Description: 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 Wlfflin 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 Sjstr 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.

Please Wait