David Bordwell

Book DescriptionA film tells its story not only through dialogue and actors' performances but also through the director's control of movement and shot design. Figures Traced in Light is a detailed consideration of how cinematic staging

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

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. Ab...

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.

In Planet Hong Kong David Bordwell trains virtually every critical weapon in the cinema studies arsenal on a film industry that has, ironically, been marginalized by its own popular success. Film scholars will be grateful for its theoretical breadth and acuity; film fans will be happy with the graceful way Bordwell weaves into his chapters an extraordinary amount of telling anecdote; and filmmaker...

Bringing together twenty-five years of work on what he has called the "historical poetics of cinema," David Bordwell presents an extended analysis of a key question for film studies: how are films made, in particular historical contexts, in order to achieve certain effects? For Bordwell, films are made things, existing within historical contexts, and aim to create determinate effects. Beginning wi...