. The concepts are open to correction and rejection after encounters with bodies of evidence. A pretty theory can be killed by a counterexample. Many are. What’s empirical is what’s corrigible in the light of further information. (p. 272)

One of his most discussed mid-range concepts—contingent universals (also examined here)—is taken up in Projections by Patrick Colm Hogan. Hogan’s essay, “Contingent Universals? On Cross-Cultural Features in Film,” is conceptually rich, endeavoring to thicken Bordwell’s heuristic into a full-blow theory in need of scrutiny for its direct explanatory potential.

Hogan, to my eyes, indulges in a thought-experiment. What if we scrutinize Bordwell’s concepts as high-end rather than mid-range? Hogan strategically recasts Bordwell’s contingent universals through the lens of linguistics.

In simple terms, a contingent universal in historical poetics isn’t really, truly universal, i.e., something to be found in every film, in the experience of every viewer, or in every corner of global film culture for all time. It’s simply widespread across film industries and cultures—so conspicuously widespread that it needs a special kind of explanation that straddles nature and nurture, benefiting from a combination of historical and biological insight.

Bordwell presents contingent universals as an aspect of the cultural history of cinema. Hogan posits a higher-end concept that’s ultimately biological and thus more clearly delineated, even fully explanatory:

In linguistics, universals are properties or relations—or, more generally, principles—that are instantiated in a significantly greater number of languages than would be predicted by random processes alone, with “significance” having its usual, statistical sense. A universal that occurs in all languages is an “absolute” universal, whereas a universal that occurs in fewer is a “statistical” universal. […] The presumption of calling these non-absolute principles “universals” is that they will ultimately be explained by absolute universals. (pp. 100-101)

When would poeticians need such a powerful tool? Hogan confesses that Bordwell’s research never really establishes such a need. He doesn’t describe “any properties that satisfy the standard [viz., linguistic] criteria for universality” (p. 104).

For Hogan, the strongest candidate for a cinematic universal in the linguistic sense is hierarchy constituent structure (p. 105). When we speak a language, listen to a piece of music, and endeavor to comprehend a narrative, including in film, our brains click in “neurocognitive mechanisms to build structure,” in the words of Neil Cohn, Ray Jackendoff, Phillip Holcomb, and Gina Kuperberg. Why is this aspect of cinema universal? Because it stems from the very way the brain works, not just with respect to cinema but in a range of shared and culturally specific (and isolated) circumstances. The challenge with cinematic universals, Hogan reveals, is that, by virtue of cinema’s spread via “European colonialism,” researchers will never be able to isolate developments in film, film culture, or film viewership that avoid influence from a “common origin”—a crucial test of true universality (p. 105, 113).

* * *

In this post, I’ve proposed one way—I think an especially important way—to read and critique Bordwell’s work. It’s erotetic. It pursues questions. To really appreciate his achievements, we must keep his questioning methodology in mind. He posed queries, proposed heuristics for answering them, revised these heuristics to shift the terms of his research or produce different results, and passed these tools on to others—others who have since revised them and fashioned new queries. His dogma, to the extent that he had one, was one of relentless questioning. The process of discovery itself needed to be preserved—preserved in an explicitly investigatory posture.

In an upcoming post, I hope to review another major publication on Bordwell’s work, Observing Film Art: Themes from the Work of David Bordwell, edited by Charlie Keil and Murray Smith and due out from Rutgers University Press in December 2026. There, I will explore not just Bordwell’s questions but his many answers. What did Bordwell add to our understanding of film and film history?

Back in 2024, I was contacted by two Romanian film professors, Andrei Rus and Doru Nitescu of the Universitatea Nationala de Arta Teatrala si Cinematografica “I.L.Caragiale.” They had translated David’s and my textbook, Film History: an Introduction, the first of our books to appear in Romanian. As part of the activities around its release, they kindly offered me a Doctor Honoris Causa from their university. Of course I accepted, and my sister Karen and I headed for Bucharest. It was a moving ceremony (me giving my acceptance speech below) and a lovely visit to Bucharest.

That visit helped lead to the Criterion Channel’s new March program of Romanian New Wave cinema. The lineup of films which became available on March 1 is:

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005), 12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006), 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Christian Mungui, 2007), Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009), Aurora (Cristi Puiu, 2010), Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean, 2010), and Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu, 2016)

Naturally I prepared for the trip by watching as many Romanian films as I could find, in part because it was hinted that I could meet some of the most prominent of the New Wave directors during my visit, which proved to be the case. We had all too short a conversation with Christian Mungiu, who runs a film festival and had to dash off to introduce someone after the starter course. Andrei and I dined with Radu Jude. Doru, Karen (on the right below), and I had a very pleasant and lengthy dinner with Cristi Puiu and Anca Puiu, his wife and producer. She played a considerable role in helping organize the Criterion series.

After I returned to the USA, I contacted my friends at Criterion and asked whether Puiu’s Sieranevada, which I blogged about from the 2016 Vancouver International Film Festival, might be a candidate for release on DVD/Blu-ray. It was unavailable in the US in any format. In my entry I wrote, “Watching the lengthy opening shot, which largely involves the main character’s car being double parked and blocking a DHL truck, I did quickly realize that I was seeing a terrific film.” Finally seeing it again, I could appreciate the elaborate staging as the characters move in and out among the crowded group of vehicles.

It turned out that Criterion’s schedule of disc releases was already planned for years ahead. The option of a program of Romanian New Wave cinema, however, was a possibility. Soon it became a reality, and the Head of Programming for the Criterion Channel, Aliza Ma, made it happen. It didn’t quite make into the 2025 schedule, which would have coincided with other celebrations for the twentieth anniversary of The Death of Mister Lazarescu‘s release. It won numerous prizes, most notably the Un Certain Regard Award at Cannes. It is considered to have launched the Romanian New Wave.

Shortly thereafter Christian Mungui’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (2007) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. It dealt with the harsh punishments for those who had or performed abortions under the Communist Regime, as the woman trying to help her friend end her pregnancy encounters suspicious hotel staff and a very reluctant abortionist (see bottom). It cemented worldwide awareness of important films coming from Romania. These directors and others have continued to make films that show up at international festivals and win or are nominated for awards. I particularly like Police, Adjective (2009), which also won the Un Certain Regard Award, as well as the FIPRESCI prize.

Some of the films are grim, others have a surprising amount of humor mixed in. The most overt comedy in this group is Porumboiu’s 12:03 East of Bucharest. It takes place on the sixteenth anniversary of the rebellion that toppled the Communist reign and Nicolae Ceausescu. Three men in a provincial city form a panel in a rather makeshift television studio to discuss what acts of rebellious heroism they or anyone else in their city accomplished on that fateful day.

The Channel’s series is an excellent opportunity for people unfamiliar with the movement to get an introduction to some of its most important films. Those who saw some or all of them when they came out can watch those unavailable on home video to see them again.

For anyone who enjoys this series, here are some suggestions for a further exploration of the Romanian New Wave.

You may wonder why there is only one Christian Mungui film in this series, given that he’s one of the most widely known of these filmmakers. It’s probably because Criterion already offers access to two excellent films by him. Beyond the Hills (2013) which David blogged about from the Vancouver Film Festival, will remain available on the Channel and on a Criterion Collection disc DVD or Blu-ray. Mungui’s Graduation (2016), which David blogged about, also from Vancouver, is available on Criterion discs.

I’d like particularly to recommend Mungui’s R.M.N. (2022), an excellent film about immigrants working in a small town and encountering resistance from the locals. It doesn’t seem to have had a release in the USA, but a British Blu-ray by Picture House is available through Amazon America and UK.

Those who enjoy the two films by Corneliu Porumboiu might want to check out his 2019 film The Whistlers (La Gomera, 2019), which David blogged about from the Torino Film Festival. It’s available from a number of streaming services for a fee and free for subscribers to Apple TV+.

I unfortunately did not see all of Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas. I could only find it via a used DVD on eBay. It froze halfway through, and nothing could coax it to proceed. So I shall finally find out what happened in the end by watching it on the Channel. I have seen his suspenseful later film Întregalde (2021), available on a Grasshopper DVD.

Recently Radu Jude has become a highly popular and prolific Romanian director. One might ask why he is not represented in this series. Possibly there were rights problem, but one could argue that his distinctive style places him outside or at least on the fringes of the New Wave. I have only seen three of his films, the relatively early and more conventional The Happiest Girl in the World (2009) and somewhat more eccentric Everybody in Our Family (2012), as well as the definitely eccentric Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023) at the Wisconsin Film Festival.

Speaking of which, for those in Madison and surrounding towns who plan to attend this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival, Jude’s KONTINENTAL ’25 will be on the program. Variety‘s review says it retains his “dark absurdist edge.” (The schedule will be available online on March 5.) It’s playing at many other festivals as well.

The Channel’s Romanian program will remain online for a year.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Thanks to Cristi and Anca Puiu for help with this entry.

The Youth of Maxim (Grigoriy Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg)

Kristin here:

As usual, this end-of-the-year entry has come out early in the next year. I was out of the country for six weeks recently, returning on December 27. It takes awhile to choose ten films, track down copies, watch them, and format the illustrations. For my 1934 list, I complained because I had trouble finding a tenth film. Looking back now, it was a very good line-up. 1935 turned out to be far more difficult. Only a few really obvious films sprang to mind, and the remaining seven are good but not great films. Fritz Lang didn’t make a film that year. Mizoguchi made two films that year, Oyuki the Virgin and The Downfall of Osen. David discusses them in the Mizoguchi chapter of Figures Traced in Light, but he must have watched them in an archive; I couldn’t find anything but unwatchable prints on YouTube.

One problem this year was a lack of decent DVDs and Blu-rays to watch and the take frames from. I try to avoid YouTube, but two films were only available there. Two were only on the Criterion Channel, with no discs available.

At least I can look forward more confidently to 1936. Renoir’s The Crime of M. Lange, Lang’s Fury, Ozu’s The Only Son, and so on. Most of the films below are pleasant entertainment, but hardly masterpieces. I begin with the three best of the bunch, and the rest are in no particular order.

Previous lists can be found here: 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, and 1934.

Toni (Jean Renoir)

Toni is an unusual film for Renoir. His earlier films of the 1930s (his La Chienne was on my 1931 list and Boudu Saved from Drowning made the 1931 one) were studio productions with professional actors. In 1956 he wrote of his approach to Toni:

At the time of Toni, I was against makeup. My ambition was to bring the nonnatural elements of the film, the elements no longer dependent on the coincidence of chance encounters, to a style as close as possible to that of daily encounters.

Same thing for locations in Toni, there are no studios. The landscapes and the houses are as we found them. The human beings, whether they are played by actors or inhabitants of Mariques, try to be like the passersby they are supposed to represent: in fact, aside from a few exceptions, the professional actors themselves belong to the social classes, nations, and races of their roles. 

The opening of the film, set by a rail bridge by the town of Mariques, near Marseilles, shows immigrants coming from various nearby countries, mostly Italy and Spain, arriving looking for work in the nearby quarry and other industries. Initially the film seems almost like a documentary. One of the workers is Toni, an Italian who rents a room in a boarding house run by a French woman, Marie. The plot develops as he becomes Marie’s lover. He is attracted, however, by a woman at a nearby farm, Josepha. She marries a thuggish supervisor at the quarry, and Toni is resigned to marrying Marie. Despite the real locations and the potential for political treatment of the workers’ lives, the rest of the story is a melodrama dealing with the problems Toni encounters as he is torn between the two women.

Despite the rather bland settings (the film was shot in the autumn), Renoir manages some striking shots. He occasionally uses depth shots, as with a dramatic high angle as Tony talks with his friend on a cliff at the quarry (above). Another depth shot involves an interior shot through a window, with Marie in bed, barely visible in a gap which David would call “aperture framing.” (See also the bottom, with a depth shot after Marie’s suicide attempt.)

Toni is available on DVD or Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection and streams on the Criterion Channel.

An Inn in Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu)

Not surprisingly, Ozu has become a regular member of the yearly lists. (That Night’s Wife, 1930; Tokyo Chorus, 1931; I Was Born, But …, 1932; both Dragnet Girl and Passing Fancy, 1933; and Story of Floating Weeds, 1934.) He will no doubt return at intervals at least, as long as this series of entries continues.

Sound came late to Japan, and An Inn in Tokyo is his last surviving silent film. It’s main character is Kihachi, the same name as that of the father in Passing Fancy and played by the same actor, Takeshi Sakamoto. He doesn’t seem to be the same character, however, since in the earlier film he had one son, and here he has two. They doggedly follow him as the three walk from town to town. Kihachi is looking for a job in the Depression, and although he says he’s an expert lathe operator, he is rejected time after time. He and the boys resort to catching dogs and turning them in at police stations, because an anti-rabies campaign is going on, with rewards offered for dogs brought in. The boys continue to encourage their father, but he becomes increasingly discouraged. Ozu conveys the days that pass almost identically by showing a variety of similar industrial landscapes.

Ozu’s style is fully developed here. The opening with a large empty drum and cuts to the same drum with the family trudging along the road, seen in long shot and from a low camera height. Shot/reverse shot is done by systematically crossing the axis of action, with the framing creating graphic matches created by the characters’ positions. Low camera height and other familiar Ozu techniques are consistently used.

An Inn in Tokyo streams on the Criterion Channel but for some reason has not been released on disc.

The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock)

Around 1970, when I was approaching the end of my undergraduate career, majoring in tech theater, at the University of Iowa. I took a film history course as the only elective I could find that could fit into my schedule. (Film was in the same department as theater and rhetoric.) Other courses followed and lured me into grad school studying cinema.

I had a lot of catching up to do, watching the classics of the canon as it was at the time. No easy task in those days before home video in the form of VHS tapes, which were only beginning to appear on the scene.

I knew I wanted to see Hitchcock’s work, but the number of his films unavailable for viewing in any format, including 16mm (the norm for classroom use) is startling in hindsight. None of the silent films, few of the 1930s ones, and several of the 1950s films, including Rear Window, Vertigo, and the second Man Who Knew too Much,  which were blocked from exhibition by rights problems. I read Hitchcock/Truffaut, which had come out a few years earlier; thus I got a sense of Hitch’s career.

Some readers will remember the impact Charles Champlain’s weekly series Film Odyssey when it was shown on public television in 1972. Twenty-six films, which Champlain discussed afterward with directors and scholars. Fritz Lang appeared to talk about M, Annette Michaelson about Ivan the Terrible Part I and Potemkin, Renoir on Jules and Jim, Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, and so on. Basically the list was made up with Janus films, the ones we still see on The Criterion Channel and on the Criterion Collection’s discs. I was one of many whose lives were changed by that series, little knowing that in several years I would write my dissertation on Ivan the Terrible and publish it with Princeton University Press (1981). I still treasure the program booklet, provided free on request from Xerox, which sponsored the series.

Among the films was The 39 Steps. The booklet includes excerpts from some of the interviews, but not nearly all. These are the only way one can get information about who the interviewees were. One fan has listed the films and known interviewees on the Criterion Forum.) Eight films, including The 39 Steps don’t have this information. My vague recollection is that it was considered the best of the series of six films Hitchcock made in the mid- to late 1930s. (I don’t include Jamaica Inn, which I find unwatchable.) That series was The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, see last year’s ten-best entry); The 39 Steps; Secret Agent (1936), probably the dullest of them; Sabotage (1936); Young and Innocent (1937); and The Lady Vanishes (1938).

With most of Hitchcock’s films now available in some form, we can perhaps see that at least The Man Who Knew Too Much, Sabotage, and The Lady Vanishes are equal to The 39 Steps. (I haven’t watched Young and Innocent recently.)

The film has Hitchcock’s usual blend of suspense and humor that characterize many of his films and especially the ones from this period. The Macguffin is a secret that a group of spies are about to smuggle out of the country. Richard Hannay is forced to try and prevent this by a mysterious lady spy on the British side takes refuge in his flat and explains the smuggling plot. We never learn what the secret it, it being a Macguffin, after all. The lady spy is murdered and Hannay is assumed to be the killer and flees from London to Scotland. He continues his attempt to prevent the smuggling, but the real suspense of the film is built around his repeated narrow escapes from the police chasing him. The Scottish landscapes through which he flees are partly short on location, but quite a few shots were done with rather cheap studio sets; Hitchcock managed to give these a strong atmospheric with lighting, as in the frame at the top of this section.

One police encounter ends with Hannay handcuffed to a pretty blonde who has offered to provide evidence against him. This adds the conventional romantic subplot of a couple who hate each other initially and then cooperate to reveal the real murder and spies. It also provides a little mild risqué humor as the two have to pretend to be a honeymooning couple in order to take refuge in an inn (above).

The 39 Steps is available on Blu-ray and DVD from The Criterion Collection and streaming on the Channel.

Ruggles of Red Gap (Leo McCarey)

My impression is that Ruggles is not thought of as a significant film within academia, which is a pity, as it is a clever, funny film. It was based on Harry Leon Wilson’s 1915 best-selling novel. (P. G. Wodehouse claimed to have invented his character Jeeves because he felt that Wilson had failed to capture the dignity of English valets.) Ruggles was a considerable box-office success and was nominated for a Oscar as Best Picture. It’s score on Rotten Tomatoes is 100% (among critics, the general populace ranks it at 89%). It played at Il Cinema Ritrovato in a 2015 McCarey retrospective in Bologna.

The plot is based around an English nobleman who through gambling loses his valet, Ruggles, to a nouveau riche couple vacationing in Paris. The wife wants Ruggles to dispose of his new master’s loud clothing (above) and dress him in a more dignified fashion. Doing his duty, Ruggles allows the couple to take him to Red Gap, their small town in Washington. He adheres to his valet’s job, doggedly deferring to his employers by refusing when they tell him to proceed them through doors. Once in Red Gap he gradually grasps the American ideal of all people being equal, becomes a popular citizen of the town, and opens a restaurant.

Ruggles is widely viewed as a screwball comedy, which I think is a fair assessment. It follows the common plot premise of rich people being eccentric, often in regard to working-class people. (A model of such a plot is My Man Godfrey, released in 1936.) It’s very funny, due largely to its excellent cast. Charles Laughton was anxious to show that he had a broader range than the villains and scoundrels whom he had played in his most prominent films.

Ruggles is widely available on a variety of streaming services. The DVD from which I took these illustrations is still available. A British Blu-ray from Eureka! is out of print and seems to be difficult to find and expensive when one does. The frames above demonstrate that in this case a DVD is quite acceptable.

A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood and Edmund Goulding)

I thought that Duck Soup (1933) would be the Marx Brothers sole appearance on these lists. The general consensus is that the Marx Brothers’ uncontrolled madness was toned down by Irving Thalberg when they moved to MGM. In a lean year like 1935, however, A Night at the Opera, while not a masterpiece, isn’t out of place in the list.

True, one must sit through two bland musical numbers. Kitty Carlisle at least can act and sing opera, but Allen Jones and his nasal crooning are pretty intolerable and implausible when he impresses a big opera impresario. Moreover, there are the inevitable piano (Chico) and harp (Harpo) solos, this time delivered to cute little children.

Still, setting all this aside, the film has advantages. Zeppo departed the team between Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera. There are two chaotic sequences that live up to the old Marx style: the famous stateroom scene, reaching its most crowded in the frame above. The lengthy interruption and destruction of the opera performance in the climactic scene is hilarious. Groucho is close to his best here, dominating the non-musical-number scenes with constant ad-libs and mugging.

I watched the Warner Bros. Archive Collection’s Blu-ray. (Amazon is even still selling a VHS tape.) The same version streams on Amazon Prime and other services for a small fee.

Carnival in Flanders (Jacques Feyder)

How many people these days knows much of Jacques Feyder’s films? Silent film lovers may be familiar with his 1922 show feature Crainquebille, and Garbo fans recognize him as the director of her elegant 1929 film The Kiss. La Kermesse héroïque remains his main classic of the sound era.

Set in 17th Century Flanders during the Spanish occupation, the film deals with the reaction of a town in the path of an approaching Spanish military group. Fearful of a attack of rapine and pillage, the men of the city timidly come up with a feeble plan to pretend that the mayor has recently died. Scornful of the plan, the women, including the mayor’s wife, decide to welcome the Spaniards with entertainment, food, and in some cases sexual favors. The Spaniards are delighted, enjoy an night of carousing, and move on in the morning.

Feyder saw the film as a farce, and much of it is quite amusing. Still, the idea of the women saving their town by consorting with the enemy adds a sour undertone to the film. Nevertheless, if one ignores this and take it as Feyder intended, Carnival is an impressive film. The action takes place within an elaborate city set by the great designer Lazare Meerson (above and below). The comic scenes are played by an excellent cast, particularly the major stars Françoise Rosay as the mayor’s wife and Louis Jouvet as a cynical Spanish priest.

I have been unable to track down a disc release still in print, but the film streams on The Criterion Channel.

Wife, Be like a Rose! (Mikio Naruse)

Naruse makes his second appearance on the list, after Street without End in 1934. My impression is that a lot of Japanese cinema aficionados view it as his best film of the 1930s.

The plot is handled in an interesting way, with the action falling into two halves. In the first part we meet Kimiko, a modern young woman who claims her salary is bigger than her boyfriend Seiji’s (below). The two bicker and tease each other but are clearly assuming they will eventually marry. Kimiko’s mother, Etsuko, spends her time writing poetry and lamenting the absence of her husband Shunsaku, who has run off with another woman long ago. Kimiko remarks that her mother never paid much attention to her husband. When she sees her father on the street one day, she expects him to visit her and her mother, but he never shows up. Angry, Kimiko takes a train up to a mountain village where her father lives with the other woman.

So far we have seen the situation entirely from Kimiko’s point of view and occasional remarks from Seiji. Once Kimiko reaches the village, she goes into the countryside to see her father. He spends his time panning for gold, hoping to make a better life for his other family, who life a somewhat spartan life. Once Kimiko meets Oyuki, the woman Shunsaku lives with, she realizes that Oyuki is kind and generous and feels guilty about having broken up Shunsaku’s marriage. Although poor, she has been sending money anonymously to Etsuko, money Kimiko had assumed came from her father. The entire situation that had been set up in the first half is turned upside down, and Kimiko finally is convinced that her mother has given him no reason to return and it is better that her father stay as he is.

As usual, the film has echoes of Ozu’s style. The film starts with a shot through a window in an office building (above), a common way Ozu starts his films dealing with characters who work in bland offices. Naruse also uses shot/reverse shots that cross the 180-degree line and creating graphic matches between the two characters, particularly their faces.

He also uses references to American movies, as Ozu does. Here a cover of a fan magazine clearly entitled “Hollywood” (left). Which is not to say that Naruse follows Ozu slavishly. His tracking shots are quite different. In the scene where Kimiko is moved by Oyuki’s description of her happy if spartan home life and her revelation of her sending the money, Naruse uses a tight close-up of the two women, something Ozu would never do.

In a short running time (74 minutes), Naruse leads us to radically change our views in the way that Kimiko does and to sympathize with “the other woman,” who had been vilified in the first half.

Being a sound film, Wife Be like a Rose! is not in Criterion’s Eclipse box set of Naruse’s late silent films, which includes Street without End. The only place I could find it is on YouTube in a so-so print with rather obtrusive large subtitles in black boxes. It’s not available on disc as far as I can tell.

I should add that for mediocre prints like this one, I usually photoshop them, typically boosting the contrast a little and getting rid of any bugs that are present. Wife has a NipponKino logo at the bottom right and little white curved corners, which I also eliminate. The idea is to give a better sense of the filmmaker’s style.

Steamboat Round the Bend (John Ford)

In her excellent new book, John Ford at Work: Production Histories 1927-1939, Lea Jacobs has this to say about the importance of Ford’s actors were one of two vital influences on him: actors and cinematographers:

Obviously Ford’s career may be charted through the stars he worked with and sometimes helped to create. Henry Fonda and John Wayne are the most famous examples, but Victor McLaglen and Will Rogers are much more important for the first half of the 1930s, and their influence on Ford’s œuvre and career remains to be fully explored. (p. 5) 

She contributes to that exploration with a chapter on Ford’s three Will Rogers films, Doctor Bull, Judge Priest, and Steamboat Round the Bend. The latter is not a masterpiece on the level of most films that make it to my lists, but Lea assures me it’s the best of the three. I hadn’t watched any of them, so I started backwards and watched Steamboat–not just for this list but in preparation of reading that chapter. (I plan to discus the book in a future blog entry.)

Rogers plays Doctor John Pearly, a snake oil salesman who passes his bottles of Pocahontas as medicine, though it is mainly alcohol (above). This is played for comedy, so that the extremely popular Rogers, with his homespun persona, does not come across as a villain. Apart from making money in this fashion, he decides to overhaul his rundown steamboat and enhance his income with it. When the owner of a fancier boat belittles Pearly’s, the two agree to a bet on a steamboat race, with the winner taking ownership of the other’s boat. A major subplot involves Pearly’s newphew Duke, who shows up with Fleety Belle, whom Pearly initially rejects with scorn as a “swamp girl.” A rapid transformation follows, as a bath and a wardrobe of Pearly’s late wife’s clothes turn Fleety into a spunky, smart  young lady whom Pearly admires and even teaches to steer his boat. Duke has been accused of a murder of a man who was trying to force himself on Fleety, and much of the rest of the film involves a search for a witness to the crime who can clear Duke.

The film gives a good demonstration of why Rogers was so very popular. Much of Steamboat has the look of a fairly low-budge film, but Ford pulls out all the stops at the end, with a whole fleet of steamboats participating in the race (more than are visible in the frame below). Naturally Pearly is the one who ends up with two boats, when he runs out of wood and stokes his fire with the remaining stock of Pocahontas–suggesting that he will now give up his old ways and make an honest living.

Steamboat was Rogers’ last film. It was released a month before his death in a plan crash.

Steamboat is available on DVD as part of a set, John Ford at Fox Collection, with all three Rogers films and three other comedies. I haven’t checked the quality of the prints, but it’s a 20th Century-Fox release. Steamboat was earlier also released by itself by Fox. That’s out of print, but there are plenty of copies on eBay. That’s the one I used for the frames above. As far as I can tell, the streaming rights have expired for all the services that used to carry it.

The Youth of Maxim (Grigoriy Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg)

1935 was not a good year for most of the major filmmakers in the USSR. Eisenstein was struggling with the ill-fated Bezhin Meadow. Pudovkin was accused of formalism for Deserter (1933), and combined with health problems, his next film was not released until 1938. I haven’t been able to find a watchable version of Dovzhenko’s Aerograd, but friend, colleague, and Dovzhenko expert Vance Kepley assures me that it does not belong on a ten-best list.

Kozintsev and Trauberg have been on the list previously (The Overcoat, 1926; New Babylon, 1929; and Alone, 1931).

The Youth of Maxim is the first of three films, The Youth of Maxim, The Return of Maxim (1937), and New Horizons (1939). These were loosely based on the life of writer Maxim Gorky, presumably derived from his fictional set of memoirs, My Childhood, In the World, and My Universities (1913-1923). The films do not reflect Gorky’s actual life, however. The future author had a miserable early life, orphaned at a young age, wandering across Russia from job to job, and even attempted suicide. (“Gorky,” an assumed name, means “bitter.”)

By contrast, in the first film, Gorky is a carefree young man with a factory job and a girlfriend. We first see him singing a cheerful song with his two friends. The year is 1910, but Gorky has no knowledge of workers’ rights or a coming revolution. The arc of the plot is conventionally Stalinistic. The death of one of the friends in a factory accident begins to alert Gorky to the dangers workers are exposed to and the indifference of the owners to such a minor problems. A second death (above) lingers over the workers grief and anger, and Gorky begins to realize the resistance is necessary. Ultimately at the funeral procession for the dead man, the workers treat the occasion as a protest march, watched by the owners and a military presence (see top). When a riot breaks out, Gorky finally commits to the workers’ cause and joins in the fighting, ending up in prison.

This film and the two that succeeded it were both considered acceptable to the regime, and in 1941 the two directors were awarded the Stalin Prize.

The only place I could watch the film was on the RVISION channel on YouTube, with subtitles. It’s a so-so print, reasonably good in some scenes and poor in the darker ones, including the lively opening that seems to have echoes of New Babylon.

Two experimental animated shorts in color:

Composition in Blue (Oskar Fischinger) 

Fischinger began his career making black-and-white abstract animated film synchronized to musical pieces. A group of these Studies were included in a section on experimental cinema in my 1930 list. During the 1930s Fischinger participated in the development of a color system called Gasparcolor, which he first used in one of his ads for Muratti cigarettes, Muratti geift ein (1934) and some animation tests. His first exhibited experimental film using the system was one of his major animated works, Komposition in Blau, at four minutes. It is done in stop-motion rather than with drawings. Most of the little shapes that move about via stop-motion are objects.

The film was shown at a theater in Los Angeles, leading Paramount to hire Fischinger. His move to the US was permanent. His work there culminated in his most ambitious project, Motion Painting No. 1 (1948).

Composition in Blue is available from the Center for Visual Music on one of the two discs of his work: Oskar Fischinger: Visual Music.

 A Colour Box (Len Lye)

Coincidentally,  in 1926 New Zealand avant-garde artist Len Lye had moved to London and in the 19302 started work for John Grierson’s Film Unit within the General Post Office. His first two four-minute color shorts, both made in 1935, were Kaleidoscope and A Colour Box. Rather than using stop-motion to manipulate colorful objects, he painted shapes directly onto clear 35mm film. The result was a pair of abstract animated films that ended with a brief passage of words and numbers aimed at promoting the G.P.O.

Both shorts were made using a different early system called Dufaycolor. It seems to have had a narrower range of colors than Gasparcolor, which Lye switched to for his next films, including the marvelous Rainbow Dance (1936)–which might well make it to next year’s list.

A DVD collection of Lye’s shorts called rhythms has been sold in the past by the Center for Visual Music, but the shop lists it as sold out, which seems to be permanent. Canyon Cinema has the same DVD for sale.

Thanks to Vance Kepley, Lea Jacobs, and Ben Brewster for help with this entry.

The quotation from Renoir is from the notes included in the Criterion disc of Toni, which also contains a useful essay by Ginette Vincendeau

Toni