In this study, David Bordwell offers a comprehensive account of how movies use fundamental principles of narrative representation, unique features of the film medium, and diverse story-telling patterns to construct their fictional narratives.
Hollywood moviemaking is one of the constants of American life, but how much has it changed since the glory days of the big studios? David Bordwell argues that the principles of visual storytelling created in the studio era are alive and well, even in today’s bloated blockbusters. American filmmakers have created a durable tradition—one that we should not be ashamed to call artistic, and one that survives in both mainstream entertainment and niche-marketed indie cinema. Bordwell traces the continuity of this tradition in a wide array of films made since 1960, from romantic comedies like Jerry Maguire and Love Actually to more imposing efforts like A Beautiful Mind. He also draws upon testimony from writers, directors, and editors who are acutely conscious of employing proven principles of plot and visual style. Within the limits of the "classical" approach, innovation can flourish. Bordwell examines how imaginative filmmakers have pushed the premises of the system in films such as JFK, Memento, and Magnolia. He discusses generational, technological, and economic factors leading to stability and change in Hollywood cinema and includes close analyses of selected shots and sequences. As it ranges across four decades, examining classics like American Graffiti and The Godfather as well as recent success like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, this book provides a vivid and engaging interpretation of how Hollywood moviemakers have created a vigorous, resourceful tradition of cinematic storytelling that continues to engage audiences around the world.
Bringing together twenty-five years of work on what he has called the "historical poetics of cinema," David Bordwell presents an extended analysis of a key question for film studies: how are films made, in particular historical contexts, in order to achieve certain effects? For Bordwell, films are made things, existing within historical contexts, and aim to create determinate effects. Beginning with this central thesis, Bordwell works out a full understanding of how films channel and recast cultural influences for their cinematic purposes. With more than five hundred film stills, Poetics of Cinema is a must-have for any student of cinema.
Film is an art form with a language and an aesthetic all its own. Since 1979, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art has been the best-selling and most widely respected introduction to the analysis of cinema. Taking a skills-centered approach supported by examples from many periods and countries, the authors help students develop a core set of analytical skills that will enrich their understanding of any film, in any genre. In-depth examples deepen students’ appreciation for how creative choices by filmmakers affect what viewers experience and how they respond. Film Art is generously illustrated with more than 1,000 frame enlargements taken directly from completed films, providing concrete illustrations of key concepts.
Studying the arts isn't only about learning facts and concepts either, although both are important. In addition, studying the arts broadens our tastes. In eleven editions of Film Art, we've made reference to many well-known films but also to many that you've probably never heard of. This is part of our plan. We want to show that the world of cinema teems with a great many unexpected pleasures, and we hope to get you curious"--
This new edition of Film History has been revised to include recent films, new examples, and updated comprehensive overviews of the rise of streaming services as purveyors of cinematic content as well as the massive disruptions of film production, distribution, and exhibition caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a comprehensive global survey of film and its many genres – from drama and comedy to documentary and experimental – written by three of the discipline’s leading scholars. Concepts and events are illustrated with frame enlargements taken from the original sources, giving students more realistic and relevant points of reference than publicity stills. There are 100 new film clips with commentary in McGraw Hill Connect® – the web-based assignment and assessment platform that helps you connect your students to their coursework. Film History is a text that any serious film scholar – professor, undergraduate, or graduate student – will want to read and keep.
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson are two of America’s preeminent film scholars. You would be hard pressed to find a serious student of the cinema who hasn’t spent at least a few hours huddled with their seminal introduction to the field—Film Art, now in its ninth edition—or a cable television junkie unaware that the Independent Film Channel sagely christened them the “Critics of the Naughts.” Since launching their blog Observations on Film Art in 2006, the two have added web virtuosos to their growing list of accolades, pitching unconventional long-form pieces engaged with film artistry that have helped to redefine cinematic storytelling for a new age and audience. Minding Movies presents a selection from over three hundred essays on genre movies, art films, animation, and the business of Hollywood that have graced Bordwell and Thompson’s blog. Informal pieces, conversational in tone but grounded in three decades of authoritative research, the essays gathered here range from in-depth analyses of individual films such as Slumdog Millionaire and Inglourious Basterds to adjustments of Hollywood media claims and forays into cinematic humor. For Bordwell and Thompson, the most fruitful place to begin is how movies are made, how they work, and how they work on us. Written for film lovers, these essays—on topics ranging from Borat to blockbusters and back again—will delight current fans and gain new enthusiasts. Serious but not solemn, vibrantly informative without condescension, and above all illuminating reading, Minding Movies offers ideas sure to set film lovers thinking—and keep them returning to the silver screen.
Bordwell scrutinizes the theories of style launched by various film historians and celebrates a century of cinema. The author examines the contributions of many directors and shows how film scholars have explained stylistic continuity and change.
David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve. Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques--a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis.
The Cinema of Eisenstein is David Bordwell's comprehensive analysis of the films of Sergei Eisenstein, arguably the key figure in the entire history of film. The director of such classics as Potemkin, Ivan the Terrible, October, Strike, and Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein theorized montage, presented Soviet realism to the world, and mastered the concept of film epic. Comprehensive, authoritative, and illustrated throughout, this classic work deserves to be on the shelf of every serious student of cinema.
Acclaimed for its breakthrough approach and its combination of theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, this is the standard work on the classical Hollywood cinema style of film-making from the silent era to the 1960s.
This definitive study of Hong Kong cinema examines the work of directors such as Tsui Hark, John Woo, Ringo Lam, Johnnie To, King Hu, and Wong Kar Wai.
An engaging look at four pioneering film critics—“besides being a pleasure to read, [it] makes a sophisticated contribution to the study of film criticism” (Cineaste). In the 1960s, Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert were three of America’s most popular and influential film critics. But their remarkable contributions to the cinema landscape were deeply influenced by the work of four earlier critics who are too often overlooked: Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler. Throughout the ’30s and ’40s, these pioneering critics scrutinized movies with an intensity not previously seen in popular reviewing. With The Rhapsodes, renowned film scholar and critic David Bordwell restores their work to a wider audience. Bordwell calls these four critics the “Rhapsodes”, in honor of their passionate and deliberately offbeat prose. Each broke with prevailing currents in criticism, finding new ways to discuss popular films that their contemporaries regarded as trivial. With his customary clarity and brio, Bordwell considers each critics’ writing style, their conceptions of films, and their many quarrels. He then concludes by examining their profound impact on later generations of film writers.
The courtroom, like the movie theater, is an arena for the telling and interpreting of stories. Investigators piece them together, witnesses tell them, advocates retell them, and judges and juries assess their plausibility. These narratives reconstitute absent events through words, and their filming constitutes a double narrative: one important cultural practice rendered in the terms of another. Drawing on both film studies and legal scholarship, David A. Black explores the implications of representing court procedure, as well as other phases of legal process, in film. His study ranges from an inquiry into the common metaphorical ground between film and law, explored through "the detective" and "the witness," to a critical survey of legal writings about the cinema, to close analyses of key films about law. In examining multiple aspects of law in film, Black sustains a focus on the central importance of narrative while also unearthing the influences--pleasure in film, power in law--that lie beyond the narrative realm. Black's penetrating study treats questions of narrative authority and structure, social authority, and cultural history, revealing the underlying historical, cultural, and cognitive connections between legal and cinematic practices.
Arriving fifty years after Ebert published his first film review in 1967, this second edition of Awake in the Dark collects Ebert's essential writings. Featuring new Top Ten Lists and reviews of the years' finest films through 2012, this edition allows both fans and film buffs to bask in the best of an extraordinary lifetime's work."--Provided by publisher.
A dense, challenging and important book.' Philip French Observer 'At the very least, this blockbuster is probably the best single volume history of Hollywood we're likely to get for a very long time.' Paul Kerr City Limits 'Persuasively argued, the book is also packed with facts, figures and photographs.' Nigel Andrews Financial Times Acclaimed for their breakthrough approach, Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson analyze the basic conditions of American film-making as a historical institution and consider to what extent Hollywood film production constitutes a systematic enterprise, in both its style and its business operations. Despite differences of director, genre or studio, most Hollywood films operate within a set of shared assumptions about how a film should look and sound. Such assumptions are neither natural nor inevitable; but because classical-style films have been the type most widely seen, they have come to be accepted as the 'norm' of film-making and viewing. The authors show how these classical conventions were formulated and standardized, and how they responded to the arrival of sound, colour, widescreen ratios and stereophonic sound. They argue that each new technological development has served a function within an existing narrational system. The authors also examine how the Hollywood cinema standardized the film-making process itself. They describe how, over the course of its history, Hollywood developed distinct modes of production in a constant search for maximum efficiency, predictability and novelty. Set apart by its combination of theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, this book is the standard work on the classical Hollywood cinema style of film-making from the silent era to the 1960s. Now available in paperback, it is a 'must' for film students, lecturers and all those seriously interested in the development of the film industry.
The Cinema of Errol Morris offers close analyses of the director’s films—from box office successes like The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War to Morris’s early works like Vernon, Florida and controversial films like Standard Operating Procedure. Film scholar David Resha’s reappraisal of Morris’s films allows us to rethink the traditional distinction between stylistically conservative documentaries, which are closely invested in evidence and reality, and stylistically adventurous films, which artfully call to question such claims of nonfiction and truth. According to Resha, Errol Morris does not fit neatly in this division of the documentary tradition. Rather, his experiments with documentary conventions constitute another way to investigate reality—in particular, to examine the ways in which his subjects understand, and misunderstand, themselves and the world around them. Seen within the nonfiction tradition, an Errol Morris documentary is a flexible form of lively, engaging storytelling and shrewd, cutting, in-depth reportage.
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