THE WAY BORDWELL TELLS IT: ON CLASSICAL AND POST-CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD CINEMA David Bordwell might well be the

most well-known and respected film scholar of our time. His Film Art, co-authored with his long-time partner Kristin Thompson in 1979 and currently in its 7th edition, has surely appeared on more curriculums the world over than any other book on film. Should it ever be dethroned, the couples exceptionally comprehensive Film History from 1994 might well be the most likely contender for the top spot. For The Classical Hollywood Cinema Bordwell and Thompson were joined by Janet Staiger. The book charts the development of a set of aesthetic norms and industrial practices from 1917 to 1960. Published in 1985, but written over a period of more than five years, it is one of the most gargantuan empirical endeavors ever in the area of film studies. 1985 also saw the publication of Bordwells Narration in the Fiction Film, a key text on cinematic narration that also introduced the cognitive perspective which came to challenge the dominant psychoanalytical paradigm. In Making Meaning from 1989, a kind of poetics of film criticism, Bordwell maps the interpretative practices of film writers. Despite being largely descriptive rather than evaluative in nature, it appears to be such a damning indictment of what Bordwell calls Interpretation Inc. that it has been largely hushed up. He has also written three books on individual directors Dreyer, Ozu, and Eisenstein as well as one on Hong Kong cinema. Now Bordwell has decided to have his say in one of the most talked-about issues among film scholars over the past couple of decades: Hollywoods purported post-classicism. Its a question one of the few, perhaps that seems to fascinate academics and regular moviegoers alike: Has Hollywood entered a new era? And if so, when did it start? And what is it, precisely, that has changed? Though the topic has received plenty of attention, there simply has not been a comprehensive and systematic study of the contemporary period on a par with The Classical Hollywood Cinema. But The Way Hollywood Tells It goes some way towards rectifying that. A kind of sequel that picks up where the first book left off, it traces changes in storytelling and stylistic conventions over the past 50 years. At the same time, Bordwell suggests that these changes are best understood as extensions of and adjustments to, rather than breaks with, classical norms. Although by no means the final word on contemporary Hollywood cinema, The Way Hollywood Tells It is by far the most in-depth investigation of it to date, and it is sure to be the first book to which future researchers will turn. In keeping with the form of inquiry that he calls a historical poetics of cinema, the book is essentially descriptive and explanatory rather than evaluative and interpretive. Bordwells attention to detail, coupled with an unsurpassed and quite possibly unsurpassable knowledge of film history, is sure to make his latest book one that will be debated and deliberated in years to come. Erlend Lavik, Phd student at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen, conducted this interview with Bordwell in June. You are associated with a number of theories or approaches: constructivism, neo-formalism, cognitivism, and historical poetics. Yet clearly these terms are related. Could you say something about the relationship between these various labels?

DB: What Im trying to do is to participate in or construct a historical poetics of cinema, and we can take that to be something like What are the principles by which films are made in different historical periods and how might we compare them?. These constructional principles include the kinds of spectator effects theyre aimed at. That would be the overall umbrella concept. Within that the issue of constructivist psychology or cognitivism comes up because one of the things that a poetics addresses is how works are engineered or designed to be comprehensible. Since I was looking at the principles of films design from the standpoint of narrative construction, I kept running up against the fact that the regularities I saw seemed to be best explained by cognitive conceptions of the spectator, and more specifically constructivist psychology within cognitivism. So the psychological dimension grew out of trying to understand the effects of formal systems. Neo-formalism is something that Kristin Thompsons work is associated with, and it shows the indebtedness of her work to Russian formalist poetics. I havent really self-consciously used that term myself very much, because it carries so much baggage. But it concentrates on form and style. The area I work in doesnt focus so much on theme. In my practical criticism, when Im trying to talk about individual films or filmmakers, I try to give equal weight to thematic factors. But in terms of the theoretical or historical studies I do, theme probably counts for the least. So neoformalism is a subcategory of historical poetics? DB: I would say that historical poetics has many different possibilities, and that the kind of neofomalism that Kristin practices that is very much oriented towards Schlovskys concept of defamiliarization is one potential direction. But I have to say that Ive never really found the concept of defamiliarization as cogent or attractive as some people have. Its an aesthetic concept, but its very broad and sometimes vague. I have alluded to it on occasion, but I dont consider it central to the kind of research projects that I undertake. Let me ask you a question about cognitivism. When Post-Theory1 came out 10 years ago, one had the sense that we were on the threshold of almost a paradigm shift within film studies. But it seems to me that that hasnt quite happened, at least not in the sense that it has produced very many new books or articles in academic journals. Is it fair to say that it has gone a bit quiet? DB: For Post-Theory we tried to gather a lot of people who did very diverse work that didnt seem to fit easily into what was the dominant or reigning conceptions, which were either psychoanalytic or culturalist2, particularly cultural studies. I dont think we tried to announce it as a cognitivist manual, but we wanted to suggest that there was a lot of other work to be done. But youre right, I wouldnt have said that it was anything like a paradigm shift. And I havent actually pursued the cognitive model as much as other people have. My own work has taken a different direction. But I would say that now nearly everybody looks at cinema from a standpoint of what if you want to talk about its effects on spectators we might call rational social action. The psychoanalytic model is waning, or has waned quite a lot, at least in the cultures that I know. People no longer feel it is
1

Anthology from 1996 that Bordwell co-edited with Nol Carroll. The book confronts so-called Grand Theories, particularly psychoanalysis, and suggests that cognitivism represents a more productive approach to the study of film. 2 Bordwell uses the term culturalism to refer to various traditions which claim that the social and psychic functions of cinema are governed by sweeping cultural mechanisms. He identifies three strands of culturalism: the Frankfurt school, postmodernism, and Cultural Studies.

necessary to study Lacan before they study cinema. Certainly, there are some prominent people who continue to advocate that, like [Slavoj] iek and others, but I dont get the sense that thats the mainstream anymore. I think what we have now is a lot of different research programs that pursue different things. I think the cognitive program is pursued more actively in Europe than in the US at this point. It has obviously taken its place as one of many other possible research avenues. So we could perhaps say that cognitivism has been helpful in stopping film scholars from asking some unhelpful questions? DB: Maybe it has inoculated us a little bit against some fruitless questions. But I also think that this parallels developments in the human sciences. I think that even today the source of a lot of theory in the humanities comes from literary theory, and I think what were seeing is partly due to the fact that deconstruction and psychoanalysis are faltering. The absence of any new really powerful literary theory has made more people in those disciplines look to other alternatives more. If I had to say one thing that I see very widely in literary theory maybe its just because of the books that I choose to read but it does seem to me that literary theory is getting more and more aware of evolutionary theories. And there are so many people teaching and researching literature that even if a very small research program gets started there tend to be a lot of people doing it. My sense is that the reigning theory though Im disinclined to call it a theory is the cultural studies perspective. And it isnt anywhere near as abstract or philosophically grounded a theory as, say, Lacanian psychoanalysis was, or postmodernism is. I think maybe this is why we see the return to history and to research, even among people who used to do quite abstract theory. But it is interesting, I think, that in the US there still hasnt really been, in film studies, a serious discussion of the comparative advantages and disadvantages of these different theoretical perspectives. Post-Theory was confrontational because we were prepared to criticize alternative theories. I havent seen a comparable book explaining and defending psychoanalysis or cultural studies that actually tries to engage with critiques of alternative research programs. You get more argument, I think, within the theoretical research programs themselves. So there are or were, at least Lacanians who would argue about what Lacan really meant, but there doesnt seem to be very many people who want to argue whether he was right (laughs). I dont believe that in print theres been a serious effort to engage with cognitive film theory as a group enterprise. I could be wrong about that, I havent seen everything. But it does seem that its a kind of happy pacifism that reigns. Lets turn to your latest book. It is inevitable that comparisons will be made to The Classical Hollywood Cinema. People will no doubt see The Way Hollywood Tells It as a kind of sequel, but they are also quite different in some respects. I have noticed two things in particular, though they may be related. First, your writing style seems livelier, and now and then you also offer your opinions on your likes and dislikes. So that makes it an easier and more enjoyable read than the first book. The second thing that I noticed was that it somehow feels less scientific. The amount and range of research behind it is still remarkable. But you do not examine a random sample of films, and things like that. So there are obviously certain methodological differences too. DB: Ever since the late 90s, since On the History of Film Style once I got my ideas clearer to myself, after 15 or 20 years or so trying to figure out what those ideas were I thought I could make them more energized and available, particularly to students.

Also, the first Hollywood book has a more complex argument. It tries to take into account the historical changes that were going on at several levels, and that really required a lot of research. This book takes for granted the immense amount of work that has been done on the contemporary studio system. We were among the first to talk about the early years of American cinema from an industrial perspective, particularly the teens and the twenties, the consolidation of that system. A lot of what Janet and Kristin did on the industry was new research, and so it was a more sizeable undertaking. This time I could take for granted that the structure and the conduct of the industry were pretty well established. I wanted to write a book that was still solidly researched, but that didnt try to bite off as big a chunk. I felt the best way to try to convince people that there was a continuity to classical cinema was to concentrate on the films. So a lot of the institutional stuff is either off-stage or barely visible. Its really the films and the filmmakers, and the testimony of filmmakers and the technology and how those interface, that come to the fore. That makes it a thinner book, not just physically, but in terms of its conceptual structure. But on the other hand, perhaps it becomes a little more forceful this way, maybe the main points become clearer. So its a trade-off. Its also, of course, an effort to respond to contemporary debates. I wanted to have my say in the debate about postclassical cinema because people were often asking me about it when I was giving a talk on something. I would say it is not as rigorous or in-depth as the first book. And Im getting older as well. Im not sure I could do the research I did in 1980 again. One term that was central to The Classical Hollywood Cinema was the concept of the dominant, which you adopted from Russian formalism, where it designates a component that rules, determines and transforms the remaining components. For you, the dominant of the classical Hollywood cinema was a specific sort of narrative causality. But in The Way Hollywood Tells It you dont invoke the dominant. One of the criticisms that the first book met with was that its use of this term provided it with a very neat, tidy, economical historical account, but that the price you pay is that it becomes hard to account for structured tensions within the classical paradigm. So I guess the argument has been that there is a trade-off between an economical framework and DB:one that is more nuanced or more detailed. Yeah, I think that is a somewhat fair criticism. I think the concept of the dominant was a way to organize a lot of material conceptually, and I still believe that those particular narrative principles play a crucial role in Hollywood cinema. But in the new book, for the sake of conceptual clarity, I didnt introduce that theoretical framework. On the point of the objection I guess I would say that the problem with a lot of protestations is that they are a posteriori objections. That is, there isnt a comparable body of documentation for an alternative position. There might be elements in tension with the dominant, and people have rehearsed those. They say that genres like comedy, melodrama, and the musical seem to strain against narrative causality. I tend to believe that claim is slightly exaggerated. I do believe you can find one-off cases, like a Wheeler and Woolsey film or something like that. Yeah, there are a few of those, I wouldnt deny it. They come out of the vaudevillian tradition and the narratives are pretty inconsequential. We were not trying to explain the Marx brothers movies, by and large. But I should note that those movies do have stories. They are not just a string of vaudeville acts. Why not? Why couldnt they be? If thats their primary appeal surely the filmmakers have made a mistake in trying to string the Marx brothers into a story?

You might compare the classical cinema to a building. A building needs a blueprint. Take a French cathedral: we go in and look at the stained glass windows and the beautiful carvings and the tapestries. You might want to say the building is secondary to all those attractions. But it isnt really, because the buildings construction is often designed to set those off. And the building is at least a necessary condition for them. If it were really the case that those were the true reasons we went into a cathedral, they should just as easily be hanging in a museum. But we can find legitimate exceptions, I have no doubt of it. But we made an inductive generalization, and most inductive generalizations have exceptions. When we plot averages, for instance, there may be no member of the population that were sampling that is exactly average. But still, that measure of the average is useful information. Finally, I think theres an advantage to having a simple theory if you try to wring or squeeze everything you can out of it. The concept of the dominant is a heuristic device, to some degree. It helps us see things. Probably the most frequent criticism of The Classical Hollywood Cinema has been that the book homogenizes the films from the classical period, that it fails to account for the nonclassical features of much of that period. So it may come as a surprise to some that in The Way Hollywood Tells It your portrayal of the films from the studio period displays a tremendous diversity. DB: A lot proceeds from the particular research questions that were asking, and the question that really drove the first book was: If we assume there was a system to this filmmaking, how did it come into existence, and what explains its stability over time?. We were not explaining its diversity. The new book asks: How can we best track continuity and change?. Thats a slightly different question. Classical narration can absorb a wide variety of materials and still tell a story in an engaging, entertaining, edifying way. It seems to me to be a good point of departure to examine how the pressures towards diversifying films, from the studio product to the indie product, have allowed for a kind of controlled variation that is still subsumable to this tradition of narration. And I think its true that this book does emphasize a range of diversity thats greater than the earlier one. You learn things from peoples responses, so if I could rewrite The Classical Hollywood Cinema I would put in some notes and warnings. There seems to be an inherent stability to the system, and we do say that. But I think we should have said it more frequently in the course of the book and granted and devoted some more time to diversification more explicitly. Let me pick up on the bounds of difference. It has to do with one move you make several times in your latest book: first, you state the ways in which some film seemingly comes into conflict with classical principles, but then you conclude by saying that ultimately the film is still comprehensible/intelligible to audiences, and you seem to take this as evidence that the film is classical after all. Could one say that all films whose syuzhet cues spectators to construct a logical and coherent fabula are classical?3 DB: Only at a very general level. There would still have to be certain features of that coherent fabula. There would still have to be, prototypically, heterosexual romance, appointments, deadlines,
3

The terms fabula and syuzhet derive from Russian formalism. A films syuzhet is its concrete manifestation of audiovisual material. The fabula is a mental construction: the total, chronological narrative that viewers create based on the specific cues in the syuzhet.

etc. I mean, the middle level is really important. It isnt just about coherence. Its about individuated psychology and protagonist functions. Its about how time and space are subordinate to causality. And those features are as much classical as the more general idea that the syuzhet allows you to construct a coherent fabula. It does so according to certain more middle-range principles. Thats still a broad definition. You have written an article on Danish film that suggests that the Dogme films are quite classical. This seems somewhat ironic, however, given that the Dogme movement was deliberately trying to be something that Hollywood wasnt. DB: Yeah, good luck! (laughs) I mean, often artworks that break with tradition turn out to be indebted to it at the same time. And some of the ways that they break with tradition are simply in a way the most visible things. But to take an example from the article you mentioned Mifunes Last Song thats a classically constructed narrative, even the cutting patterns. To me its a very interesting comparison to von Trier. You have the handheld camera in Mifune, but the cuts match action perfectly. But if you look at The Idiots by von Trier, every cut breaks the timeframe. You never have a match on action in that film.4 You just get every scene broken into these fragments, and sometimes the shots are quite short. So theres this constant skipping over of time. On the stylistic level thats a pretty unclassical choice. So that would be an example of a film that is comprehensible but still unclassical? DB: Well, I havent done a detailed analysis, but my impression after watching it a few times is that The Idiots really does veer off, but is still comprehensible. There may be some questions, but basically it is comprehensible. And I guess if we introduced the concept of theme, you could make an even stronger case for its non-classicism. DB: Yeah, also that its thematics dont fit the classical model, thats right. This is always a case of judging along several dimensions, and a lot of what we would consider European art cinema always owes something to classicism, I think. The Dogme filmmakers say things like you cant have a gun, but theyre melodramas. I mean, what is more melodramatic than The Celebration? A family reunion at which one of the children divulges the hidden secrets of the family. Radical differences are really hard to attain, I think. My take on this is that your concept of classicism is highly sensitive to historical continuity, and the way you account for change within that particular framework is pretty much irrefutable. But at the same time there may be a price to pay for this, in that the reader feels a certain frustration that nothing is really new. And we seem to be geared towards change, so we would very much like to be able to say that some things are new, and that seems to be quite hard within the particular framework that you operate with.

A match on action is a cut that connects two views of the same action. Movement begun in the first shot is picked up in the second one. This cues the audience to concentrate on the continuity rather than on the breaks in the transition between set-ups.

DB: Nothing is new all at once, would be the way I would modify it. Do I think there have been innovations? Absolutely! Do I think theres been change? Completely! Its just like [the Thodore Gricault painting] The Raft of the Medusa: youre out at sea and you cant take all the planks away and put in all new planks, or the boat sinks. You have to change the planks one at a time. But historically, not all the planks have ever been changed. Some planks were there at the beginning of the voyage and are still there in the middle of the sea. Can we ever get beyond personalized causality in the Hollywood film? I dont think we have, but its possible, maybe. But I wouldnt bet my house on it. Leonard Meyer calls it trended change. You can have almost unpredictable change, but within certain boundaries. His example was the weather. We might have a hurricane soon, but were not going to have a snowstorm at this point in time. I know that feeling on the part of the reader. I know why people wish for it to be different. I just havent seen a compelling argument for why it should be different. Well, its not really an argument that refutes your framework, but it says that there is a trade-off. DB: Yeah, there is a trade-off. But, you know, most of my work has been too academic for the mainstream, and its the wrong academic approach for most of my colleges. So in that sense Im used to having people feel frustrated! (laughs). An important concept in your latest book is intensified continuity,5 which you introduced in an article in Film Quarterly in 2002, and you expand on it in the book. I have certain reservations with this term, because it sounds like even more continuity. I guess its easy to make that assumption because it would be a parallel argument to the one that Kristin Thompson makes concerning narrative conventions in Storytelling in the New Hollywood: that high concept is merely an intensification of something that has been present in Hollywood films all along. But it is not actually a strictly analogous argument that you make. It is not that there is even more continuity for example, you discuss the tendency of some recent films to cut across the 180 degree line in dialogue scenes but that the continuity is more frenetic. Well, I wanted to be able to summarize it in a kind of sloganistic way, so I could refer to it as a kind of stylistic change. But I did get this comment from readers beforehand that they didnt like the term intensified. They didnt have an alternative, but I tried to define it loosely, saying it is more amplified, more raised to the next power. And I meant it to carry the idea that that it is continuity plus, so to speak. One fascinating observation you make in The Way Hollywood Tells It is that more outr techniques in contemporary cinema do not usually prevent us from comprehending the story. Audiences threshold for obtrusiveness increases all the time. You suggest that the triumph of intensified continuity reminds us that as styles change, so do viewing skills. That is undoubtedly true, but it goes both ways, doesnt it? As viewing skills change, so do cinematic styles. Do you think this might explain some of the features of intensified continuity, like
5

Intensified continuity is characterized by four strategies: fast editing, use of extreme lens lengths, reliance on close shots, and free-ranging camera movements.

elliptical and non-chronological stories, the lack of establishing shots, or even the appetite for disorienting viewers momentarily in action sequences? In other words, that this is a way of providing contemporary viewers with some cognitive work, to challenge our mental capabilities? DB: Yeah, thats a very good point. It would be worth examining. If you take the puzzle film6 certain audiences do expect to be challenged either in terms of guessing the plot twist that is going to come, or who is going to get killed, all those things that we associate with contemporary horror films or thrillers. And this kind of cognitive work, while sometimes present in studio filmmaking, is much more salient now, in particular for young audiences. So you could turn it around and say that as viewing skills change, films try to cater to those. Puzzle films demand to be seen more than once on the presumption that with DVD you can go through it slowly and discover new things. And that will then make filmmakers make more dense movies. Again, of course, I would probably say that such films too are constrained by the overall architecture. Take Donnie Darko, for instance. It has some features of fantasy cinema, of alternative realities and parallel universes and those kinds of things. What is intriguing about it is the way it leads into and out of these alternative universes. But it still exists within a framework that to a considerable degree is recognizable as a classical story: disaffected boy out of keeping with his classmates; his family is dysfunctional; Halloween is a time when horror takes place. There are a lot of generic and compositional factors that come in. But of course you need those in order to get your new effects. If we take a popular TV drama like The West Wing, even, many episodes begin right in the middle of a scene or with a dialogue that gives you no way of knowing what is really going on, because there has been no exposition. That comes later. So you need to piece the story together in a way that is a little bit more demanding. Maybe one way of looking at that is to see it as a kind of jolt to the cognitive system that is experienced as pleasurable. DB: Absolutely, and this is a common pattern. How difficult something is depends, I suppose, on how familiar it is. You probably know Steven Johnsons book, Everything Good Is Bad for You. Basically, his claim is that popular culture has become more cognitively demanding, and people are demanding more cognitive work in their popular culture. My feeling is that there is something right about that. But I also think that his examples are very selectively chosen. Instead of comparing Survivor to The Price Is Right, what if we compared it to Jeopardy, where you actually had to know a lot? So I think he picks and chooses his examples. Nevertheless, there is something there, I think. More people have been to college now than ever before, and there are marks of distinction all along popular culture. There are lots of ways in which you could explain a general trend, and maybe we are seeing a general trend. But on the other hand you have a lot of popular culture that is absolutely mindless, and becoming more mindless. You may talk of Magnolia as a complicated film to track, but there are a lot of Jean-Claude van Damme films too that arent that cognitively demanding. But I do think at least one tier of popular culture is this way.

The term indicates a trend in the new Hollywood, particularly in the 90s. Puzzle films are characterized by selfconscious, playful narration. The Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, and Memento are among the most wellknown examples of this type of film.

After a long and esteemed academic career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Bordwell recently retired. His decision is certainly not down to a lack of enthusiasm. Over the course of an early summer PhD seminar in Ebeltoft, Denmark, during which this interview was conducted, Bordwell took part in discussions ranging from contemporary action cinema to silent Danish film with genuine passion. He looks forward to the opportunity to attend even more film festival now that he is in retirement, and he will continue to write.