[KineJapan] Rest in Peace, DB

[Michael Kerpan]

While I never met Prof. Bordwell in person, we corresponded with each other
from time to time.  (His last trip to Boston was a year or so before I
belatedly discovered Ozu). I always considered him my sensei when it came
to Japanese cinema (especially Ozu, of course).  I am quite sad -- it is
too early to have to say goodbye to him.

Michael Kerpan
Boston

On Fri, Mar 1, 2024 at 8:36 PM Markus Nornes via KineJapan <
kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:

> 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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