On the History of Film Style [Hardcover]

David Bordwell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 1998

The study of cinematic style has profoundly shaped our attitude toward movies. Style assigns films to a tradition, distinguishes a classic, and signals the arrival of a pathbreaking innovation. David Bordwell now shows how film scholars have attempted to explain stylistic continuity and change across the history of cinema.

Bordwell scrutinizes the theories of style launched by André Bazin, Noël Burch, and other film historians. In the process he celebrates a century of cinema, integrating discussions of film classics such as The Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane with analyses of more current box-office successes such as Jaws and The Hunt for Red October. Examining the contributions of both noted and neglected directors, he considers the earliest filmmaking, the accomplishments of the silent era, the development of Hollywood, and the strides taken by European and Asian cinema in recent years.

On the History of Film Style proposes that stylistic developments often arise from filmmakers' search for engaging and efficient solutions to production problems. Bordwell traces this activity across history through a detailed discussion of cinematic staging. Illustrated with more than 400 frame enlargements, this wide-ranging study provides a new lens for viewing cinema.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Here, Bordwell (The Cinema of Eisenstein, LJ 10/15/93) refutes condemnations that the study of film style is "empiricist," "formalist," or prey to the fantasy of a "grand narrative." He explains how film scholars have tried to codify stylistic continuity and change over the past 80 years. Beginning with the "Standard Version" of stylistic history as espoused by Robert Brasillach and Maurice Bardeche, he moves on to treat Andre Bazin, Noel Burch, and more recent research programs. In so doing, Bordwell discusses classics like Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and popular contemporary works like The Hunt for Red October (1990). Liberally illustrated with frame enlargements, the book is informative, provocative, and recommended for all libraries.?Neal Baker, Ball State Univ., Muncie, IN
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

[Bordwell] explains how film scholars have tried to codify stylistic continuity and change over the past 80 years. Beginning with the 'Standard Version' of stylistic history as espoused by Robert Brasillach and Maurice Bardeche, he moves on to treat Andre Bazin, Noel Burch, and more recent research programs...Liberally illustrated with frame enlargements, the book is informative, provocative, and recommended for all libraries.
--Neal Baker (Library Journal )

On the History of Film Style is an important addition to the growing body of scholarly work in film historiography. Bordwell's analysis is perceptive and lucid in its discussion of how historians and theorists have sought to explain the changes in film style in the relatively short history of the cinema. It is to the text's advantage that Bordwell utilizes an abundance of frame enlargements to illustrate major points. Above all the book justifies a return to film studies as a humanistic discipline worthy of scholarly pursuit and a continuation for further research programs to be developed through investigative inquiry.
--Ronald W. Wilson (Institute of Film Studies, Nottingham )

Bordwell is always sharp and often funny...[He] has a wonderful way of making aesthetic propositions sound plausible while discreetly hinting at what he thinks is their error...[On the History of Film Style] surveys the field [starting] with what he calls 'the Standard Version' of the history of film style...Bordwell next summarizes Bazin's 'dialectical' version of film history...[and] offers a brilliant account of the history of staging in depth, taking us from Meliès and Porter through Sjöström's Ingeborg Holm and Stroheim's Greed to Preminger's Fallen Angel, Cukor's A Star is Born and Speilberg's Jaws.
--Michael Wood (London Review of Books [UK] )

Bordwell, the most prolific of film scholars, is certainly not anti-aesthetic. He is, if I may use appreciatively a word that it has been fashionable to use disparagingly, a formalist. In his approach to film style and film history, he takes after such art historians as Heinrich Wölfflin and E.H. Gombrich. At the outset of his latest and perhaps best book, On The History of Film Style, he asks Gombrich's question: 'Why does art have a history?' And though he does not exactly answer the question--neither did Gombrich--at the close he has earned the right to assert with some pride: 'There are people who can look at a film and say with good accuracy when and where it was made.' In the book's last chapter he takes a sustained look at an issue dear to Bazin, staging in depth, and gives an illuminating account of its stylistic history, of the ways it has varied and evolved, technically and expressively, with the use of shorter and longer lenses, short shots and long takes, in the works of filmmakers from Victor Sjöströ to Steven Spielberg, Sergei Eisenstein to Theo Angelopoulos, Otto Preminger to Hou Hsiao-Hsein. No one since Bazin has treated depth in such depth. And to this central issue of film aesthetics Bordwell brings a larger awareness of film history and a freshly discerning eye informed by that awareness. His discussion of film style under the regime of shallower focus brought on by color and wide screen--an area little explored--seemed to me especially impressive...This stylistic history...yield[s] penetrating critical insights.
--Gilberto Perez (Chronicle of Higher Education )

[On the History of Film Style is] exquisitely logical and virtually inarguable...There is so much that is helpful, useful, illuminating and superbly presented here: the explication of André Bazin's 'dialectical' view of film history and the unity of Noël Burch's 35 year-long 'oppositional program'; the account of how archives, libraries and traveling collections of prints have decisively shaped the 'canon' of film histories; and--most decisively--the rebutting of several highly influential, grand, neo-Hegelian scenarios of the cinema as a medium that slowly 'unfolds' or evolves towards its essence.
--Adrian Martin (RealTime )

This superb, insightful synthesis critiques the dozen or so major approaches to the cinema's stylistic development...[This] volume has all the familiar Bordwell virtues: enviably clear prose, copious documentation, superbly chosen film stills that concretely illustrate salient points, and keen, intelligent polemics. A pioneering study highly recommended for upper-division undergraduates, graduates, and faculty.
--S. Liebman (Choice )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (January 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674634284
• ISBN-13: 978-0674634282
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,142,222 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Bordwell is Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He holds a master's degree and a doctorate in film from the University of Iowa. His books include The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer (University of California Press, 1981), Narration in the Fiction Film (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (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), Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Harvard University Press, 2000), Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (University of California Press, 2005), The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (University of California Press, 2006), and The Poetics of Cinema (Routledge, 2008). He has won a University Distinguished Teaching Award and was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Copenhagen. His web site is www.davidbordwell.net.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not for beginners, August 6, 2002

By 

Charles Monia "sjexile" (San Jose, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: On the History of Film Style (Paperback)

From the title, I expected the work to be a history of stylistic evolution. Instead, it's a history of how film theory evolved. As such, it seems aimed at experts in film criticism . Given this focus, I found long stretches of it to be loaded with jargon and incomprehensible to a layman like myself. For that reason, I feel unqualified to judge it fairly. Consequently, the reader should take the three-star rating with a large grain of salt.

Nevertheless, I found much of value in this book. I especially enjoyed Bordwell's reconsideration of stylistic innovation as a creative response to practical problems rather than an outgrowth of theory. What's more, his analyses of editing techniques and movies such as "The Best Years of Our Lives" gave me a glimpse of what it might be like to really "see" a movie.

That aside, I suspect others like myself would find his "Film Art" to be a more accessible alternative to this title.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The way movies really look, September 26, 2000

By 

JAMES MCARDLE (Fryerstown, Victoria Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: On the History of Film Style (Hardcover)

Have you ever actually looked at a film? David Bordwell answers the tendency of recent film criticism and analysis to concentrate on the ideological and cultural motivations and manifestations of cinema. His interest is in really looking at the films themselves. Such a 'novel' standpoint has of course a very long tradition, but Bordwell uses the examination of mise-en-scene, framing, focus, control of colour and contrast values to uncover a great deal that is missed in other readings of cinema. Here is a history of film that a practitioner of cinematography (or plain old photography) will appreciate. He does not underestimate or oversimplify the sublety of a filmaker's intentions and gives credit to the ability of the director/cinematographer team to invent and develop a sophisticated visual language. Brodwells commentary is reinforced by 'photograms' (actual frames) selected from a authoratative familiarity with film that is not restricted to American cinema but includes Soviet, Japanese, Indian and European film. It is only the eyestraining size of their (monochrome) reproduction that is disappointing - but then, we can always go and see the films for ourselves!

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extremely useful book, September 24, 2006

By 

Nikica Gilic - See all my reviews

This review is from: On the History of Film Style (Paperback)

If you're a student of cinema, you will have great use of this book, written by probably most influential film scholar around;
his analysis of the film style are equally rewarding as are his comments on the history of cinema studies.

Is Bordwell always right, are his claims without doubt? Hardly. But as students of cinema in many countries know (the book was recently translated into Croatian as well), informed insight is but a beginning of the serious discussion and inspiring analysis...