Mario Slugan, Queen Mary University of London
David Bordwell passed away on 29 February 2024. I was aware that he had health difficulties as he missed a couple of recent Society for the Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image annual conferences – a society whose ethos he deeply inspired and for a few years presided over. But I clearly did not understand the gravity of the situation for I was dumbfounded when I heard the distressing news in a short email from Noël Carroll. Taken together, Bordwell and Carroll are undeniably two scholars who have contributed the most to film studies no longer being contests of who can produce more references to Althusser, Lacan or Freud, or who can offer a reinterpretation of this or that canonical work in a psychoanalytic, gender, or some other ideology critique key. We can only thank the minor gods of lucid writing in the humanities that the two found themselves at the same time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where in 1996 they co-edited Post-Theory – a volume which cleared the way for the research programme of film cognitivism. Next to the introductory essay on the then dominance of what is still known simply as Theory with a capital T (as the posthumously just published book by Frederic Jameson, another recently passed pre-eminent scholar, evinces), Bordwell’s contribution to the volume was a piece titled “Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision” which introduced the notion of “contingent universals.”
Summarizing both Bordwell’s original account and Ted Nannicelli’s explanation of the concept in his contribution to the Literary Universals Project (available here), contingent universals are the underlying reasons for why a specific artistic technique is widely distributed and comprehensible. In other words, contingent universals are human practices that are at least widely distributed across cultures. Bordwell’s focal technique is shot/reverse shot and, underlying this, the practice of conversation which involves a face-to-face exchange and taking turns. It is this practice of conversation that is arguably widely spread across cultures, which then explains why the editing structure which alternates two characters in relatively close shots to represent a conversation is so widely used and understood. While this might seem sensible, even self-evident, for the readers of the Literary Universals Project, during the heyday of Theory it was controversial, for at that time it was not uncommon to take even the recognition of verisimilar photographic images as culturally constructed. In such a context, positing contingent universals, thus moving away from purely nurture accounts of film comprehension, was a highly innovative move.
Of course, Bordwell’s towering influence on film studies had started much earlier and extends far beyond theory to include other two traditional branches of the discipline: history and criticism. Already in the late 1970s, together with his spouse Kristin Thompson, Bordwell published Film Art, the most widely used disciplinary textbook which taught thousands of students how to analyze film style, currently in its thirteenth edition and translated to more than a dozen languages. In mid-80s he authored Narration in the Fiction Film – a manifesto of cognitivist film theory – which introduced the then radical idea that for the model for how the viewer understands film we should look to the discipline of contemporary psychology, rather than early 20th century psychoanalysis. Appearing in 1988, The Classical Hollywood Cinema another joint project with Thompson, with Janet Staiger contributing this time as well, has remained the fundamental work for understanding the means of production, their evolution, and the textual features of the Hollywood studio system. Film History, originally from 1994 and again co-authored with Thompson, now in its fifth edition, is to this very day one of the best introductions to film history and canonical national cinemas from the end of 19th century to the beginning of the 21st.
I will not list many other books that he published (although I believe Making Meaning – a scathing critique of the schematic and run-of-the-mill practice of academic film interpretation – is as timely now as it was in 1989 and as applicable to literary scholarship as it is to film). Instead, I would like to devote the remaining words to what becomes clear to anybody who read many of the in-memoriam posts that appeared in the days after his demise and written by many of those who were lucky enough to be his students (and are now themselves notable academics)–how generous Bordwell was as both a colleague and teacher. Despite the disciplinary authority he exuded, in his interactions in the classroom or the conference room he was always attentive and positive towards other people’s ideas even when they clashed with his own. At the 2016 Society for the Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image conference at Cornell University, I had the good fortune of experiencing this generosity firsthand when after my presentation he approached me and said that he liked my points and found them convincing. Imagine that! You are a postgraduate student who is wrapping up their PhD and sending your job applications all over the place, and David Bordwell tells you that you have good ideas. (That will keep you inspired through a couple of dozen rejection letters.) While the experience was unique for me, this type of encouragement must have been habitual to him. This is yet another reason to appreciate the wide reach of Bordwell’s scholarship, one which, I dare say, is for film studies what shot/reverse shot is for film style.