Another Shaw Production: Anamorphic Adventures in Hong Kong

[October 2009] : David Bordwell : What did teenage viewers think when Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) opened with the logo for Shawscope? Could they possibly have shared the frisson felt by baby-boomers who had haunted inner-city theatres thirty years before? Or by viewers who had watched “Kung-Fu Theatre” on 1980s television? Or by fanboys like Tarantino, freeze-framing cropped and trembling VHS tapes? For all those generations, the Shawscope blazon opens onto a world of one-armed swordfighters, beautiful woman warriors, and kung-fu masters with very long white eyebrows. Without denying the peculiar pleasures of these sagas, we can peer behind the logo and study this widescreen format’s place in a broader dynamic. The Shaw mystique arose out of creative innovations of the studio’s personnel, guided by the business policies of an all-powerful producer. We can as well analyze how Shaw directors forged a distinct widescreen aesthetic—one that still, as Tarantino seems to realize, has much to teach us about the ways movies can seize spectators. Hong Kong took tutorials in widescreen from its neighbors, but eventually it could offer lessons, and exhilarating ones, to the world. [read the essay]

Paolo Gioli’s Vertical Cinema

[August 2009] : David Bordwell : The film image has always been biased toward the horizontal. The classic 4:3 rectangle has been the worldwide standard, and when it has varied, it has stretched lengthwise (CinemaScope, Panavision). Within a shot, figures usually move laterally and the camera swivels or travels accordingly. Apologists in the 1920s argued that this horizontality was simply natural. Our eyes are mounted side by side, and we have more eye muscles devoted to tracking objects on that axis than on the vertical one. Further, the commentators argued, painters and other graphic artists had long preferred the horizontal. [read the essay]

(Re)Discovering Charles Dekeukeleire

[June 2009] : Kristin Thompson : The parentheses in my title arise from the fact that Charles Dekeukeleire, a largely forgotten Belgian experiment filmmaker of the late 1920s, had only small recognition in his own day. Hans Scheugl and Ernst Schmidt, Jr., in their admirable reference book, Eine Subgeschichte des Films: Lexicon des Avantgarde-, Experimental-, und Undergroundfilms, say of his films: “They were so advanced in their formal means, so far ahead of their time, that they left behind the puzzled contemporary critics.” There were in fact a few contemporary Belgian writers who discussed Dekeukeleire’s films with insight, but certainly this minority response was not enough to insure his work a place in cinema history after he turned to documentary filmmaking in the 1930s. [read the essay]

Doing Film History

[September 2008] : Nearly everybody loves movies. We aren’t surprised that people rush to see the latest hit or rent a cult favorite from the video store. But there are some people who seek out old movies. And among those fans there’s a still smaller group studying them. Let’s call “old movies” anything older than twenty years. This of course creates a moving target. Baby boomers like us don’t really consider The Godfather or M*A*S*H to be old movies, but many twentysomethings today will probably consider Pulp Fiction (1994) to be old — maybe because they saw it when they were in their teens. Our twenty-year cutoff is arbitrary, but in many cases that won’t matter. Everybody agrees that La Grande Illusion from 1935 is an old movie, though it still seems fresh and vital. Now for the real question. Why would anyone be interested in watching and studying old movies? [read the essay]

The Hook: Scene Transitions in Classical Cinema

[January 2008] : How do movies carry us from scene to scene? The question is simple, but not many people have explored it. I’m especially interested in how transitions are managed in mainstream, mass-audience movies, but I’ll have some things to say about other traditions too. I’ll also be talking a lot about unity, which can make the whole exercise seem fairly old-fashioned and Aristotelian. Yet examining how films create internal patterns reminds us that those patterns are almost always aimed at the audience. We’re supposed to register those patterns, consciously or not, and they prompt us to react in particular ways. As so often, when we talk about form we’re actually talking about the psychology of spectators. [read the essay]

Anatomy of the Action Picture

[January 2007] : For a long time Kristin Thompson and I have been interested in how films tell stories. We’re fascinated by the principles that govern different storytelling traditions. For the sake of simplicity, we’ve called the principles norms. The term implies a standard of craft competence, along with a dimension of collective decision-making. Norms are preferred alternatives within a tradition. A norm isn’t a single and inflexible law; it’s best seen as a roughly bounded set of options. Within any cluster of norms, there are always different ways to do anything. [read the essay]

Hearing Voices

[September 2006] : If you want your movie to fail, be sure to have an independent journalist publish a day-by-day account of its making. History is on your side. In Picture (1952), the founding entry in the genre, Lillian Ross followed the making of Huston’s Red Badge of Courage; the movie sank. Theodore Gershunny’s Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture (1980) expended 340 pages on Rosebud, one of Preminger’s biggest embarrassments. In The Devil’s Candy (1991), Julie Salamon chronicled the fiasco that was The Bonfire of the Vanities. Clearly, an outsider’s making-of book portends a flop. [read the essay]

Preface to the Croatian edition of On the History of Film Style

[August 2005] : Visual style was a major preoccupation of critics, theorists, and filmmakers in the 1920s and thereafter, yet the study of it unaccountably went out of favor at just the moment when it should have been in full flower. As film studies entered the Western academy in the 1970s, most scholars turned away from such “aesthetic” concerns. Instead they promoted a cultural/political framework for examining cinema, emphasizing a symptomatic method of interpretation and a metapsychology derived from psychoanalysis. The influence of this framework is still being felt: Slavoj Žižek is continuing it, more playfully but no less dogmatically. Today’s most influential frame of reference, cultural studies, has continued the anti-aesthetic tradition, replacing questions of artistic design and effect with questions about audiences and broad cultural processes. [read the essay]

Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything

[April 2005] : In The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post‑Theory (London: BFI, 2001), Slavoj Žižek makes some criticisms of my arguments bearing on the history of film style. I reply to those criticisms in the last chapter of Figures Traced in Light (pp. 260–264). But there is much more to say about FRT, and this online essay supplements my remarks in Figures. [read the essay]

Film and the Historical Return

[March 2005] : An assembly of position papers in Cinema Journal, “In Focus: Film History, or a Baedeker Guide to the Historical Turn” (Cinema Journal 44, 1 [Fall 2004], 94–143) raises issues of continuing interest around how historical research might be pursued. It seems to me, however, that the collection offers as many grounds for discouragement as for hope.

The letdown can partly be attributed to the contributors’ embrace of fairly fixed conventions of the symposium genre. The essays carry an unhappy cargo of truisms. We should “construct interdisciplinary discourse” (97); linear narrative is bad; we should encourage non-westerners to write histories of their cinemas; collaboration between scholars would be good (but it carries risks). And, in case anyone has forgotten, “history matters” (124). There’s also the usual call to get with it, the announcement that we’re tired of one thing and need a fresh departure (in particular, what the writer is currently working on). It’s time to discard old habits. For Richard Abel, the primary question of historical research is, “Where next?” (107). “An exclusive focus on gender should be passé,” the collection’s editor Sumiko Higashi warns (97). Those who believe that academic work in the humanities is driven by fashion and a search for novelty at any cost will find some evidence here. [read the essay]

Studying Cinema

[2000] : People talk about the movies they see, and some people write about those movies for newspapers and magazines. How does film studies, as an academic discipline, accord with these more common ways of talking and thinking about films? The two ways of thinking about film aren’t completely distinct, I think, but some differences are worth noting.

First, ordinary discourse about cinema centers on evaluative talk. “That movie was great! I loved it!” “Really? I didn’t think it was very good.” Likewise film reviewers take as their primary goal the evaluation of films, giving thumbs up or thumbs down, saying whether they regard them as worth the ticket price or not. Academic film studies can involve evaluation, but for most film scholars evaluating a particular movie isn’t, or isn’t always, the goal. [read the essay]

Annotated List of Principal Essays