[KineJapan] Rest in Peace, DB

[Steven Elworth]

I knew David for over 40 years. He was so knowledgeable about cinema and
how to understand it closely and in context.  He was also a great person.
He is already missed. But we have the books and the blogs.
Steve Elworth

On Fri, Mar 1, 2024 at 8:52 PM Michael Kerpan via KineJapan <
kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:

> 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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