[KineJapan] Rest in Peace, DB

[Gerow Aaron]

Thanks Markus for the wonderful tribute. 

I actually only met David a couple of times, though he was always so kind and generous each time. I remember at an Iowa conference where he called out my name from the podium even though we’d only met for the first time an hour before. 

I had a conversation today with my first film prof, John Belton, on Facebook. John was remarking on his first encounter with Bordwell’s work though an article on Citizen Kane in 1971, an encounter that changed John’s approach to film from phenomenological to a kind of “formalist phenomenology”—an odd creature indeed. My first film class was with John and he used the Film Art textbook—which David wrote with Kristin Thompson—so over the years, I probably have also been imbued a kind of formalist phenomenology, one augmented by my studies under the Bazinian Dudley Andrew. When I came to start teaching Intro to Film at Yale, I insisted on using the Film Art textbook because I still believe a formalist approach is the best way to start looking at film. 

So while I was also a young turk who wanted to combat his elders, and thus had my own critiques of Bordwell’s approach to Japanese cinema (and cinema in general), the formalist in me still understood how essential his work is to studying Japanese film. I of course still teach his work. While the translation of Hasumi’s Ozu book is coming out this month, in which Hasumi is critical of Bordwell, I can also see how Bordwell is a productive counter to Hasumi as well.

Some did say his work was not historical enough, but I can’t understand that complaint: heck, he called his methodology "historical poetics." Some of his early pieces on the practice of studying Japanese cinema still contain a lot of good advice for historical approaches to this cinema. If we can call it a fault, his main limitation was that he had no limits, and could write about so many things (I love his books on Dreyer and Hong Kong film). I sometimes wonder what Bordwell could have written if had the means—such as the language—to delve even more into the depths of Japanese film history. But I guess that is our task now.

Aaron


Aaron Gerow
Alfred W. Griswold Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Film and Media Studies
Chair, East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University
320 York Street, Room 108
PO Box 208201
New Haven, CT 06520-8201
USA
Phone: 1-203-432-7082
Fax: 1-203-432-6729
e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu <mailto:aaron.gerow at yale.edu>
website: www.aarongerow.com





















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