By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Cinema Scope 26: David Bordwell and something worthy of the art we love
Cinema Scope 26 is out now, with a few tidbits on line. Offline, Jason Anderson writes up Patrick Keiller‘s “peripatetic hybrids” and editor Mark Peranson has a regionalist perspective on Sundance 2006. Chuck Stephens has an extended conversation with just-retired film scholar David Bordwell, who describes how he comes across topics for his many books: “I think of a book as a cluster of questions or problems I want to illuminate, and usually those are ones I think have been neglected by other scholars. Fortunately or unfortunately, not many people are interested in most of the topics I write about, so I always have fresh material. Even subjects that people have written a lot about, like Eisenstein or Hou or Hong Kong cinema, haven’t been studied from the angle I favour, so I always seem to have a lot to study. For example, in “The Way Hollywood Tells It,” I try to talk about script structure and visual style in ways congruent with the way the creative people seem to handle those matters, even if I also try to maintain some critical distance on their conceptions of their craft. This is something that most academics just aren’t interested in. Same thing with the CinemaScope talk you heard; there’s been a lot written about Scope, but academics haven’t much tried to figure out the various approaches directors and crews took toward Scope composition.
One way to frame this more broadly is to say that most film scholars aren’t interested in film as a creative art. I know it sounds odd to say that, but I think it’s true. Most scholars are interested in film as an expression of cultural trends, interests, processes, etc. or of political moods, tendencies, etc. More specifically, those who are interested in film as an art seldom try to find out the craft traditions—the work processes, the technologies, etc.—that give artists the menus they work with. The approach I try to develop is commonplace in art history and the history of music, but not very developed in film studies.” Bordwell also contributes a brief cri de coeur for a different kind of film criticism: “Film magazines and free city weeklies promote that self-assured nonconformity which prizes jaunty wordplay and throwaway judgments… There are some fine journalistic critics and film scholars. Still, no one, as far as I know, is producing what I’d like to see. The film writing I have in mind would be essayistic, but it would have a solid understructure of evidence. It would be conceptually bold and bristling with subtly defended opinions… Add a graceful writing style leavened with humour and purged of vainglorious anecdotes… Something worthy of the art we love.”
