Archive: Book Reviews, August 2001
Film Art: An Introduction
By David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 1997; ISBN 0-07-114073-5, xiii + 496 pp., $45.93 (hbk)
A Review by Raymond J. Haberski, Jr, Ohio University, USA
In 1939, Lewis Jacobs, a former editor of the politically left journal Experimental Cinema, published a book entitled The Rise of the American Film. With that work, Jacobs made a significant contribution to the history of movies, mostly because he treated the subject so seriously. He made the case that not only did movies have a history comparable to the other arts, he argued that movies were in fact an artistic expression. That is now a standard assumption; students the world over can take courses in film studies and can even graduate from film departments and schools - something unthinkable sixty years ago. A product of this transition is the crop of scholars devoted to the study of motion pictures. Two at the top of that profession are David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson.
Bordwell and Thompson are authors of a well written and smartly conceived text entitled Film Art: An Introduction. They both teach at the prestigious Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin and both gained Ph.D.s from Iowa University's well-respected graduate program. They are fine teachers and scholars who have produced a lengthy list of monographs and survey textbooks. Bordwell has written on Theodore Dreyer, Ozu, Eisenstein, and the language of cinema. Thompson has published on Eisenstein as well, and the large and fascinating subject of American movie exports to Europe during the silent film era.
In producing the book under review here, the authors set out to survey the world of film aesthetics. Their approach is fairly straight-forward: they look at individual films as one might a painting or a sculpture and seek to place movies in a larger stream of history. They explain that each film is "an artifact - made in particular ways, having a certain wholeness and unity, existing in history" (x). They avoid unnecessary jargon; explain difficult ideas (such as mise-en-scene) briefly but clearly; and offer a very satisfying work for students as well as teachers looking for a useful text.
It is clear from the organization of their book as well as the central themes it proposes that both authors are intellectual children of the 1950s and 1960s. They accept the efforts of the French New Wave to catalog and analyze movies by directors and use the formal construction of the film as a window onto its social meaning and historical implications. For example, early in the book they write "it is through the director's control of the shooting and assembly phases that the film's form and style crystallize" (28). Thus readers will be treated to extended discussions of Alfred Hitchcock, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, Orson Welles, and other directors and documentarians whose work is probably either familiar to most people or whose films tend to distinguish them from their contemporaries.
And, yet, this book does not resemble Andrew Sarris's latest work, You Ain't Heard Nothin Yet, because it does not dwell on particular directors, rather it uses them and their movies to illustrate larger points about the composition of a film. For example, Bordwell and Thompson conduct an involved discussion of The Wizard of Oz in order to explore different ways to tell a story and the various levels of meaning one might glean from a movie's narrative. The authors suggest that when moviegoers attempt to analyze a film they should:
Not leave behind the particular and concrete features of a film. We should strive to make our interpretations precise by seeing how each film's thematic meanings are suggested by the film's total system. In a film, both explicit and implicit meanings depend closely on the relations between narrative and style (75).
In regard to The Wizard of Oz, they offer multiple meanings of the film - one more detailed than the last - that correspond to the density of context into which one fits the film. The authors do not, however, subscribe to a limitless analytical universe in which meaning can be found through cascading levels of abstraction. "As analysts," they warn, "we must balance our concern for that concrete system with our urge to assign it wider significance" (77). In other words, as good students, we should consider a film's technical form along with its historical context and its makers intentions - even if they are not fully known.
One of the greatest values of this book is its level-headed approach to evaluating movies. In a brief section entitled "Evaluation," Bordwell and Thompson provide basic criteria that make a movie good. Their list includes coherence, intensity of effect, complexity, and originality. Viewers should, of course, weigh such criteria according to the type of film under review. But the authors believe that some immutable standards exist that can help students judge movies. "Ninety minutes of a black screen," they write, "would make for an original film but not a very complex one. A 'slasher' movie may create great intensity in certain scenes but be wholly unoriginal, as well as disorganized and simplistic" (78).
This last statement intimates the sometimes strange dilemma posed by evaluating movies. Can we really take "slasher" films seriously? Should we subject a medium made by committee for mass consumption on Friday night dates to the same or similar standards that we would apply to a serious work of art? As the authors make clear in their book, we can and should take films seriously but do so selectively. Excluded from their survey, therefore, are movies simply not worth discussing. By including those films and directors who take their craft seriously and strive to create a product worth more than the price of popcorn, the authors sensibly articulate the dynamics of film art. They make it relatively easy to determine what makes a movie such as Raging Bull both a technical and narrative masterpiece. Even more than that, though, by the end of the book, I found myself competently considering both the technical as well as the intellectual composition of movies. Perhaps that is the highest praise I can give this work.
The book also has a few technical features worth noting. At the end of each chapter the authors include a section called "Notes and Queries" that serves as a collection of brief bibliographic essays. They also include a brief glossary as well as a two-page list of internet web sites for information on a variety of subjects ranging from studios to museums. And while the chapter on film history is an extremely brief thirty pages, there is a fair bibliography attached to it. For a more exhaustive survey of the subject, see Bordwell and Thompson's other major textbook, Film History: An Introduction.