David Bordwell, scholar who demystified the art of film
David Bordwell, a film studies scholar whose immersive, accessible writing transcended the corridors of academia and illuminated the mechanics of moviemaking to a generation of cinephiles and filmmakers, died Feb. 29 at his home in Madison, Wis. He was 76.
The cause was interstitial pulmonary fibrosis, said his wife, Kristin Thompson, a prominent film scholar who frequently collaborated with him.
Mr. Bordwell taught at the University of Wisconsin for 30 years and wrote or cowrote more than 20 books, including “Film Art: An Introduction” (1979), a textbook written with his wife that is widely used in film studies programs. After retiring in 2004, he and Thompson analyzed movies on his blog at davidbordwell.net and in videos for the Criterion Channel.
Hailed as “our best writer on the cinema” by Roger Ebert, Mr. Bordwell’s film analysis avoided ivory tower theories on the social and political undertones of movies in favor of clear, frameby-frame examinations of scene structure, shot angles, and other elements of filmmaking.
In a blog post about “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s 2010 film about the founding of Facebook, he analyzed the facial expressions of Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin (played by Andrew Garfield) during a scene when Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) blindsides him.
Mr. Bordwell used a single frame that he cropped into several images.
In the first image, only Eduardo’s eyes are visible. “Certainly they give us information — about the direction the person is looking, about a certain state of alertness,” Mr. Bordwell wrote. “The lids aren’t lifted to suggest surprise or fear, but I think you’d agree that no specific emotion seems to emerge from the eyes alone.”
The next image adds Eduardo’s eyebrows. “Now there’s a degree of surprise,” he wrote. “The brows are lifted somewhat. But still the emotion seems fairly unspecific: not particularly sad or angry or distressed; probably not joyous either.”
The final image shows Eduardo’s entire face. “The sloping brows suggest the man is trying to figure out what’s happened; but the mouth is a slight gape,” Mr. Bordwell wrote. “You can almost imagine the lips murmuring: ‘Ohhh, or ‘Wow,’ and not in appreciation or pleasure. If you wanted to show someone being blindsided, this is a pretty precise way to do it.”
Mr. Bordwell watched thousands of movies — perhaps tens of thousands. He did not discriminate between summer blockbusters and art-house fare. One of his favorite films was “The Hunt for Red October” (1990), based on a Tom Clancy spy thriller. Another was “Sanshiro Sugata,” a 1943 Japanese martial arts film directed by Akira Kurosawa.
To colleagues, he was known as a walking Wikipedia of movies. “Here is a man,” Ebert wrote, “who recalls every film he has ever seen, and where, and when, and why, and where he sat, and usually who he sat next to.”
David Jay Bordwell was born July 23, 1947, in Penn Yan, a small village in upstate New York, where his parents, Jay and Marjorie (Jones) Bordwell, operated a small farm.
He loved movies, but there was only one theater in town, so most of his cinema consumption was limited to whatever played on television. He was a prodigious reader, especially about movies. One of his favorite books was Arthur Knight’s “The Liveliest Art” (1957), a history of filmmaking.
After graduating from the State University of New York at Albany with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1969, Mr. Bordwell received his master’s and doctorate in speech and dramatic arts, with a concentration in film, from the University of Iowa.
While at Iowa, he met Thompson, who was also studying film in graduate school. After Mr. Bordwell was hired as a professor at the University of Wisconsin in 1973, Thompson took up her doctoral studies there. They married in 1979.
Film studies was a nascent academic field in the 1970s, but the university was an ideal place for a young and ambitious cinema scholar: The library had an archive of more than 5,000 films from the United Artists collection. There were also more than 20 film societies.
Mr. Bordwell’s books include “The Classical Hollywood Cinema” (1985), an examination of the technological and institutional factors that shaped Hollywood movies; “Narration in the Fiction Film” (1985), a treatise on how films tell stories; and “On the History of Film Style” (1997), an inquiry into how film scholars analyze movies.
In 2011, Mr. Bordwell and his wife published “Minding Movies,” a collection of their blog posts.
“We don’t have all the answers about this still-new art form, but we have a lot of questions,” they wrote in the introduction. “How is the medium of cinema used in different times and places? How do narrative and other formal principles get deployed in particular films?”
Their goal was to “freezeframe a mercurial art form long enough to offer fresh information and explore ideas at leisure. If the prospect of thinking seriously but not solemnly about movies intrigues you, read on.”
Mr. Bordwell’s first marriage, to Barbara Weinstein in 1970, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sisters, Diane Bordwell Verma and Darlene Bordwell.
His analysis of movies was so perceptive that at least one Hollywood screenwriter, after reading blog posts about his own films, thought Mr. Bordwell had taken up residence in his brain.
“He made an observation that I write a lot of things that naturally gravitate toward some sense of confinement,” David Koepp, the writer of “Jurassic Park” and “Mission: Impossible,” said in an interview. “Like whether the story takes place over 24 hours or all in a town house in New York City or over a weekend or just two characters.”
He added: “It actually helped me understand how I approach things because I never thought of it that way before.”