It’s the only study I know of how narrative techniques emerged and developed in a single era. No wonder it took five years. I watched over 600 films. I trawled through books and trade papers for hints about what the producers, directors, and writers thought they were doing. And because a lot of techniques weren’t unique to film (e.g., flashbacks, first-person voice-over, etc.), I wound up reading forgotten plays and neglected novels, while listening to hours of old-time radio.

Tags: Bordwell, Storytelling, Filmmaking

Most famously, Hu is a daring cutter. The smoothness of his dialogue scenes gives way to the majestic disjunctions of the fights; sometimes the editing stretches time, sometimes it pinches it. Some shots are only six frames long—a quarter of a second on the screen. The effect is to make these warriors’ prowess all the more astonishing: the camera can’t keep up with them. In the bamboo-forest sequence, Shi and Yang pop in and out from every side, scampering, hopping, swooping, dive-bombing. After a flurry of close-ups, a sudden long shot forces us to hunt for the characters in crannies of the frame. Xu’s sudden attack on the abbot is rendered in a jump cut with the force of a fist blow: leaping from far back in the shot, Xu suddenly drops into the foreground, nearly in our faces. Here, cinematic technique amplifies the staccato force of disciplined, near miraculous physical action.

Tags: Film, Bordwell

At the core of their reputation is Bordwell and Thompson’s passion for the art of film. “The pleasure of moviegoing is not something that has gotten lost,” says Healy. “You can talk to them for hours about movies. Then you want to go off and watch all the movies they’ve talked about. But they also give you the feeling that it’s mutual. They want to know what you’ve discovered; what you like. They have that unending curiosity.”

Tags: Bordwell

Mad Max: Fury Road seems to me a superbly directed film in its chosen style, but we can find alternatives. What about fast cutting that tries, as a part of an action scene’s kinetic drive, to shuttle or bounce the viewer’s attention more widely across the frame? This option wouldn’t be helter-skelter in the Bay manner; it’s calculated, and engenders its own pictorial excitement.

Tags: Bordwell, Filmmaking, Editing

Tags: Bordwell, Film, Filmmaking

There was also an argument for keeping nitrate around on artistic grounds. As Roger put it: “It’s pretty.” Everyone I know agrees. In the late 1970s Kristin and I saw at MoMA a double bill of two nitrate prints, Gance’s La Roue and Ford’s How Green Was My Valley. They glistened. Later, attending the Pordenone Giornate del Cinema Muto and Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato, we saw lots of nitrate prints and were always overwhelmed. The images, especially from very early films, seemed at once sharp in contour and soft in textures.

So nitrate images look great. But why? Some say that nitrate prints have more silver in the emulsion than acetate ones. In This Film Is Dangerous, John Reed suggests that the increased “silver load” yields solidity in shadow areas and vitality in white ones. He also speculates that nitrate-based copies may benefit from  projector lenses, screen surfaces, and carbon-arc projection (this last a topic I’ve touched on briefly with respect to Technicolor). If all these factors are in play, the beauty of the copy may be only contingently related to nitrate as such.

Tags: Film, Bordwell

This is what we have come to expect in mainstream cinema. Not only inner monologues but all channels of subjectively tinted information are usually slanted toward one character per scene. So a film might have several point-of-view characters in its overall running time (e.g., Psycho), but any given scene is likely to be anchored around one.

Tags: Film, Theory, Bordwell

Filmmakers solve the problem of rhythm in practice, often brilliantly. Those of us who want to understand how films work, and work upon us, want to get specific and explicit. What is this thing called cinematic rhythm? What contributes to it? Can we analyze it and explain its grip? Very few scholars have tackled these questions; they’re hard. In her new book, Film Rhythm after Sound: Technology, Music, and Performance, our friend and colleague Lea Jacobs takes us quite a ways toward some answers.

Tags: Film, Theory, Storytelling, Bordwell

It’s been years since I clicked my cable remote to the Sundance Channel and the Independent Film Channel, now known as IFC. Seeing them a couple of weeks ago was a mild shock. Now each boasted a bug in the lower right corner, and swarming over the image were lots of texts plugging other programs. Worse, there were commercials for weight-loss scams, Burger King, and Portlandia. More to the point here, these services give us a new version of pan-and-scan.

Tags: Film, Theory, Bordwell

Asking why? about something in an artwork actually veils two different questions.The first is: How did it get there? The answer is a causal story about how the element came to be included.The second sense of why is: What’s it doing there? That’s not a question of causes but of functions. How does the element contribute to the other parts and the artwork as a whole?

Tags: Film, Theory, Bordwell

The brute fact is that these movies are, moment by moment, awfully opaque. Not only do characters act mysteriously, implausibly, farcically, irrationally. It’s hard to assign them particular wants, needs, and personalities. They come into conflict, but we’re not always sure why. In addition, we aren’t often told, at least explicitly, how the characters connect with one another. The plots are highly elliptical, leaving out big chunks of action and merely suggesting them, often by a single close-up or an offscreen sound. Godard’s narratives pose not only problems of interpretation but problems of comprehension—building a coherent story world and the actions and agents in it.

Tags: Film, JLG, Bordwell, 3D, Theory