Episode #72 - David Bordwell (Daisy Kenyon)

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"How much can we squeeze out if we treat films very simple? Sometimes going simple, even with complicated filmmakers, yields things that are often taken for granted."

Truffaut remarked there was cinema before Godard and cinema after Godard. The academic discipline of Film Studies could be said to have its own Godard in David Bordwell, the author of some of the most influential books in understanding the history of film style. In this sprawling conversation, David discusses his upbringing that led him to movies and his first steps in helping spearhead the neo-formalist movement of film criticism. He looks back at the formation of poetics, his role in thinking about the conventions that tell us a film story, the role of auteurism as problem-solvers, and how popular film criticism has influenced in his more recent work. They swing through conversations on art history, Jean-Luc Godard, new media, Hong Kong filmmaking, and Robin Wood. Finally, David and Peter discuss Daisy Kenyon, a 1947 Joan Crawford-Dana Andrews-Henry Fonda melodrama from Otto Preminger with so many radical choices in its delivery of narrative one might mistake it for being a subversive text, even if it's all convention.

0:00-2:40 Opening

3:27-10:22  Establishing Shots - Texture and Claire Denis
11:07-1:27:05 Deep Focus - David Bordwell

1:28:10-1:30:37 Mubi Sponsorship
1:32:20-1:52:00 Double Exposure - Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger)

1:52:02-1:56:23 Close

Read David Bordwell at Observations on Film Art alongside Kristin Thompson.
David's books include: Film Art: An Introduction, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, Planet Hong Kong, Figures Traced in Light, On The History of Film Style, Post Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, Narration in the Fiction Film, Poetics of Cinema, 

Episode #71 - Kristin Thompson (How Green Was My Valley)

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"You always start with saying, 'What is this film trying to do?'"

If you've taken a film studies course in the last couple decades, you likely came across Film Art on the required book purchases. Chances are you first learned how to investigate the structure of a film (narrative, editing, mise-en-scene, sound, etc) before learning how to recognize ideology, or apply psychoanalytic theories. Wherever one's interest lie in looking at cinema, the work by film scholar Kristin Thompson over the last four decades has provided intensive groundwork into looking at Hollywood cinema's most intuitive principles and beyond. Kristin sits down to traces her entrance into academic film studies and developing a method for understanding form as adapted from Russian theories, the history of classical structure as developed by Hollywood and its legacy both abroad in the silent era and continuing into even today's so-called "VFX-driven" movies, and her work on The Lord of the Rings franchise and its game-changing success in the new century. Finally, the two sit down to look at John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, which employs unique methods of narrative strategy and compositional staging to create a poetic "three-hankie picture" (and well deserving of its 1941 Oscar).

0:00-3:03 Opening

4:21-11:36  Establishing Shots - Manhunter
12:21-58:18 Deep Focus - Kristin Thompson

59:27-1:02:07 Mubi Sponsorship
1:03:49-1:22:27 Double Exposure - How Green Was My Valley (John Ford)

1:22:31-1:24:09 Close

Read Kristin Thompson at Observations on Film Art alongside David Bordwell.
Kristin's books include: Film Art: An Introduction, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Breaking the Glass Armor,  Storytelling in New Hollywood, The Frodo Franchise, Eisenstein's Ivan The Terrible, Exporting Entertainment, and Herr Lubistch Goes to Hollywood.