David Bordwell - все книги по циклам и сериям | Книги по порядку

An introductory text for courses on film appreciation, covering the elements of film, film production, narrative and non-narrative film, all with a strong theoretical base and practical application.

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.

Planet Hong Kong – Popular Cinema & the Art of Entertainment

On the History of Film Style

On the History of Film Style (Paper)

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.

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.

Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as “difficult” become familiar to audiences?

In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another’s work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.

Written by two leading film scholars, Film History: An Introduction is a comprehensive survey of film-from the backlots of Hollywood, across the United States, and around the world. As in the authors' bestselling Film Art, concepts and events are illustrated with actual frame enlargements, giving students more realistic points of reference than competing books that use publicity stills.

About the Author

Kristin Thompson is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. She holds a master's degree in film from the University of Iowa and a doctorate in film from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. She has published Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (Princeton University Press, 1981), Exporting Entertainment: America's Place in World Film Markets, 1907-1934 (British Film Institute, 1985), Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton University Press, 1988), Wooster Proposes, Jeeves Disposes; or Le Mot Juste (James H. Heinman, 1992), Storytelling in the New Hollywood (Harvard University Press, 1999), Storytelling in Film and Television (Harvard University Press, 2003), and Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film after World War I (University of Amsterdam, 2005). In her spare time she studies Egyptology. .

The authors have collaborated on Film History (McGraw-Hill, 1994) with Janet Staiger, on The Classical Hollywood Cinema (Columbia University Press, 1985) and Storytelling in the New Hollywood (Harvard University Press, 1999)..

David Bordwell is Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He holds a master's degree and a doctorate from the University of Iowa. He is the author of The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer (University California Press, 1981), Narration in the Fiction Film (University Wisconsin Press, 1985), Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (British Film Institute/Princeton University Press, 1988), Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Harvard University Press, 1989), The Cinema of Eisenstein (Harvard University Press, 1993), On the History of Film Style (Harvard University Press, 1997) and Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Harvard University Press, 2000). He has won a University Distinguished Teaching Award.