Entries associated with the tag "David Bordwell":

I remember walking out of Patton (1970) with a hippie friend who loved it. He claimed that it showed how vicious the military was, by portraying a hero as an egotistical nutcase. That wasn't the reading offered by a veteran I once talked to, who considered the film a tribute to a great warrior. —David Bordwell, from an August 16 Web site posting

So here we are in the middle of a war about movie superheroes (see comments threads here and here). The word itself begs for judicious scare quotes—why "super"? why "heroic"?—but what predictably gets the blood boiling, at least among the die-hard fans, is anyone calling these wayward exotics "childish." How can you write off a whole genre, the argument goes, when it's never a one-dimensional, monolithic thing?

And basically I agree. "Childish" is largely irrelevant, an easy, moralizing put-down where something less analytically loaded—that doesn't skew the semantics from the get-go—gets you to a more interesting place. (Interesting too that "childlike" skews in the opposite direction—depends on what brand of kid you are, I guess: innocuous before impish, etc.) Which doesn't mean the land of the overmuscled and preternaturally endowed is a place you'd necessarily want to visit, only that it's a little more complicated—and worrisome—than supercilious dismissals ever let on.

In the post quoted above, David Bordwell gets into the industry dynamics of the superhero genre, but not so much the social assumptions that make that genre go. Which, considering the BANG! POW! megadoses we've been getting the last couple of years, seem positively toxic. What's arguably OK within "reasonable" limits, even homeopathic in a more benign state, as an expression of the creative urge, the infinite variety of thinking and feeling that's always searching for an outlet, seems lately to have run off the rails. But what are we tuning in on really? Is it "imagination unleashed," exploring creative options that a dull, dreary realism can't handle (since if, e.g., Frozen River's the responsible "adult" alternative to the knockabout energies of the Hellboys, The Rocketeer, Mulcahy's The Shadow, and other supposedly "infantile" delights—not to mention anything with Super Milla in it: go Resident Evil, go!—then somebody please save us from this castor-oil curse)? Or is it national paranoia, an unwillingness to negotiate, the sense of imperial privilege our abundant supply of supers always seems to share. Just plop for the unilateralist solution, where you can force an outcome and not have to worry about diplomacy and all that other whimpering, whining shit. Or maybe it's more exotic: What do superheroes and World Wrestling Entertainment smackdowns have in common? Why aren't faeries with magic wands (note effete spelling) as popular as Batman? Are superheroes responsible for the war in Iraq? Are they more responsible for keeping us there? And isn't it ironic that the "world's most powerful military machine" comes from an emotionally frazzled country where disempowerment fantasies regularly take hold? The teeming minions in The Dark Knight seem all too typical: faceless, almost sheeplike, stampeding in whatever direction their panicky impulses drive them. Day/night, good/evil, hyperthyroidism/helplessness, a world of Manichaean extremity with nothing in between, that only projected megalomania can ever set right. What's "childish" about any of this? Looks more like terminal pathology to me.

Do movie audiences in, e.g., Portugal or Switzerland or Luxembourg need the same macho reassurances our own fragile psyches seem to? And if not why do we? Or maybe it's just one thing feeding off another, hyperthyroidism to helplessness and back again, like partners locked in an escalating dance, one of Gregory Bateson's notorious schismogenetic tangos. Talk about peaceful coexistence—except in the long run there's nothing peaceful about it.

The esteemed critic David Bordwell has written a hilarious piece on the preening and posing of film lovers called "Games Cinephiles Play." Especially rich is his section on "Upsmanship," in which two fictional cinephiles, Jules and Jim, face off using the breadth strategy ("The DVD from Austria fills in the missing scenes with stills. Oh, you didn't know there were missing scenes...?"), the longevity strategy ("I liked it when I saw it in 1971. In fact, I liked it so much I wrote about it for Sight & Sound."), the depth strategy ("I especially liked the scene where the camera tracked sideways, picking up the back of the guy who'll turn out to be so important in the end."), and the insider strategy ("The director sent me a rough cut on DVD a few months ago.").

I think Jules and Jim is the title of a film, but I'll need to check on that and get back to you.

The idea of explaining artists' works in terms of problems and solutions is ... not so common in film studies. It can be fruitful to consider that sometimes filmmakers face common problems and that they compete to solve them, or to find different problems they can solve. —David Bordwell, from Web site commentary on Ratatouille 

One of the reasons I'm so stuck on Theo Angelopoulos's The Travelling Players (1975)—number one on my all-time best list, if you must know—involves this very notion of problem-solving. Because, at least in my opinion, based on the film's internal clues, Angelopoulos was facing a big one here—something that even halfway through the filming he hadn't come to grips with, perhaps because he wasn't quite sure what it was. But what seems certain is this: that more than his usual perfectionist striving was needed to bring this meticulously crafted epic to life. 

Which in the film's second half he serendipitously discovers—of course serendipitously, since that's what's been missing all along. Chance, randomness, indeterminacy--like punctuated equilibrium in evolutionary theory, where a sudden break in "natural" continuity ushers in waves of new life forms. No more the "absolute" master, like an obsessed totalitarian deity—it's almost as if he's decided to throw the film away. So the tablecloth comes off, at the wedding banquet on the beach, and suddenly we're in medias res, in a new, unpredictable space. "Let's try it and see what happens"—a discovery infinitely repeatable, if only in strategically measured bursts. As Angelopoulos has been systematically "rediscovering" ever since, about three or four times per film ...

So too P.T. Anderson in his semisurreal Adam Sandler vehicle Punch-Drunk Love (2002), which actually serves up a double dose of random—first the anomalous bouncing pianola, then the car crash with no other purpose than to turn the film inside-out: wherever we were before this happened, we're definitely not there now. But of course there's more, and Anderson keeps upping the ante. Like the scene of Sandler talking on the phone, back to the camera so we have an optimal view of his neck, in a room so devoid of sensory stimulation he might as well be peddling widgets at Guantanamo. It's minimalism upon minimalism, and the implied bet here is that Anderson can keep us interested—or maybe even fascinated, in a perverse, movie-movie kind of way. (It's a bet he almost loses, by the way, though against these odds "almost" seems equivalent to winning the lottery.) Or another logistic gambit: the "relationship"—such as it is—between Sandler's incredible shrinking schmo and poor Emily Watson, who's obviously befuddled by it all. A lot of critics frowned on this amorous coupling--as in "Why would an intelligent woman like that ever ...?" etc—but here's what I think went down: "OK Adam, your job is to be as unavailable as possible ... and yours, dear Emily, is to 'love' this inaccessible dolt in spite of everything he does." Which of course is a recipe for failure, and what's a capable actress to do? So when Watson ultimately falls back on, well ... mothering the damn infant, it's like throwing in the towel—yo, Billy Madison wins again! Though if ever she'd actually cracked the mysteries of Sandler, all we'd have to show for it is another conventional romance. Instead of the indeterminate, risk-taking masterpiece we ultimately do get. Winning for losing's the name of this gambler's game. Not what you'd expect from Hollywood ...

As the plagiarism debate rages on (or at least percolates along) over at the Daily Harold, UW film prof/scholar David Bordwell offers up a few thoughts at his own blog on what plagiarism might mean in relation to film. "It’s interesting to speculate about what a plagiarized film would be," Bordwell muses. "You can plagiarize somebody’s script by passing it off as your own. ... But can you plagiarize a movie itself?"

Bordwell thinks it'd be hard to pull off. "I might swipe a finished film’s negative from the lab and then make new credit sequences that replace the director’s name with mine. But I could hardly expect to get away with it, since nearly everybody involved would notice. Perhaps I could find an old forgotten film and then stick my name in there somewhere. Again, though, I’d have to explain how I could have been around to make that 1930s Monogram musical or 1960s Taiwanese kung-fu film. ... I’d have to tell a plausible story about how the work came to be."

But what actually constitutes plagiarism, and how do you distinguish it from, say, an ordinary homage ... or even a simple remake? "All those copies and unauthorized remakes of Hollywood films, like Hong Kong Pretty Woman and Kaante, the Bollywood version of Reservoir Dogs, might count as plagiarism. (The producer of Kaante calls it an homage [Bordwell's link].) Still, my inclination is to say that plagiarism is a difficult concept to transfer to the visual/moving image arts; its core application may be literary and ... musical performance."

Setting aside the distinction federal judge Richard Posner apparently likes to draw between plagiarism and violations of copyright (which doesn't figure into Bordwell's reasoning at all), does it even make sense to talk about a movie being plagiarized? Even shot-by-shot appropriations, like Gus Van Sant's '99 version of Psycho, don't fit the definition comfortably (whatever that definition is, but let's not go there now ...). Consider the Van Sant for a moment: the cast isn't Hitchcock's, the physical locations aren't the same, the dialogue's recited with different emphases, different inflections, and even shots literally replicating the original's don't register the same way. Or actually can't: like the scene of Julianne Moore mounting the steps of the old Bates family manse, camera pulling up in half shot as she climbs; it's exactly as Hitchcock framed Vera Miles's front-on equivalent back in 1960 ... except nobody shoots this way anymore--at least not on staircases, where sides and up angles are practically de rigueur ... and never, ever with the actor's feet cut out of the frame! It's a point about contingency/temporality that Bordwell makes well enough, if only indirectly--the copy that isn't a copy, and how circumstance (the identity of the performers, the venues, etc) inevitably colors the way we interpret what we view. But it's minuscule departures from the template (not all of them advertent) that make Van Sant's clone so interesting and, in its own small way, "inventive," like one of those old Victorian illustrated teasers: so how many apostles can you find hidden in the rocks on the road to Jerusalem?

Another new year, and just about time for another of Lars von Trier's antinomian gifts to the world--which in the case of the recent Palm Springs International Film Festival (January 4-15) happened to be The Boss of It All, a feature von Trier shot (or that shot itself) in something called "Automavision," a computer-driven technology that purports to eliminate the need for a human cinematographer at all. As von Trier explains it, the director (in the present case, himself) decides on the "best possible" setup for the camera, then lets the computer zoom, jump, and/or whip around as it haphazardly chooses. "For a long time, my films have been handheld," he told Geoffrey Mcnab in a September 2006 interview in the Guardian. "That has to do with the fact that I am a control freak. With Automavision, the technique was that I would frame the picture first and then push a button on the computer. I was not in control--the computer was in control." 

Well, maybe ... though as UW-Madison film prof/scholar David Bordwell points out, there's inarguably a kind of "method to the madness, although the method, granted, is a bit mad. ... Let’s just say that von Trier’s famous 100-camera technique of Dancer in the Dark has been repurposed in a pretty unexpected way. And don’t believe what he says about surrendering to chance; the cuts are often very careful." Which might be said as well of last year's Manderlay, where apparently spastic camera swoops and hiccups and zooms (albeit noncomputerized) and raggedly mismatched shots were wedded to a voice track that functioned with an almost clocklike precision: as lean and purposive in its design as the visuals were all over the place ... which, not coincidentally, created a lot of interesting (or at the very least eccentric) formal juxtapositions.

But apparently not satisfied with one new gimmick per movie, von Trier in The Boss has decided on a second--an audience-participation puzzler called "Lookey," which invites the viewer to discover "mistakes" deliberately planted in the film. "For the casual observer, it's just a glitch," he explained to Screendaily.com (as quoted in the Guardian), but "for the initiated, it's a riddle to be solved. All Lookeys can be decoded by a system that is unique." While some folks wonder if Lookeys won't simply distract the audience from the film they're supposed to be watching, I'm wondering instead if the film itself won't become the ultimate MacGuffin, a kind of ROSEBUD writ large--like all those Renaissance nativities shoving the main event into the background, the better to admire the sumptuous foreground je ne sais quoi. Too late alas, poor Lars, it's all been done before!