![\"detective-500.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/detective-500.jpg\")
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Detective <\/em>(Godard, 1985).<\/p>\n \n Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, 1781.<\/p>\n \n \n David here:<\/p>\n \n Kristin kept the blogfires burning while I traveled last week and did UW duties this one. I had a great time at the University of Georgia in Athens (but didn’t see Stipe) and at Emory in Atlanta (but didn’t see Scarlett). At both places I met sharp, energetic students and faculty. I have a couple of blog entries backlogged for posting, but now recent items relating to publications get the pole position.<\/p>\n \n Second, the University of California Press is having a big sale<\/a> on many outstanding media titles, from Richard Abel\u2019s books on French silent cinema and Andr\u00e9 Bazin\u2019s classics of film theory to Michele Hilmes\u2019 study of NBC television and Mike Barrier<\/a>\u2019s new Disney biography, The Animated <\/em>Man<\/em>. To get the discount you must sign up for an e-newsletter, but it\u2019s not intrusive.<\/p>\n Among the books of mine on sale, the biggest bargain is the hardcover edition of Figures Traced in Light<\/em> (2005), originally priced at $65, now going for $7.95 plus postage. (No, apparently I don\u2019t get the full-price royalties.) You can find this item here<\/a>. There are also paperback copies of Figures<\/em> (going for $12.95) and of The Way Hollywood Tells It<\/em> ($15.95). If you’re inclined, hurry: the sale ends on 31 October.<\/p>\n Bad news first. Poetics of Cinema<\/em> is priced at $45 in paperback, with no sellers I know offering it at discount. Go ahead, say it: Very expensive. If you haven\u2019t published a book, you may not know that authors have no say in the pricing of their work. Publishers would never set a price or price ceiling in a contract, and calculations about pricing are based on many factors, including what comparable books sell for. A high cost isn\u2019t my preference, of course; every writer wants to reach as many readers as possible. But unless you blog or self-publish your work, the publisher sets the price.<\/p>\n There are some good reasons for the cost. Running to 500 fairly dense pages and containing over 500 photographs, Poetics of Cinema<\/em> was a complicated book to produce. I peddled it to other publishers, but they ruled it out as too whopping an investment for them. So Routledge has priced it along lines of comparable books, reckoning in the size of the likely audience (I hope, more than 118.3 readers). I have to thank Bill Germano, then Publishing Director at Routledge, for taking a chance on this project.<\/p>\n From age fifteen or so I\u2019ve been a compulsive writer. Scribble, scribble, scribble. I\u2019ve been at work on one book or another for over thirty years. I\u2019ve got several projects in mind for my next effort, but I\u2019ve held back committing. Is there any point in publishing more books, at least as<\/em> books?<\/p>\n I mean this as a serious question. Would it have made any difference to me or my readers if Poetics of Cinema<\/em> appeared as pdfs, available at a price considerably less than $45? Wouldn\u2019t I find more readers? What about variable pricing? If Radiohead can do it, why can\u2019t I? Somebody in film studies should try putting a digital book for sale online; maybe I will. But for a few years at least, this last baggy monster will be available only in dead-tree format.<\/p>\n \n Poetics: Some puzzles<\/strong><\/p>\n Gentlemen Marry Brunettes<\/em> (Richard Sale, 1955).<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve read this far, you may be interested in what the book is about. Most basically, it\u2019s predicated on the belief that we make progress in research by asking questions. Some questions are too deep to be answered\u2014call them mysteries\u2014but others can be answered with a fair degree of precision and reliability. We can turn mysteries into puzzles and puzzles into plausible answers.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a fairly common sort of composition in Hollywood cinema of the 1940s. This shot from The Killers<\/em> (1946) displays the sort of steep depth I\u2019ve talked about at various points on this blog and in my other books.<\/p>\n But now here\u2019s an equally tense confrontation at a counter, from Bad Day at Black Rock<\/em> (1955), made in early CinemaScope.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t look much like the 1940s shot. The characters stand far from us, and the figure in the foreground doesn’t loom over the background. The shot is more open, the composition more porous. And unlike The Killers<\/em>, Bad Day<\/em> doesn’t contain close-ups of the actors in any scenes.<\/p>\n \n \n So questions come to mind. Did John Sturges have to stage the scene in Bad Day<\/em> this way? Did other filmmakers resort to the same choice? What factors created pressures toward this more spacious format? Could more resourceful filmmakers have done something different? And given that such shots are rare today, what changes made it possible for filmmakers in later years to create the tight anamorphic widescreen close-ups we have now (as here in Cellular<\/em>)?<\/p>\n \n \n \n Despite all that has been written about CinemaScope and other early widescreen processes, no one has explored, shot by shot, what staging options were used by filmmakers. A chapter in Poetics of Cinema<\/em> called \u201cCinemaScope: The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses\u201d tries to show how filmmakers used the new format to tell their stories. This led them, I propose, to experiment with some staging strategies that, surprisingly, had precedents as far back as the 1910s.<\/p>\n \n Take another instance. We\u2019re all familiar with recent films that present alternative futures, like Run Lola Run<\/em>. A story line runs along and then is interrupted, and we switch to the same characters living a different storyline in a parallel universe. The emergence of such \u201cforking path\u201d movies arouses my curiosity. How do they work? How do they make their alternative-reality stories intelligible to the audience? How is it that we\u2019re able to understand them? (After all, the notion of an infinite number of alternative universes to ours is pretty hard to get your head around.) Are such stories a brand-new innovation, or do they have precedents? (Clue: Remember A Christmas Carol<\/em>?) Why do we see a cluster of these emerging in recent filmmaking?<\/p>\n I tackle these questions in another essay, called \u201cFilm Futures.\u201d There I look at several such movies and try to spell out the tacit rules that filmmakers follow and that audiences pick up on. While this story format probably doesn\u2019t constitute a genre, it does obey certain conventions, and I try to chart those. Some films also make some clever innovations in the format, which I also try to trace. The essay as well suggests how the conventions are handled differently in mass-market films like Sliding Doors<\/em> and in art films like Kie\u015blowski\u2019s Blind Chance<\/em>.<\/p>\n These two essays, along with the others in the book, try to explain and illustrate an approach to film studies I call film poetics. At bottom, this is an effort to explain why films are designed the way they are: how filmmakers have made certain choices in order to shape our response to their films. How do movies work? How do movies work on us?<\/p>\n \n \n \n \n Poetics: The project<\/strong><\/p>\n Vagabond <\/em>(Varda, 1985).<\/p>\n As a kind of reverse engineering, film poetics looks at both structure and texture. I argue that we ought to study how films are constructed architecturally, as revealed for instance in plot structure or narration. Poetics also concentrates on stylistic patterning, the way filmmakers organize the techniques available to the medium. Poetics traditionally deals as well with thematics, the subjects and ideas that are mobilized by filmmakers and reworked by large-scale form and cinematic style.<\/p>\n Put it this way: I want to know how filmmakers have confronted problems set by others, or created problems for themselves to solve. I want to know how they draw on the past to borrow or modify or reject creative strategies. I want to know filmmakers\u2019 secrets, including the ones they don\u2019t know they know. And I want to know how all this creative activity is shaped to the uptake of spectators in different times and places.<\/p>\n Some of what I\u2019ve written on this blog could illustrate how the poetics-driven perspective works in particular cases. The book offers more such instances, probed in more detail than is possible here. Using a comparative method, I also trace out some general principles of film form and style as they have developed over history.<\/p>\n The book consists of fifteen essays. Some have been published before; those have been revised for this collection. Other essays are newly written. After a somewhat polemical introduction, the first part concentrates on some theoretical problems. The anchoring essay offers a general introduction to the idea of a film poetics, with several examples. (An earlier version is on pdfs here<\/a>.) In the same essay, I float a model of how film viewers respond to various aspects of films. I distinguish activities of perception, comprehension, and appropriation, and I suggest that a cognitive perspective sheds light on them.<\/p>\n Part I also contains an essay considering how cinematic conventions work. A poetics-based approach will spend a lot of time on norms, traditions, and received routines, for these are often the basis of filmmakers\u2019 creative choices. This essay argues that some conventions are local and require a lot of cultural knowledge, while others are cross-cultural, compelling us to study why certain cinematic strategies seem to crop up across the world.<\/p>\n The second part of Poetics of Cinema<\/em> considers narrative, one of the most common ways in which films are organized to affect viewers. I wrote a new essay to launch this section, a wide-ranging study called \u201cThree Dimensions of Film Narrative.\u201d The three dimensions I consider are narration, plot structure, and the narrative world. The essay considers how each of these shapes our understanding of a film\u2019s story. This essay ends with a discussion called \u201cNarrators, Implied Authors, and Other Superfluities.\u201d<\/p>\n Some more tightly-focused pieces follow. One is devoted to forking-path plots. Another concentrates on an odd question: What role does forgetting play in our watching a film? Cognitive theory can offer some answers, and I take Mildred Pierce<\/em> as an example. There\u2019s an update of an essay that has been something of a golden oldie in film courses, \u201cThe Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice.\u201d In a supplement to that piece I suggest some new avenues of inquiry and draw on more examples, notably Varda\u2019s Vagabond <\/em>(Sans toit ni loi<\/em>).<\/p>\n The longest piece in Part II is devoted to what I call network narratives. Prototypes of this would be Grand Hotel<\/em>, Short Cuts<\/em>, Crash<\/em>, and Babel<\/em>. This essay tries to show how a poetics of cinema shed light on this format, currently a very popular one. When I started looking at these movies, I was surprised to discover how many filmmaking traditions work in this vein; I append a filmography with nearly 250 items, and today I could update it with several more. (1) I consider how this option has developed distinctive strategies of narration, plotting, and worldmaking. I also survey some common themes running across network tales, such as the role of chance and fate. The essay finishes with more in-depth analyses of four films: Altman\u2019s Nashville<\/em>, Iosseliani\u2019s Favoris de la lune<\/em>, Anderson\u2019s Magnolia<\/em>, and Jean-Claude Guiget\u2019s Les Passagers<\/em>.<\/p>\n Poetics: More problems<\/strong><\/p>\n Bus Stop <\/em>(Logan, 1955).<\/p>\n Part III moves from questions of narrative to questions of film style, no stranger to this blog. The opening essay is a tribute to Andrew Sarris that appraises his role in making readers of my generation style-conscious. It\u2019s the most personal piece in the book. There follows a study of Robert Reinert, a director in the German silent cinema who might have become much better known if his quite demented Nerven<\/em> and Opium<\/em> had been as widely seen as Caligari<\/em>. The essay \u201cWho Blinked First?\u201d considers how our reaction to films is affected by the ways in which actors use their eyes, including how and when they blink. Big deal, huh? Actually, yes.<\/p>\n The monster essay in this section is the CinemaScope piece, of which I\u2019ve given versions in lecture form over the last couple of years. I argue that some directors responded to the new widescreen technology by adapting certain norms of staging and shooting to the new format, while other filmmakers moved in more adventurous directions. The piece uses the model of problem\/solution as a way to understand stylistic continuity and change, a framework I\u2019ve floated in On the History of Film Style<\/em> as well.<\/p>\n The last four studies in Part III are devoted to style in Asian cinema. There are two essays on Japanese film of the 1920s and 1930s, both expanded somewhat from their original versions. There I argue that we can see Japanese directors as building upon, as well as adventurously departing from, stylistic norms shared by most filmmaking countries of the period. This brace of essays fills out some ideas that I fielded in Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema<\/em>, and they should appeal to that growing body of viewers who have developed a passion for Naruse Mikio<\/a> and Uchida Tomio<\/a>. It\u2019s gratifying that several of the films I discuss, which I had to study in archives, are now circulating in touring programs.<\/p>\n Poetics of Cinema<\/em> concludes with two studies of Hong Kong film, one surveying the stylistic tactics by which that very lively tradition excites its audience, the other analyzing the unique innovations of King Hu. The articles are companion pieces to Planet Hong Kong<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n Poetics: The mysteries<\/strong><\/p>\n A Touch of Zen<\/em> (King Hu, 1970).<\/p>\n As an approach to answering questions about cinema, poetics blends history, criticism, and theory. It requires that we do research into the artistic history of film, looking at styles, genres, narrative modes, and other traditions. It asks for close analysis and interpretation of films. At the same time, it asks broader questions about what principles govern narrative, stylistic patterning, and the like. I\u2019d say it obliges a historian to concentrate on aesthetics; it makes criticism more historical and theoretical; it ties theory to concrete historical conditions and the fine-grain workings of individual films.<\/p>\n Kenneth Burke used to say that you could get a sense of a book by looking at its first and last sentences. My book\u2019s first essay opens this way:<\/p>\n Sometimes our routines seem transparent, and we forget that they have a history.<\/strong><\/p>\n I think that this captures my concern to look closely at familiar things in film and try to make their principles a little more evident. Yet in trying to make filmmakers\u2019 choices explicit and tracing out the principles undergirding how we make sense of movies, I\u2019m sometimes criticized for simply stating common sense. Poetics can look bland alongside the skywriting swoops of most academic film theory. But skywriting is blurry and dissolves while you look at it. By contrast, clearly setting out some basics of filmic construction and comprehension offers a firmer place to start answering questions about how movies work and work on us.<\/p>\n Poetics tries to produce concrete, approximately true claims about cinema. Most film theory operates as an application, borrowing big theories of culture, identity, nationhood, and the like and then mapping them onto films. The results are usually thin. It seems to me that most film theory today is not carefully thought through or persuasively argued. For examples, see my essay in Post-Theory<\/em>, the last chapter of Figures<\/em>, and my comments here<\/a> and here<\/a> on this site.<\/p>\n In trying to establish reliable knowledge about cinema, we won\u2019t answer every question and we will make false steps, but we can make progress. Film poetics is one way we film enthusiasts can join that tradition of rational and empirical inquiry which remains our most dependable path to knowledge. My introduction, though peppered with some pokes at Big Theory, has the serious purpose of making a plea for film scholars to join that tradition.<\/p>\n The final line of the book concludes the essay on King Hu:<\/p>\n The mainstream [<\/strong>Hong Kong<\/strong>] style has given us many beautiful and stirring films, but Hu\u2019s eccentric explorations evoke something that other directors\u2019 works seldom arouse: a sense that extraordinary physical achievement, if caught through precisely adjusted imperfections, becomes marvelous.<\/strong><\/p>\n To get the full point you need to read the essay, but what should come through here is my concern to highlight filmmakers\u2019 originality when I find it, and to locate it by means of a comparative method. In addition, I hope that what comes through is an appreciation of the sheer exhilaration we feel when a filmmaker has made the right, bold choice. A poetics-based approach probably can\u2019t fully explain this feeling\u2014it may fall under the heading of mysteries rather than puzzles\u2014but at least it can reveal how some forces contribute to it.<\/p>\n My summary, and the size of the book, may leave the impression that I think that I\u2019ve answered these questions fully. Of course I don\u2019t. I try only to make some progress, realizing that offering answers is also an invitation to disagree, to refine the questions and tackle new ones. Nor do I think that these are the only questions that matter. We\u2019re just starting to understand how films work and work on us, and there are a great many areas we haven\u2019t charted. (Performance, to take a big one.) We have to start somewhere, though. I\u2019d hope that by posing some questions and proposing some answers, Poetics of Cinema<\/em> offers fruitful points of departure.<\/p>\n (1) Some candidates are 25 Fireman Street <\/em>(1973, Hungary, Istv\u00e1n Szab\u00f3), Feast of Love<\/em> (2007, US, Robert Benton), Continental\u2014A Film without Guns<\/em> (2007, Canada\/ Stephane Lafleur), The Edge of Heaven<\/em> (2007, Germany\/ Turkey, Fatih Akin), Unfinished Stories<\/em> (2007, Iran, Pourya Azarbayjani), God Man Dog<\/em> (2007, Taiwan, Singing Chen [Chen Hsin-hsuan]), A Century\u2019s End<\/em> (2000, Korea, Song Neung-han), and Why Did I Get Married?<\/em> (2007, US Tyler Perry).<\/p>\n <\/em> <\/em> <\/p>\n <\/em> <\/em> <\/em> <\/p>\n <\/em><\/em>A Moment of Innocence<\/em> (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996).<\/p>\n <\/em> <\/em> <\/p>\n <\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n <\/em> <\/em> <\/p>\n <\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n <\/em> <\/em> <\/p>\n <\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n <\/em> <\/em> <\/p>\n <\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n <\/em> <\/em> <\/p>\n <\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Detective (Godard, 1985). Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon? William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, 1781. David here: Kristin kept the blogfires burning while I traveled last week and did UW duties this one. I had a great time at the University of Georgia in Athens (but didn’t see Stipe) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89,4,42,7,2,1,6,14,5,60,72,54,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-cinema","category-asian-cinema","category-books","category-film-and-other-media","category-film-art","category-film-comments","category-film-industry","category-film-scholarship","category-film-technique","category-technique-cinematography","category-film-technique-widescreen","category-narrative-strategies","category-national-cinemas-hong-kong"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1425"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9250,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1425\/revisions\/9250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"jese-filmart-cover-small.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/jese-filmart-cover-small.jpg\" "\\"jese-filmart-cover-small.jpg\\"")
First, a Japanese translation of our Film Art: An Introduction<\/em> has just appeared. It\u2019s a very handsome version of the seventh edition, rendered by Fujiki Hideaki and Kitamura Hiroshi. We\u2019re grateful to them and to Nagoya University Press for publishing it.<\/p>\n![\"poetics-cover-225.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/poetics-cover-225.jpg\" "\\"poetics-cover-225.jpg\\"")
The biggest news, though, is that I just got my author\u2019s copies of Poetics of Cinema<\/em>, published last week. For a while Amazon was telling some people who pre-ordered it that copies won\u2019t be available until 27 December, but now, despite what it says here<\/a>, the book seems ready to ship.<\/p>\n![\"jane-looks-at-tower-225.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/jane-looks-at-tower-225.jpg\")
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