[KineJapan] Rest in Peace, DB

Sun Mar 3 03:12:48 EST 2024

 Hi Markus,
Thanks for letting us know. This is a shock. 
I knew David more though his Hong Kong cinema passions than those for Japanese cinema, although I conversed with him on Asian (and occasionally Australian cinema) across conference rooms, lecture plinths, email, dinner tables and cinema seat backs on maybe four continents over the years. 
No scholar was so much also the generalist buff and lived across and brought together the streams of screen (and in recent yars popular genre literary) scholarship, moving image archiving and living film production. And that he wanted to be a scholar and fan as much as a teacher stick in the mind. It was marvelous to see him taking it in from the front row of Bologna's Ill cinema ritrovato or contemporary, Asian cinema-focused festivals on both side of the Pacific, then rush back to blog on it in the evenings. Or getting very excited and talking selfies when chairing a judging panel at the Hong Kong Film Festival because actor Christopher Lambert was on his panel. Or supporting the careers of rising indie filmmakers whose films he'd seen (for example HK filmmaker Chan Tze-woon, who made a point of professing how valuable DB's early feedback had been at the seminar on documentary filmmakers and festivals held at last year's Yamagata). 
And it was really humbling when he'd try to claim that he'd learnt a lot from you. When in truth you owed so much to him.
Thoughts go his partner Kirstin and huge extended family of colleagues, collaborators and admirers. 
Many things need to get named after him...
Quentin TurnourNational Archives of Australia / Cinema Reborn Film Festival.

    On Saturday, 2 March 2024 at 02:14:10 pm AEDT, Steven Elworth via KineJapan <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:  

 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 KerpanBoston
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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