Observations on film art

Paul Taberham’s impressive study of film animation was released earlier this month. The title brings to mind a major concern of David Bordwell in studying cinema, poetics as an aesthetic approach. Taberham has indeed been influenced by David’s writings and indeed mine, as he state in his introduction: Live-action cinema and television have received sustained critical attention within the field of poetics (see Bordwell 2007; Cavendish 2013; Mittell 2015; Çağlayan 2018), but animation has, by…

Kristin here: David’s passing was well over two years ago, and not surprisingly various tributes continue to appear. Film series, collections of essays by his colleagues and friends, many of whom he never met but whose lives were touched by him, and even the naming of institutions for him and me. (One such event will take place in September, and I shall blog about it then.) Scholars around the world have helped to explain the facets of his complex career and its impact on the field. One major…

Many of you may know that an anthology of writings about various aspects of David’s career has been in the works–partly because many of you contributed to it. Twenty-five to be precise, plus, as the cover above states, a foreword by me and a preface by Damien Chazelle. It has been edited by Charlie Keil and Murray Smith, two alumni of the Film Studies area of the Dept. of Communication Arts here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Editing collections of essays is a daunting task, so hats…

Kristin here Last year at the Le Giornate del Cinema Muto film festival in Pordenone, Italy, attendees had the first opportunity to purchase Lea Jacobs’ fresh-off-the-presses book, John Ford at Work: Production Histories from 1927 to 1939. It was also given away as one of the perks for higher-level donors. The title says “Production Histories,” but Jacobs covers more than that phrase might seem to suggest. She has drawn on the strengths of the film-studies area of the Department of…

Back in 2024, I was contacted by two Romanian film professors, Andrei Rus and Doru Nitescu of the Universitatea Nationala de Arta Teatrala si Cinematografica “I.L.Caragiale.” They had translated David’s and my textbook, Film History: an Introduction, the first of our books to appear in Romanian. As part of the activities around its release, they […]