“Preconceived methods, applied simply for demonstration purposes, often end up reducing the complexity of films,” David and Kristin once wrote. That's a sentiment I totally agree with. It bears repeating today, now that much of “cultural writing” consists of “takes” that analyze moving image artworks as if they were brochures or PDFs, and that seem primarily interested in provoking a response, often with all the grace and erudition of a stick in the eye.
I never had David in a class, but based on my conversations with him, he must have been a wonderful teacher. He once explained classical continuity versus heightened continuity to me, citing Howard Hawks' classic screwball comedy “Bringing Up Baby” as an example of the oldest type of continuity. Filmmakers in the pre-television era, he said, tended not to cut unless they felt there was a reason. They also understood that performances in a physical comedy are funnier if the camera stays further back and shows us most or all of the actors' bodies, so that they are somewhat diminished in the frame and we begin to think about them almost like machines or objects. or dolls. The more we see them as warm, complicated, psychologically plausible human beings (mostly through close-ups), the less likely we are to burst out laughing. That's why Hawks doesn't give us the first close-up of “Bringing up Baby” until halfway through the film, when he cuts to a shot of Katharine Hepburn as she silently realizes that she's in love with Cary Grant. The moment is glaring and unexpectedly powerful because the director hasn't been shoving the camera up the actors' nostrils for the previous 45 minutes. “Your brain thinks, 'Oh, this is different, this could be important,' and then you wonder why,” David told me. “In many modern films, the close-up is the default.”
David was tremendously productive until the end, writing books under his own byline and in collaboration with Kristin, and contributing essays to other people's work. (David did essays for three of my books. WesAnderson Collection Series: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French officeand a forthcoming book, not yet scheduled, on asteroid city. The French office The book is dedicated to him and Kristin, and he wrote the introduction to asteroid city.) He remained connected to the world of film criticism and scholarship, and often made efforts to seek out and mentor younger writers who had been inspired by his and Kristin's work. And he was generous in recognizing the contributions of others: a blog post from last year about the book by James Cutting Movies on Our Minds: The Evolution of Film Engagement (which, like many film studies, would not have existed without the work of Bordwell and Thompson) is not only extravagant in its praise of Cutting but goes out of its way to mention six other film scholars in the space of a single paragraph. David was always keen to let people know when he cited his work or said something good about it, and there are probably thousands of people who, over the decades, had their days brightened by the arrival of an email from Bordwell with the heading of the subject, “They Have Written You in a BLOG!”
David once wrote to me years ago that he didn't see the kind of video essays he had begun doing in the mid-aughts as being all that similar to the formal, augmented-image analysis he and Kristin did in their books. But then he came up with the idea that they were different paths to the same destination. I think he proved it beyond a doubt in the articles he did for Criterion Channel with Kristin and Jeff Smith, which are compiled here. It is a most surprising work that accompanies all the others.
The world already seems a poorer place without him. The best way to honor his memory is to talk about cinema. The stuff dreams are made of.
