[KineJapan] Rest in Peace, DB

[Markus Nornes]

SCMS just announced the passing of David Bordwell (b. 1947). David was a
capacious, amazing scholar and incredibly generous. As a student, he
entered grad school just as the field was taking shape. Imagine how
exciting it was be studying a field that was nascent and just about
anything you write was the first word. That was at Iowa, where he studied
under Dudley Andrew who himself was just out of grad school and not too
much older. I wonder if David was Dudley's first grad student.

In the early 70s he became interested in Ozu, which was starting to
circulate on 16mm and even TV. Then he offered a course pretty much
centered on the director and rented all the prints he could get his hands
on. At the time, there were the books by Schrader and Richie, but those
didn't jive with what they were seeing. He told me he would go to the booth
between classes and grab stills off the prints. From this experience, his
student Ed Branigan wrote "The Space of Equinox Flower," and David and
Kristin Thompson wrote their seminal "Space and Narrative in the Films of
Ozu." I regularly teach this essay. It picks up all the things Richie,
Schrader and others were writing about, adds a whole lot more, and
describes it with a remarkable rigor that gives that essay a special
durability. It's also a useful essay for seeing the development of what
would later be called neo-formalism being thought out on the fly.

In the background there was defining baselines that filmmakers like Ozu
were working off of. The marker for that part of his research trajectory is
the monumental *Classical Hollywood Cinema*, co-written with Thompson and
Janet Staiger. That came out just when I started grad school, and it was an
astounding read that demonstrated to a lot of us how to be a serious film
scholar.

And just a few years after this he followed up with Ozu and the Poetics of
Cinema, which builds on his other writings at the time that explored norms
that a given filmmaker plays with in doing something different. And the Ozu
book is the prime example. The analyses in that film are unparalleled. Only
someone as sensitive David could recognize the breathtaking intricacy of
Ozu's work. It was criticized, even dismissed, by some for being thin on
history. But for someone who is not a Japan specialist, with no language
ability to crack the archive in the way they did with *CHC*, it's pretty
solid history. And the heart of the book is breathtaking. I learned so much
from that book, and still go back to it.

At some point, David told me he was shocked and delighted to find the Ozu
book in a New York used bookstore for over $400. I had no idea it was out
of print. Princeton refused to reprint it because of all the photographs,
which he found ridiculous and frustrating. So I reprinted it in digital
form—long before the idea of "open access"—through UM's CJS Pubs (and this
morning, I'm shocked to find that it's currently offline; I'll work on that
asap). He actually hired a student to make new prints of the 300+ images
and make what were then high res scans for the digital version. We actually
made a novel interface that turned the small images on the pages into
thumbnails that would call up the full res images. He was delighted with
this, and continued to be frustrated with university presses and did a
bunch of digital pubs and reprints in the future (eg., his Hong Kong cinema
book).

His interest in Japanese film was lifelong, and actually it began with
Mizoguchi. In fact, he attributes his decision to go to grad school to
study cinema to his serendipitous encounter with Sansho the Bailiff in
1969. His major contribution on Mizoguchi is in *Figures Traced in Light*
from 2008. He also published a nice supplement to the book on his blog:
http://www.davidbordwell.net/books/figures_intro.php?ss=1

If you haven't explored his blog, stop, take a moment and go down the
rabbit hole. You can go to the sidebar on the right and find links that
create discrete collections on Ozu, Mizoguchi and others. Many others:
Kore-eda, Miike, Naruse, Miyazaki, nado nado.

I learned A LOT from David Bordwell, but I especially learned how to look
at Ozu and Mizoguchi. He'll be missed.

Markus
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