A crowd lined up for a screening at the 2024 Wisconsin Film Festival (Source: Wisconsin Film Festival Facebook)

KT here:

About a month ago, August 17 to be precise, Variety published an essay by Owen Gleiberman. In it he decries the fact that while national grosses of mainstream films, especially blockbusters, have been recovering from the problems caused the pandemic and the writers’ strike, art-house films have not seen a comparable recovery. The blame for this disparity he places squarely on the shoulders of people who love art-house fare. They are either too timid to venture back a crowded theater or so lazy that they prefer to lounge about streaming movies. He even calls these art-cinema devotees “the bad guys” for having damaged the art-house market so badly. He considers no other possible causes of the art-house-cinema grosses failing to recover something like their former levels.

This struck me as unacceptable as a sole cause for the decline. I was tempted to write a response myself, but I didn’t have the data that would be needed to refute his claim. Fortunately the cinema-studies area of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has a history of professors and graduate students studying the film industry. I have turned to two recent Ph.D. recipients whose areas of expertise are ideal for a guest post analyzing Gleiberman’s argument. They have delved into the working of the two main places where people see foreign films, indies, and restored classics in a theatrical setting: film festivals and art houses.

Matt St. John’s dissertation is entitled, “United Slates: The Evolution of the American Film Festival System.” He defended on July 20, 2023. In it, he examines the industrial functions of American film festivals and their historical development into an extensive system. Matt is currently a manuscript archivist at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

Zachary Zahos‘ dissertation is entitled, “Meaning in the Margins: Boutique Distribution and the Contemporary Art House Film Market.” He defended on July 10, 2024. In it, he historicizes the emergence and analyzes the releasing strategies of boutique distribution companies like Milestone Films, Kino Lorber, and The Criterion Collection, from 1980 to the present.

These two experts have information that is current. I am grateful to them for sharing that information, which shows that the decline in art-house grosses has many important causes and that the  attendance by lovers of non-mainstream films has not dropped nearly as much as Gleiberman claims. They also exonerate those supposedly timid, lazy “bad guys.”

(Note: some of the sites linked below are behind paywalls.)

“Where the movie lovers are”

Have movie lovers stopped seeing movies? Owen Gleiberman thinks so, pressing the case that the sky is falling, or at least the ceilings of art-house theaters, in a Variety column last month (linked above).

Under the headline, “Will the People Who Say They Love Cinema the Most Come Back to the Movies?” Gleiberman reflects on the gap he perceives between the state of independent moviegoing today versus that of the halcyon 1990s. After listing the box office hits of the summer (primarily released by Disney), he steps back to note that “there is still a major piece missing”:

But what about the good guys of the ’90s — the adventurous moviegoers whose enthusiasm sparked the rise of indie film? Have they all gone away? No, but sorry, they’ve become the bad guys. Because they’re the ones who are staying home.

Gleiberman rounds up the usual suspects like streaming, lingering effects of the pandemic, and the deluge of home media options, before stating that droves of people are still clearly seeing films, leading to his main question: “Why aren’t more of the people who say they love cinema among them?”

Longtime readers of this blog will recall popular discourses of yore proclaiming “the Death of Film,” given how frequently David (here) and Kristin (here and here) have deflated such doom-and-gloom arguments over the years. For our part, we do not wish to put too fine a shine on the industry outlook today. From the popular press alone, recent features in Harper’s,  The New York Times, and The New Yorker supply plenty of evidence on how deregulation, COVID-19, and intellectual property have respectively hindered “the movies,” as we know or knew them.

But in Gleiberman’s case, his column provides no evidence for its central claim: that audiences are to blame for the decline of independent and non-blockbuster films like dramas. Of these supposedly marginal films, he writes:

You might say: Those movies do the business they do. There’s no world where they would have been bigger. But I’m saying that we need nothing less than a collective rediscovery of what commercial filmmaking can mean. Yes, it means twisters and bad boys; it means Marvel and horror; it means rom-coms and animated rides. But can’t we envision a world, once again, where it could also mean…drama? (Just look at the business that “It Ends with Us” is doing.) Where the big screen can take two people talking in a room and make them larger than life?

Leaving aside the merits of casting It Ends With Us as the poster child for the kind of cinema that needs to be saved, we take issue with the overall vagueness of Gleiberman’s prognosis. How does “a collective rediscovery of what commercial filmmaking can mean” take place, and where? It likely involves the independent distributors and exhibitors who acquire and screen the non-blockbuster fare Gleiberman champions, yet the column makes no mention of these entities, or the specific strategies they have attempted as of late to retain and even expand their audiences. Rather, the blame rests squarely on the consumer:

This summer proved, beyond a doubt, that movies are still a hot commodity. The real question ­— not just for now, but for 20 years from now ­— is: What, exactly, is a movie going to be? It’s time that the people who say they love movies the most answered that by showing up for them again.

The last line especially rankles, because, for all the challenges “adult dramas,” indie cinema, and art house theaters face, uninterested audience members rank low on the list. Streaming’s plentitude certainly keeps many viewers at home, and box office failure is not confined to the independent film sector alone (see here, here, and here). As researchers focused on the contemporary art house distribution and film festival landscapes, we have observed a range of data points indicating enthusism among art house audiences, in particular the desire for more: more theaters, more volume, more unexpected and diverse programming options (see here, here, here, and here) .

Are audiences to blame for the struggles of independent and non-blockbuster films? The more salient issue, we would argue, comes in the transformation of distribution and exhibition infrastructure over recent years — changes which are especially visible in the markets outside of New York and Los Angeles. We’re not suggesting that it’s all blue skies and sunshine for art houses in the largest cities in the country, but film-loving audiences in smaller cities across the United States are meeting a more complex and varied set of situations and places in which they can view new independent films. When you actually follow the release trajectories of specialty fare today—as films bounce between multiplexes, art house theaters, and regional film festivals, propelled by increasingly short platform launches—“the people who say they love movies” start to look not so much checked-out, as scattered and spread thin.

Art-house theaters: Everything

Reading the trades here in Wisconsin—where we still receive our bundles of Daily Variety via horse-drawn carriage, as you no doubt picture—we tend to notice that industry press coverage can lose sight of the regional nuances of distribution and exhibition. (Anthony D’Alessandro’s box office reports for Deadline remain a notable exception for digging into regional market data, week after week.) These distinctions may seem small, but they are important when, for one, you want to gauge what makes a genuine domestic hit, on the specialty circuit or otherwise. Understanding how art-house theaters program and how specialty films travel, outside of New York and Los Angeles, is even more relevant when you set out to diagnose the behavior of cinephiles and “adventurous moviegoers” today.

To put it plainly, art house theaters across the country program more heterogeneous slates than ever before. New York may have the population and infrastructure to sustain a handful of theaters solely dedicated to first-run indie/international cinema and repertory film, art houses like Film Forum, Film at Lincoln Center, IFC Center, Metrograph, the Angelika Film Center, and Anthology

Art by Brie Underhill. Source: Texas Theatre Instagram

Film Archives. But independent theaters elsewhere, in addition to programming the latest indie or hot revival, often dedicate a share of their screens to first-run Hollywood titles—movies like, most recently, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. While this brings in much-needed ticket sales for the venues, it means that screens traditionally reserved for specialty films are now, at times, showing new major releases.

Here is just a sample of the U.S. art houses now playing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: the Athena Cinema, in Athens, Ohio; the Texas Theatre, in Dallas; FilmScene in Iowa City; and Sidewalk Film Center and Cinema, in Birmingham, Alabama. Even Manhattan’s storied Quad Cinema has joined in on the fun. All the while, these theaters are still screening independent films. The Athena is currently splitting its second screen between two A24-distributed titles, the drama Sing Sing and horror film The Front Room, as well as a nature documentary. FilmScene is also showing those two A24 films, plus the French thriller Red Rooms and grindhouse restoration Six-String Samurai. Down in Alabama, Sidewalk Cinema’s slate this week offers a snapshot of how pluralistic art house programming can be. In addition to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, this two-screen theater booked the independent drama Good One, distributed by Metrograph Pictures; the documentary Family Tree, as part of the Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers initiative; and revival screenings of Mary Poppins, via Disney, and Seven Samurai, via Janus Films.

None of these theaters are booking the $100 million Warner Bros. tentpole at gunpoint, as far as we can tell. In fact, the promotional gas these art houses have expended on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is telling. The Texas Theatre, FilmScene, and the Athena all currently spotlight the film on their Facebook page cover photos, with the Athena having posted its image back in early August.

Nor are these art houses clearing half their slate for just any studio product. The embrace of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, among independent theaters, falls in line with the post-pandemic exhibition strategies outlined in this 2022 Business Insider piece. Films by auteur directors, working in franchises or with bigger budgets, like Dune or No Time to Die in 2021 or Barbie last year, not only draw crossover audiences but cater to their most dedicated patrons, too. According to Business Insider, the highest-grossing film of 2021 at the Avalon Theatre, Washington D.C.’s historic art house, was In the Heights, despite debuting day-and-date on HBO Max and developing a reputation since as a box office flop.

Films like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Barbie present exhibitors with ample opportunity to “eventize,” a term of art we heard often at the Independent Film Exhibitors Conference, IND/EX for short, held in Chicago a few months back. Last year, the waves of Barbie pink that crashed over theaters, like the custom Barbie box photo op in the Sidewalk Cinema’s lobby, pictured above, are among the more visible instances of such “eventized” filmgoing. Beetlejuice’s pinstripe decor has popped up in multiplexes and art houses like FilmScene, as has the likeness of Bob the Shrinker on merch and cocktails sold at the Texas Theatre. Such offerings are clear appeals to come see the film at a place that is more fun than your average multiplex, a theater that celebrates the films it shows with DIY flair, not just studio promotional materials. Less flashy forms of eventizing include member’s only screenings, which Sidewalk conducted for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice last Thursday, the day before its official release. Not only does this practice make screenings special, but it also encourages people to join the membership rolls, which, as that aforementioned Business Insider piece made clear, help keep the lights on at most independent theaters these days.

The median art house may very well wish to book more studio films than it currently does. The challenge comes not so much in alienating an existing audience, but rather in navigating clearances with the local multiplex or settling on a sensible profit share and screen commitment with the major studios.

For now, most art houses are balancing their historical bread-and-butter, namely independent and repertory fare, with hot Hollywood tentpoles. This balance, by necessity, sacrifices screens for the kind of specialty films Gleiberman accuses cinephiles of abandoning, yet we would dispute the charge that the audiences pouring in to see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice at an art house like FilmScene or Sidewalk do not count among the movie lovers worth cultivating. We would also like to know how many of these viewers will also end up seeing Seven Samurai at Sidewalk this week, or the Cannes-laureled thriller The Substance after that? We would be willing to bet more than a few, especially among younger viewers with Letterboxd accounts.

Specialty films: Everywhere

Just as art houses today program both specialty and blockbuster films, said specialty fare (by which we mean not just American indies, but also subtitled international, documentary, and repertory film) travels across a wide range of venues, beyond art house theaters alone. Due to the power of corporate chains like AMC (see here and here), especially in regional markets, specialty distributors often book their titles in big multiplexes rather than art houses. Other venues such as film societies and film festivals—many considered “nontheatrical” or “ancillary” by distributors, and thus not always counted in public grosses—fill in the gaps, and these institutions cultivate audiences devoted to artful cinema in the process. But these one-off screenings, despite reliably turning out movie-mad people in whatever locale they occur, usually rent films for a flat fee, meaning a series of sold-out screening may not add much to box office totals. This all has clear implications for how art house films “play” in most areas of the country.

Consider our Madison, Wisconsin—population: 269,840, metro area: 680,796—for but a moment. Our art house options may look miniscule compared to New York, Los Angeles, or even Chicago, but believe it or not, a ton of specialty films screen here regardless. The extent to which art house titles arrive here anyway, often in unheralded or fleeting stays, provides a sense of how specialty distributors book films in mid-size American cities today.

From a cursory glance, Madison’s moviegoing landscape may look bleak. Technically, Madison has not had a full-service art house cinema since 2016, when our Sundance Cinema (6 screens) was sold to AMC Theatres (that AMC location likewise closed in 2022). Our second-run cinema Market Square Theatre (much beloved by David and Kristin) would frequently book independent titles, but that also closed in 2022. At present, the Madison theatrical market consists of four multiplexes, all of them chains, whether national (one AMC) or regional (we have two Marcus Theatres, plus Flix Brewhouse). Our AMC boasts 18 screens, our Marcus multiplexes possess at least 15 screens each, and Flix Brewhouse has eight, tilting the latter toward more mass-market titles. Against this backdrop, our university-sponsored, free-to-the-public UW Cinematheque has become “the city’s arthouse by default” due to its cinephilic programming, while UW-Madison’s student-run WUD Film, in addition to its second-run prerogative, also books specialty titles like Anatomy of a Fall and Past Lives. So, in sum, that leaves Madison metro with four multiplexes and two nontheatrical venues, plus our annual Wisconsin Film Festival. Six theaters total, yet somehow we have three Costcos.

But specialty films play in all the aforementioned Madison venues. At least one screen at our AMC is dedicated to the latest Indian import on any given week. In recent months, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, art films to the letter, also played at our AMC, thanks to the joint distribution effort of Janus, Sideshow, and Variance Films. The catch is that, even in a mid-size market like Madison, specialty titles such as these fall into countless different tiers of screen size and scope, as determined by distributor and exhibitor.

We can look at the last year of A24’s distribution slate to get a better sense of this. By our count, between the beginning of September 2023 and September 6, 2024, A24 booked New York theatrical runs for 18 titles. Of these 18 titles, 16 screened or are scheduled to screen in one of the aforementioned Madison venues. (The exceptions are Steve McQueen’s four-plus-hour documentary Occupied City, which for runtime reasons is understandably absent, and Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, which despite its excellent reviews, here, here, and here, has also not been booked.)

Putting aside Alex Garland’s Civil War, which opened wide across large-format screens, the other 15 A24 films run the gamut of bookings. Higher profile genre and awards-season titles, like The Iron Claw, Love Lies Bleeding, and MaXXXine, opened simultaneously across all four Madison multiplexes. Below this tier, more offbeat or meditative art house fare, like Dream Scenario, Tuesday, and I Saw the TV Glow, have opened in two multiplexes, usually AMC Fitchburg and Marcus Point Cinema, and typically stayed for over a week. Below this, what we presume are considered even harder sells, like Dicks: The Musical and (our personal favorite of the bunch) Problemista, appeared in Marcus Point Cinema for a week, then vanished. Other A24 titles began, and in some cases also ended, their Madison journeys at our UW-Cinematheque. The Zone of Interest inaugurated the Cinematheque’s past spring calendar with a screening where numerous people had to be turned away. Closer to the Academy Awards ceremony, it was booked into multiplex runs. Aaron Schimberg’s dark satire A Different Man, another A24 title, just opened the Cinematheque’s fall calendar to a packed house, though the film’s local trajectory, beyond this one screening, remains uncertain as of this writing.

We outline all these distinctions to stress that, before the audience has a say in any of this, the vagaries of distribution and exhibition have shaped the trajectories of specialty film. We would have liked to see A24 do more than drop Problemista in our market without fanfare, just as we would have wished to see a local exhibitor promote its presence at all.

An odd quirk of regional specialty film circulation is that the most packed and electrifying screenings often add precisely $0 to a film’s reported theatrical gross! As in, some of these screening fees go toward a distributor’s column of ancillary revenue — again, meaning those earnings don’t show up on Box Office Mojo. Other screening fees are outright zilch. One thing we’ve learned from our recent conversations with small exhibitors is that outfits like A24 or Neon will sometimes send their latest titles to venues (usually nontheatrical ones) without charge. These distributors enable these sneak previews not because they hope no one will show up, but because they know such hubs of movie love are legion—ravenous, even, for something different. While we are curious to find data to support this claim, we suspect the word-of-mouth that follows such screenings can tee up a more successful theatrical run in smaller markets. But that only works if the films play theatrically in the markets at all. In short, the total national grosses for such films used by Gleiberman give a misleading measure of how many people are actually watching those films in a theatrical venue.

Beyond the multiplexes and film societies that make up the typical offerings for filmgoers here in Madison and many cities like it, film festivals present another wrinkle in the assumption that theatrical grosses reflect enthusiasm for specialty films. While festivals that feature major film premieres are the most familiar names, like Sundance, South by Southwest, and Telluride, dozens of other festivals occur each year in cities across the country. Audiences can see new American independent, foreign, and documentary films, and in some cases repertory films, at festivals like the Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison; the Cucalorus Film Festival in Wilmington, North Carolina; the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville; the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham; the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri; and many others. Such festivals are deemed “regional” by scholars and critics for their perceived audience reach and press coverage, rather than their programming focus.

If Gleiberman and others concerned about the lack of support for specialty film releases need encouragement, they should look no further than the enthusiasm for events like the Wisconsin Film Festival, which regularly sees sold-out screenings and lines around the blocks of venues throughout eight days of programming (see top and bottom). During this year’s festival in April, we attended a packed screening of Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed. It’s not such a surprise that audiences would flock to a new independent comedy with a winningly droll protagonist, played by the film’s writer and director. Even genre-defying art cinema also saw huge crowds. A Sunday afternoon screening of Lois Patiño’s new film Samsara (above) was filled to the brim with cinephiles eager to see the new slow cinema entry about a dying woman and reincarnation. The film asks the audience to close their eyes midway through the story, when, as Wisconsin Film Festival artistic director Mike King describes it in the program, “The liminal state between life and death is conjured through light and color we perceive through our closed eyelids.” In our minds, this is far more adventurous, challenging, and rewarding than the average two-people-talking-in-a-room dramas that Gleiberman misses, and Madison’s cinephiles did not stay home for Samsara! Distributors, take note – for reasons that defy our understanding, Samsara does not have domestic distribution. If you have someone as convincing as Madison’s own Mike King selling the films to audiences, you could have an art house hit on your hands.

Audiences are indeed seeking out excellent new films outside the blockbuster mold at events like the Wisconsin Film Festival, but, of course, festivals occupy a different role in film exhibition than traditional theatrical venues. (Unlike the Cinematheque, the WFF charges admission.) Like film societies, festivals often book titles for flat-rate fees, so even a considerable number of sold-out festival screenings may not translate to comparatively high reported box office totals. In any case, the ongoing success of regional festivals that show new films to hungry audiences suggests that moviegoers have not abandoned cinema outside of blockbusters. Instead, they may be seeing these films outside of traditional exhibition structures.

Limited release platforms: All at Once

Emma Stone in POOR THINGS. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

Audiences are not only encountering films through inconsistent distribution strategies or alternate exhibition routes like festivals, they are also facing a new landscape of fewer and shorter opportunities to see new specialty films. We have deliberately avoided talking too much about streaming, as we would just be reiterating points David has already made (here and here), and because Gleiberman yada yada’d the matter in his column. But as we move toward a conclusion, it is important to acknowledge one of the notable casualties of the streaming era, the 90-day theatrical window, and how specialty distributors and art house theaters have responded to its demise.

You, dear reader, already know how the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the collapse of theatrical windows. These periods of exclusivity, determining how long viewers had to wait before catching the latest Despicable Me at home or on a plane, had stood firm for decades, as the mutually agreed way distributors and exhibitors had to maximize the profits and prestige of movies as well as the moviegoing experience. Netflix famously disrupted this status quo, and the legacy studios, though they ceded some ground before 2020, buckled with the onset of the pandemic and started delivering their most premium titles at home, within that sacred first window. While theatrical windows have recovered from those dark days, the average period of theatrical exclusivity remains a fraction of what it once was — 37 days, according to Tom Brueggemann’s recent analysis at IndieWire.

This shortened average window can affect the performance of not only blockbusters, but specialty films most acutely. Since the days of Rashomon, art house titles rolled out slowly across the country, opening in New York and a few other select markets before expanding. These limited platform releases took time and crucially required distributors to adjust their plans on the fly, as initial box office reports appeared. The consequences of diminished theatrical windows, in this art house context, should be abundantly clear.

Some specialty distributors have addressed this crisis by releasing their titles, nationwide, over an extremely compressed timeframe. Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City caught headlines last June when Focus Features decided to collapse its platform release timeline from a typical span of months to just two weeks. In its first week, Asteroid City played in six theaters, to a sensational per-theater opening weekend average of $132,111. The next week, the film expanded nationwide to 1,675 theaters. That weekend’s $9,053,551 haul may have convinced Focus to bump up the following weekend’s theater total to 1,901 theaters, but after its fourth weekend, Focus made Asteroid City available on premium video-on-demand, closing that first window.

Focus Features expressed confidence with its Asteroid City theatrical plan, and its $28 million domestic gross made an enviable foundation for the ancillary revenue it has accrued since, as virtually guaranteed by its star-studded cast and auteur’s popularity. But compressing windows for specialty films so dramatically runs the risk of ending a film’s theatrical life before local audiences have a chance to learn about it (sorry, Problemista!). Sony Pictures Classics co-founder Tom Bernard recently expressed as much:

You get to go out into the world much faster, but [chains such as AMC and Regal] only play the movies for a couple of weeks. … Then they want to cycle in something different. So you get to $1 million or $2 million [at the box office] more quickly, but then you’re done theatrically.

Despite the apparent resistance of some exhibitors, platform releases can still pay off. Searchlight’s distribution of Poor Things, one of the titles Gleiberman suggests should have been a bigger sensation at the box office, capitalized on the longstanding strategy. When the film opened in nine theaters across four cities (New York, Los Angeles, Austin, and San Francisco) last December, Deadline noted its high per theater average of $72,000. Poor Things expanded to 17 markets the next week followed by 80 additional cities before the end of the month, and it played exclusively in theaters until its digital release on February 27 of this year.

Poor Things broke $100 million at the global box office after the successful platform release and received a healthy haul of 11 Oscar nominations. Disney’s head of theatrical distribution, Tony Chambers, told Hollywood Reporter, “It is a testament to the strength and quality of the movie, the publicity campaign and the tactical roll-out strategy that after a modest start we are now on track to ultimately hit $115 million globally.” Even with the prominence of star Emma Stone, ending its run with $34.5 million in the United States is no small feat for a very dark comedy about the liberation of a Victorian woman revived via transplant of an infant’s brain. (It’s worth noting here that Yorgos Lanthimos’s previous, acclaimed feature The Favourite totaled nearly the same domestic gross, $34.4 million, in 2018.) The word-of-mouth generated through platform releases appears to remain a viable part of a careful distribution and promotion strategy for studios with box office and awards hopes for their fall releases, even if the path is no longer a given.

We recognize that the patchwork circumstances of film exhibition that have developed in recent decades can lead to lopsided success for blockbusters and little else. On this front we largely agree with Gleiberman’s concern. But blaming audiences for this situation seems an incomplete explanation, at best, given that cinephiles across the country are still seeing movies far beyond just the tentpoles. We are eager to observe how distributors release specialty fare in the coming months, as the major fall festival premieres eventually reach smaller markets around the country. If distributors are willing to deploy platform releases and maintain substantial periods of exclusivity for new films, they could see more titles with solid box office hauls.

Could audiences vote with their dollars to see better films? Probably! But we know without a doubt that the situation is more complex than assumptions that cinephiles have abandoned challenging movies. With factors like shorter theatrical windows, art houses turning toward major Hollywood releases to make money, and increased opportunities for audiences to see specialty films outside of theaters, such as festivals, a look at the current landscape of distribution and exhibition resists the notion that audiences alone are responsible for the challenges facing specialty film releases.

Note: A recent survey conducted by Roku suggests that streaming vs. in-person moviegoing is not a zero-sum game. Among its many data points, the survey notes that “high-frequency streamers” are more frequent moviegoers than “low-frequency streamers.” The survey also spotlights Poor Things and the enthusiasm that followed it across traditional and digital channels, culminating in the film’s Academy Award wins and the attendant spike in streaming interest this past March. (The story linked requires free registration to access.)

Our gratitude to Kristin for spurring us to write this piece and offering insights about the UW-Cinematheque and Wisconsin Film Festival.

Several ideas and data points for this article were gathered from productive conversations we had at the 2024 IND/EX Conference, held in Chicago from June 25 to 28. Many thanks to the leaders at Art House Convergence and Film Festival Alliance for assembling a splendid program. Zach also extends his gratitude to the Marilynn R. Baxter Fund, as administered by UW-Madison’s Department of Communication Arts, for funding his conference attendance. Matt is grateful to the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research for supporting his attendance to speak about the ongoing “Expanding Film Culture’s Field of Vision” project, funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

Thanks to Jim Healy and Mike King for supplying data points on exhibition, Ani Biswas for help clarifying Madison theater esoterica, Allan Monterrubio for the photo of Sidewalk Cinema’s decked-out Barbie lobby, and Karla Khodanian for her boots-on-the-ground insights about Sidewalk Cinema’s recent programming.

Wisconsin Film Festival at the Barrymore Theater, 2017. In 2024 the place looked much the same.

KT here:

A memorial service for David was held on May 18, 2024. Although many friends and family members traveled to be present, the service was also streamed live for those who could not.

For those who were unable to do either, a recording of the service has been posted on Vimeo. The link is below.

There was a delay of a few weeks in posting it.

The wait was worth it. Thanks to Erik Gunneson, who also handled the technical aspects of the service itself, the recording is much improved. Erik is a faculty associate in the Department of Communication Arts here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He added superimposed titles to identify the speakers and the musical pieces. (The musical pieces were all chosen by David.) He also replaced the music as recorded in the room on the day with music from the original CDs, much improving the quality. Finally he added a lovely quotation from an exchange of email messages I had with our friend Damien Chazelle on the day after David died. Essentially all the information in the program is now in the recording.

When you click on the link, you will be taken to Vimeo. You may be asked to sign in or sign up with Vimeo. This should not be necessary. Just click on the X and the window should close. There is no need to sign up, and there is no password. It helps if you make the image full-screen.

The recording was done by a service used by the funeral service. It started about 17 minutes before the actual service began with the first musical piece. During that 17 minutes, we simply see people arriving and talking and finding their seats. Some of you may want to watch this and spot old friends. At one point one of the funeral staff is visible carrying in a chair. There were not enough chairs for the number of guests, though after more were set out, everyone was able to get a seat in the room. If you don’t want to watch this part, use the slider to go forward to about 17:40. (The music up to that point was supplied by the recording company.)

The entire recording lasts about two hours and twenty minutes.

Thanks to all involved. The service went even better than I had hoped, thanks to our wonderful host and speakers. As you will see, it was a very fitting celebration of David’s life, with much of his humor mixed with the beautiful tributes.

The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs (2020).

Since David’s death, this blog has not been updated. I do, however, plan to occasionally re-post old entries if they become relevant to current events in the world of film. I also hope to post new entries as the inspiration strikes me.

This entry deals with Mohammad Rasoulof’s There is No Evil (2020), including information on his troubles with the government at the time. Since he has now gone into exile and had a new film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, showing at Cannes, I hope this entry serves as a reminder of his earlier films. (Links below lead to other posts on his films, including The White Meadow and Manuscripts Don’t Burn.)

Kristin here:

Among the always bounteous offerings of the Vancouver International Film Festival, my favorite section is “Panorama,” since I enjoy seeing new films from countries all around the globe. Often some of these are from Iran, and the two Iranian films featured this year did not disappoint. The sole Indian film turned out to be an engaging, imaginative tale from an area of the world seldom represented on the screen.

There Is No Evil (2020)

Vancouver is in part a festival of festivals, drawing upon international films already premiered in Berlin, Cannes, Rotterdam, and other earlier festivals. Of necessity, this year’s items come from the pre-Coronavirus festivals, with films from Berlin especially prominent in the schedule. Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil, Golden Bear winner as best film, continued the director’s regular contributions to past Vancouver festivals. (For entries on other Rasoulof films we have seen at Vancouver, see here and here.) Christian Petzold’s Undine, discussed by David in the previous entry, won the Silver Bear as best actress for Paula Beer.

There Is No Evil is a deeply ironic title, since its four self-contained episodes deal with one of Iran’s notorious evils, its record for executing its citizens. As Peter DeBruge pointed out in his Variety review, “According to Amnesty Int’l statistics, Iran was responsible for more than half the world’s recorded executions in 2017. The number has since dropped, but the country continues to kill its citizens at alarming rates.”

Often the process of carrying through executions is assigned to hired civilians or is forced to be performed by soldiers. Rasoulof explores various ways in which such executions affect the willing or unwilling people who carry out the orders, as well as the effects on people they know and love. I don’t want to spoil the slow development of these consequences for the characters by describing the plots of each of the four episodes in too much detail. Suffice it to say that the revelation of those consequences are worked up to very slowly and occur dramatically.

The four episodes are shot in quite different styles. Those styles are to a considerable extent determined by the fact that the episodes move to increasingly remote locales.

The first begins in a bustling city and is shot in a bright, ordinary style befitting the depiction of a bourgeois lifestyle, with appointments to pick up spouses and children, shopping trips, and alternately bickering and affectionate conversation.

The second episode abruptly switches to a gloomy, desaturated color scheme of grays and muted browns and greens suited to a film noir (above). This segment begins with a military man assigned to perform an execution panicking because he cannot face killing anyone. During this episode, the tone and even the genre switch abruptly twice, from film noir to thriller to … something else.

The third story has a soldier on leave visiting a family of old friends, including the daughter whom he loves and hopes to become engaged to. Here the film is done in a lyrical, bright style, emphasizing scenes in the lush woods and in the happy rural home of a couple who foster a group opposing the government. Here the soldier talks with the mother of the family.

The fourth episode centers on a couple who have retired to a bee-keeping farm in a remote, mountainous area. They must contend with the visit of a niece, but neither is willing to answer her questions about the past.

I think the style in this part pays homage to Abbas Kiarostami, with numerous shots of the couple’s pickup on winding country roads (see bottom). There’s a specific echo of The Wind Will Carry Us in the motif of the girl’s repeated attempts to find cell-phone coverage to call her parents abroad.

Given the relatively large cast and considerable number of interior and exterior locales, one might wonder how Rasoulof, under an order to stop filmmaking, could make a two-and-a-half hour film critical of government policy. DeBruge’s review, linked above, also comments: “By subdividing the project like this, Rasoulof was able to direct the segments without being shut down by authorities — who are more carefully focused on features — and, in the process, he also builds a stronger argument.” In an earlier Vancouver report, we noted that Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Tales (2014) used a network-narrative structure because she could only get permission to make a series of shorts–which she then wove together into a feature.

As DeBruge writes, the reliance on episodic structure does not handicap Rasoulof. The slow accumulation of indifference, regret, and guilt demonstrates that executions have unnoticed, unforeseen, and undeserved effects. The stylistic shifts emphasize the differences in those effects and maintain interest across a long film.

The effectiveness of Rasoulof’s film has not gone unnoticed, however, and a Golden Bear is clearly not enough to protect him. On March 4, he was summoned to begin serving his long-delayed prison term, despite the widespread incidence of COVID-19 in Iranian prisons. (On March 1, three days before the summons, Indiewire published a history of government strictures on Rasoulof.) Many official protests have been launched, and one can only hope that once again the result will be yet another suspension of the enforcement of the sentences against him.

Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness (2019)

Yalda is the second feature by Iranian director Massoud Bakhshi, whose first, A Respectable Family, we recommended as “an unexpected gem” when it played in Vancouver in 2012. Yalda is another film that comes to Vancouver via this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, where it was nominated for a Crystal Bear. It also played at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury prize in the “World Cinema – Dramatic” category.

The film centers around one episode of a television series, “Joy of Forgiveness,” based on the premise that each week someone convicted of a crime seeks to be forgiven by the victim or a relative of the victim. Although not an actual law, such forgiveness is encouraged in Iran under Islamic law. If forgiveness can be obtained, the criminal is typically absolved of the crime. There are now charities, celebrities (including film director Asghar Farhadi), and other forces working informally to foster forgiveness and free guilty people, though this may include a payment of “blood money” given to the person doing the forgiving. (A real TV show based on this premise, “Honey Moon,” was the inspiration for Yalda.)

In this case, a young, shy working-class woman, Maryam, who had been married to a wealthy older man, has been convicted of killing her husband. She insists, however, that it was an accident. As the film begins, Maryam’s mother brings her to the television station. The young woman is terrified and declares she does not want to participate. But since this would mean a death sentence being carried out, her mother and the production team of the show ignore her protestations and hurry her through the preparations.

Representing the victim is Mona, his daughter, who, as the title of the TV series suggests, is expected to provide the standard happy ending to the show by forgiving Maryam. Mona seems to have  reasons to do so, since she would receive the blood money proffered by “Joy of Forgiving” and is planning to emigrate from Iran in the near future.

So far we seem to have a situation familiar from the films of Asghar Farhadi, with two or more people at odds who are gradually revealed to be flawed and to some degree at fault. The situation then typically ends in reluctant understanding between or among the opponents.

As the host interviews the two women, however, he shows a distinct bias toward Mona’s viewpoint. Rather than pleading her case humbly, as the television crew expects, Maryam becomes desperate and accusatory. Her exchanges with Mona grow more heated.

The producers begin to panic. As one points out, this show is occurring on Yalda, a festival held on the day of the winter solstice. The longest night of the year is believed to be unlucky, and traditionally Iranian families gather to eat, tell stories, read poetry, and generally cheer each other up through the night. Seeing a sad ending to the program would badly disappoint the audience.

Telling his story in what is essentially continuous time and at a brisk pace, Bakhshi starts out by sticking closely to Maryam, building up considerable sympathy for her as everyone ignores her pleas and bosses her around. Once the program begins, the increasing hostility of Mona generates a suspense that is well maintained up to the final twists of the ending–twists showing that Bakhshi is not going for a Farhadi-style resolution.

The script is tightly constructed and engrossing, so much so that one could imagine a Hollywood remake–if a plausible legal situation could be devised as the premise.

The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs (2020)

The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs (director Pushpendra Singh) also was shown at the Berlin festival, in its Encounters section. It also won best director in the “Young Cinema Competition (World)” at the online competition for this year’s cancelled Hong Kong International Film Festival.

The film begins with a young man, Tanvir, struggling to lift and shoulder a heavy stone, a traditional test for a prospective husband among a tribe to which whom the beautiful shepherdess of the title, Laila, belongs. Soon a title is superimposed: “Song of Marriage,” the first of the seven songs. These songs are sung over the action–unsubtitled, unfortunately–and give a sense of the story taking place in some old folk tale. (Indeed, a title in the credits declares that the film is “Based on a Rajasthani folk-tale by Vijaydan Detha,” a well-known twentieth-century author of numerous such short stories.)

The fact that the tribes cook over open fires and follow what seem to be old traditions reinforces this impression, until a night scene where some of the men wield LED flashlights. Another title, “Song of Migration,” leads to a the journey of the nomadic tribe into which Laila has married herding their large flock toward the village that is their home base. They pass along modern highways, moving aside for traffic to pass, through landscapes that provide beautiful shots (see the top of this entry). This stretch of the film is lyrical and captivating, thoroughly drawing the spectator into the film.

Abruptly another modern touch, a radio carried by one of the men, thrusts the action into the troubled politics of the present. A newscaster declares, “In the Kashmir Valley protests against Article 5A have escalated.” Two protestors, he says, have been killed. The reference is to Pakistan and India’s dispute over control of Kashmir, and the Kashmiri struggle for independence from both. Laila, it later is revealed, is Kashmiri, while Tanvir’s tribe lives in an area controlled by India.

Laila’s beauty soon attracts the attention of the local Station-master and his subordinate, Mushtaq. They hint that as a Kashmiri she might possibly be a terrorist. This accusation comes to nothing, and Mushtaq’s clumsy attempts to seduce Laila lead to a switch in tone. A series of episodes, each a separate “song,” follow Laila promising trysts with him and then bringing her husband along on a pretext. Mushtaq’s continued gullibility in trusting that each new assignation is made in earnest lends a farcical comic touch to this lengthy passage of the film. At the same time, however, Laila is testing whether her husband, strong enough to lift the stone and win her as his bride, has the moral power to defend her rather than currying favor with Mushtaq by turning a blind eye to his designs on Laila.

I felt that the last portion of the film ran out of the energy it had sustained so well, since Laila is strong enough to turn her back on two unacceptable men but has no apparent sense of where to turn once she has done so. Still, overall The Shepherdess is beautifully filmed, as the frames at the top of this section and of the entry demonstrate. It also tells a thoroughly absorbing story.

So far David and I have reported on six films from this year’s Vancouver festival. Already it has become clear that our accumulated experiences from past years have allowed us to trace the development of promising young filmmakers into great ones and to discover promising new ones whom we hope to encounter at future festivals.

Thanks to Alan Franey, PoChu AuYeung, Jane Harrison, and their colleagues for their help during the festival.

There Is No Evil (2020).

Kristin here:

The speed with which the news of David’s death, early on the morning of February 29, 2024, spread has amazed me. I expected many responses: condolences, tributes, and most of all stories of how he had affected people’s lives. I didn’t expect the tidal wave of messages and posts and emails that followed. The authors range from his students and colleagues to casual acquaintances met at film festivals to filmmakers whose work was influenced by his writings. His legacy will clearly be vast and lasting, which to me provides the best consolation for his loss.

David was ill for two and a half years, starting with a cancer diagnosis in June, 2021. Treatment got rid of the cancer, but his chronic degenerative lung disease very slowly progressed. He went into hospice treatment at home last September. Hospice is supposed to last for six months, with an option to renew for another six. He lived almost exactly six months. Though growing weaker toward the end, he remained lucid. We watched a movie together every evening. In the last few days he did not feel up to a complex feature film, so on the night before he died, we rewatched two episodes of The West Wing. His fingers have grown stiff in recent months, but he managed to post a blog entry three days before his death. It was a re-post of an old entry on Hou Hsiao-hsien, with a short new introduction. It was relevant, because the Criterion Collection is streaming some of Hou’s early films, which David loved.

He wanted to die at home rather than spending his last days at a hospice facility, and he did. I was with him. It was brief, and I don’t think he suffered. It happened within a few months of the fiftieth anniversary of when we moved in together in the summer of 1974. He was as wonderful a spouse as he was a scholar and a friend.

His writings live on, of course. Some of them are available free online, linked on the left margin of his website’s main page. He leaves behind video analyses and lectures, too. Some are part of our series “Observations on Film Art” on The Criterion Channel. Others are supplements on Criterion video releases. Less well-known are the five full-length lectures he recorded and posted on Vimeo. Their topics give a sense of his breadth of interests.

What will happen to the blog? Recently we decided that re-posting older entries that seemed relevant to something happening at the time seemed a good plan. With over 1100 entries since our launch in 2006, there are plenty that few know about. I probably won’t blog as often as I used to, but no doubt inspiration will hit once in a while. I promise not to give up the year-end, inexplicably popular lists of the ten best films of ninety years ago. I suspect that 1934 will yield an impressive crop of titles.

This obituary, written by David’s colleagues and valued friends, was first posted on the website of the Department of Communication Arts the the University of Wisconsin-Madison on March 1.

David Bordwell, the Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, died on February 29, 2024, at the age of 76 after a lengthy illness. A prolific researcher, dedicated teacher, and passionate cinephile, he guided countless colleagues, students, and film lovers to heightened awareness of the medium’s artistic possibilities. “One thing that I loved and greatly admired about Bordwell was how – with passion, analytic precision and boundless enthusiasm for the medium – he carved out an inviting, sui generis intellectual space that could be enjoyed by scholars and general readers alike,” wrote New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis upon learning of his passing. “He was a paragon of scholarly achievement, yes and of course, but he was also a lot of fun to read – which isn’t something you can say of most academics.”

Bordwell joined the faculty of UW-Madison’s Department of Communication Arts in 1973 immediately after completing his graduate coursework at the University of Iowa (PhD, 1974). He remained at Wisconsin throughout his illustrious career, retiring in 2004, and he continued contributing to the Department’s mission after retirement through emeritus teaching and other activities. He also held visiting faculty appointments at New York University (1979) and the University of Iowa (1980), and in spring 2017 he held the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress.

When Bordwell launched his career in the 1970s, film studies was just entering academia, and over the course of three decades at the UW-Madison, as well as a remarkably productive post-retirement, he helped the still-young discipline achieve new levels of respectability and intellectual rigor. Indeed, his scholarly productivity reset the bar for the discipline of film studies. He authored, coauthored, or edited some 22 books and monographs. These included two foundational film studies textbooks written with his spouse and intellectual partner, Dr. Kristin Thompson (Ph.D. UW-Madison, 1977), a multi-talented scholar who has made major contributions to film studies, literary studies, and Egyptology. Bordwell also authored more than 140 journal articles, book chapters, introductions to collections, and review essays.

Later in his career he produced equally valuable material for wider audiences including a lively, wide-ranging blog Observations on Film Art, also in partnership with Thompson, as well as video essays and informative DVD commentaries for The Criterion Collection. And he made himself available at numerous film festivals and public movie screenings as a commentator, sharing his knowledge and enthusiasm with fellow movie lovers. In fact, Bordwell remained a productive scholar until the very end of his life, just a year ago publishing Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder. This exhaustively researched and elegantly written book has been nominated for an Agatha Award and for the Edgar Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America, in the Best Critical/Biographical category.

An inspiring teacher, Bordwell’s classroom skills were acknowledged with the UW-Madison’s Chancellor’s Teaching Award (1984) and a Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award (2004). He was known for his energized lectures and for his lively, probing graduate seminars. His pedagogical strategy was not so much to impart knowledge as to draw it out from students, yielding fresh insights on whatever film, director, or theoretical issue was on the agenda for that day. Professor Maria Belodubrovskaya (University of Chicago) speaks for generations of former Bordwell students in recalling the sense of participation available to all members of a Bordwell class. “What struck me about David’s teaching was that in the classroom he did not behave as a big-time scholar but as more of a leader,” she recalled.  “Everyone was treated as no less curious and observant than the instructor himself.”

Bordwell also provided a professional model that benefitted many of the Communication Arts graduate students who eventually entered higher education. UW-Madison Professor Emeritus Vance Kepley’s memory of his very first experience in a Bordwell graduate course is indicative: “It was something of an epiphany. By the end of the first class, I thought, ‘This is exactly how film studies should be taught.  It’s what I want to do, and I want to do it just as well.’ Of course, I never came close to duplicating David’s casual brilliance, but years of trying made me a better teacher.”

The impact of Bordwell’s graduate mentoring can be suggested by both the quantity and quality of the doctoral dissertations he supervised. At UW-Madison, he directed 33 dissertations, each of which helped launch a productive career, and 17 dissertations were published as career-enhancing monographs. Bordwell’s dissertators could count on him to provide exacting but encouraging guidance through the always-arduous process of bringing forth a polished manuscript. “David pounced on every chapter as soon as I submitted it for review,” remembers Professor Richard Neupert (University of Georgia). “Within days he returned the manuscript covered with detailed and often witty commentary, along with a thoughtful, typed summary with warnings, suggestions, and praise. More than a great mentor, he was a fellow traveler.”

Bordwell’s research program consisted of three principal strands. The first is composed of stylistic analyses of individual films or directors, most notably The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (1980), the monumental Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (1988), The Cinema of Eisenstein (1993), and detailed essays on Louis Feuillade, Kenji Mizoguchi, Theodoros Angelopoulos and Hou Hsiao-Hsien grouped in the volume Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (2005). The introductory college textbook Film Art: An Introduction, written with Thompson, also contributes to this strand. First published in 1979, it is now in its thirteenth edition and will continue under the authorship of Professor Jeff Smith (UW-Madison). It has been translated into ten other languages, with additional translations forthcoming.

The analysis of national film styles and modes of film production constitutes the second strand of Bordwell’s research. These studies incorporate primary-level documentary research on the structure of film industries, film technology, and the conditions of production. The most important work in this category is The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (1985), written with Thompson and Janet Staiger (William P. Hobby Centennial Professor Emerita, University of Texas at Austin). A massive research undertaking, it incorporates stylistic analyses of a random sample of one hundred films, interviews with veteran cinematographers and other craft workers, and careful reading of film industry trade papers and industry technical reports. It seeks to define the group style of classical Hollywood in terms of a range of stylistic options which were delimited by the state of filmmaking technology at any given point, as well as by the craft practices and conventions internalized by filmmakers. The methodology was later used in another widely successful textbook, Film History: An Introduction, also coauthored with Thompson and designed to introduce students to a broad spectrum of national cinemas. The sole-authored Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (2000) examined a small but hugely successful film industry from the 1970s through the 1990s, focusing on stylistic norms and narrative strategies that distinguished Hong Kong cinema from Hollywood.

The third strand of Bordwell’s research involved theorizing the role of the film spectator in the movie-viewing experience. Bordwell’s ground-breaking Narration in the Fiction Film (1985) proposed the idea that viewers integrated perceptual information with higher order cognition to construct the film’s story. For Bordwell, spectators were active makers of meaning who drew on their understanding of cinematic conventions, their knowledge of different types of stories, and their real-life experience to comprehend the various visual and audio cues given to them by the film. With this and several subsequent publications, Bordwell helped encourage a robust line of scholarship in cognitive film studies, an approach that brought together analytic philosophers and psychologists in developing a model of spectatorship that amalgamates aspects of art, culture, and even biology.

Bordwell’s many professional honors attest to the respect he earned in the international scholarly community. He was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Copenhagen (1997) and from Lingnan University in Hong Kong (2023). Other major international awards include a University of Auckland Hood Fellowship (New Zealand), an Anthology Film Archives Award (United States), an Excellence in Asian Film Scholarship Award (Asian Film Society, Hong Kong), and the aforementioned Kluge Chair. At UW-Madison, Bordwell was selected for a prestigious Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Professorship (1990) and for a Hilldale Distinguished Professorship (2001), as well as a Hilldale Award in the Humanities (2001) and a senior fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities (1993-98).

Bordwell’s love of cinema emerged when he was a child, living on a remote farm in upstate New York, far from any movie theater. In his rare moments away from school and chores, he nourished his cinephilia by watching films on TV and reading books about film starting at the age of 12. Bordwell made his way to the State University of New York at Albany, where he studied English literature. He then did his graduate studies in Speech and Dramatic Arts, with a concentration in Film at the University of Iowa.

Notice of his passing prompted glowing tributes for Bordwell from prominent filmmakers and intellectuals outside the academy who valued his myriad contributions to world film culture.

David Koepp, critically acclaimed screenwriter and director (Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, Premium Rush)

“David’s genius for analyzing Hollywood narrative was an inspiration and a goal for me in my own work, and it reflected in the work of anyone who read him. He had a boundless generosity toward the medium and found value in everything he saw, at all levels of artistic accomplishment.”

Damien Chazelle, Oscar-winning writer and director (La La Land):

“I learned more about film from reading David Bordwell than from any other writer. To me he was America’s André Bazin, a thinker and historian who massively expanded the field and found a way   to marry theory and criticism in a wholly new way. Narration in the Fiction Film changed how I think about storytelling in film. Figures Traced in Light changed how I think about framing. The Way Hollywood Tells It changed how I think about Hollywood. He was a giant, and multiple generations of filmmakers, critics and theorists (for ultimately we are all in this together) owe him a huge debt.”

Kim Hendrickson, Executive Producer, Criterion:

“David and I spent many hours together recording his analyses for the fifty episode Observations on Film Art series we created for the Criterion Channel. He was a champion for movies not because he was superb at analyzing form – he was the best – but because movies were his life force. I, and so many colleagues at Janus and Criterion, are indebted to him for his brilliance, generosity, and friendship.”

James Schamus, award-winning screenwriter, producer, director, and professor (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Brokeback Mountain):

“As a filmmaker, I can describe David’s friendship as unnervingly generous. His astonishing critical intelligence never got in the way of his enthusiasms, and his enthusiasms never dampened his analytic regard; they were functions of each other. This meant that when talk came around to one’s own work, the effect was something akin to getting a loving bear hug from a nuclear-powered microscope. There will never be another like David again.”

To an international community of filmmakers, film students, and cinephiles, David Bordwell was the most respected film scholar of his generation. But to his very wide and ever-widening circle of friends, he also was a warm, witty, unaffected companion. To the thousands of students, colleagues, and movie-lovers who sought his counsel outside of the classroom, he was generous with his time and knowledge, and in social gatherings he graciously cultivated new friendships with individuals he was meeting for the first time while also reconfirming his appreciation for friends of long-standing. He could tailor his one-on-one conversations to whatever topics were of interest to the other party, and one usually came away from such chats with the feeling that, besides being a keen conversationalist, he was also a wonderfully attentive and appreciative listener. All who knew David Bordwell personally will miss his kindness, goodwill, and boundless congeniality, as well as his professional wisdom.

Survivors include his wife, Kristin Thompson; his sisters, Diane Bordwell Verma and Darlene Bordwell; his nephew, Sanjeev Verma, and his niece, Kamini Verma.