David Bordwell’s fascination with precise and disciplined filmmakers, such as Dreyer, Bresson, or Ozu, leads many to view him as a champion of the art cinema, which he was, but this characterization ignores how important his writing on popular cinema has been for many of us. The perceived divide between the two says more about our own investments in cultural hierarchies than his. Being a formalist who was interested in both “normative” practices and stylistic accomplishments made it possible for him to appreciate popular films without preconceptions. Here, I want to explore the rhetorical strategies Bordwell deploys in one of his most important essays on popular film, “Aesthetics in Action: Kung Fu, Gunplay and Cinematic Expression,”[i] which paved the way for Planet Hong Kong.

The first two paragraphs set the stage for the growing interest in 1980s Hong Kong cinema and establish his own credentials as a longstanding fan of the genre (an aca-fan as it were). He recounts his discovery that “many of the Hong Kong action films I enjoyed… have become the object of admiration among festival programmers, baby boomers, and graduate students living on ramen noodles.” He places his long-standing “enjoyment” alongside the relatively recent “admiration” of the educated elites, suggesting from the first sentence that pleasure and affect are central here. By the end of the paragraph, he evokes a clerk at his local video store who proclaimed, “John Woo is God.” 

The second paragraph declares his positionality, first acknowledging that in writing about these films, he may be perceived as “another gwailo,” then proclaiming an interest in HK cinema going back to his 20s when he saw a double bill of Fist of Fury (1972) and Five Fingers of Death (1972). Bordwell always seems to recall every film he ever saw, whenever and whereever. He then modestly qualifies his expertise against the most hardcore genre fans, while also claiming an approach that “largely go[es] undiscussed, even by those Chinese critics whose work is available in the languages I read” (2012, 396). He describes himself as an “interested outsider,” though I know he owned a large number of prints of kung fu movies. He wants us to know precisely where he is coming from here, much as I and others regard disclosing our status as aca-fans to be an ethical and epistemological stance, Throughout, he situates his perspective alongside other vantage points, comparing himself to the author of Sex and Zen and a Bullet in the Head, describing this “charming” and “flippant” (2012, 395) book as also exoticizing and anti-intellectual.

Reading the essay is to experience a gradual opening up of the different knowledge and cultural references. He starts with a close reading of action scenes from Richard Donner’s 1987 Lethal Weapon and Law Man’s 1986 Hearty Response neither director is among the most distinguished working in the genre. He applies his formalism to explain, “If Hollywood movies sketch a pervasive but often inexact sense of physical action, the Hong Kong norm aims to maximize the action’s legibility” (2012, 401). That term, “legibility,” may be one of the most useful concepts in an essay overflowing with insights about camerawork, editing, scoring, and performance techniques compared across two distinct cinemas and their modes of production. I find myself thinking about the hyperbolic legibility of recent Tollywood films, such as S. S. Rajamouli,’s 2022 RRR, which stress “the concreteness and clarity of each gesture” (2012, 401).

Bordwell’s discerning eye may help even the most hardcore fan look at these genre flicks with fresh perspective. As the essay continues, he identifies what makes the HK films distinctive and effective for their desired and desiring audiences__ for example, the play between energy and balance in the action scenes, the ability to create emphasis and tonal differences given the “expressive amplification” in each scene, and the ways that the action scenes rely more on performance skills than their American counterparts do. He writes, “I call this tendency expressive amplification… [because] the filmmaker tries to endow the action with vivid or emotional qualities…to characterize each chase or fight distinctly…I call this tendency expressive amplification because the emotional qualities aren’t presented laconically; the filmic handling magnifies them” (2012, 407).

Each formal observation emphasizes the films’ visceral qualities, how they make us “feel the blow” through “a piercing arousal of the… senses and emotions” (2012, 410) Here, I can’t help but think of Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of the popular aesthetic as delivering “more bang for our buck.” Even though he appreciates the contemplative “distance” of the art cinema, he also values popular cinema for its affective and kinesthetic qualities, which he discusses with no embarrassment or condescension. Bordwell takes these films seriously on their own terms making him an exceptional critic of popular cinema.

Bordwell’s extraordinary openness is displayed by the various axes of comparisons he uses to situate them precisely within film history. We’ve already referenced his extended comparison between Man and Donner but consider the persistence with which he circles back to the Soviet Montage theorists (themselves avant-garde rather than popular filmmakers). He cites the ways that Hollywood action scenes rely on the “Kuleshov effect” and on “Pudovkin-style Constructive editing” (2012, 410). He sees John Woo’s films as “far closer to the tradition of Sergei Eisenstein than of Raoul Walsh or Steven Spielberg” (2012, 410) In doing so, he brings to the surfaces the affective affordances and the kinetic energy underlying Eisenstein’s aesthetic theories and how ‘the unabashedly popular cinema of Mack Sennett and Douglas Fairbanks and William S. Hart” might anticipate what Eisenstein would have thought about Jet Li. 

Bordwell’s ability to make such generative comparisons gives his writing such authority. And he continues make use of it through the last paragraphs where he cites parallels and differences between contemporary Chinese and Japanese cinema (specifically the Zatoichi and Lone Wolf and Cub films, which represent relatively deep cuts in a cinema studies context). And he is also capable of tapping ideas from other arts as he shows how the rhythm of the pause-burst-pause pattern he locates in Woo’s gunplay scenes involves “a balance between poised stillness and swift attack or defense” that parallels “the Beijing Opera tradition of liang hsiang” (‘bright appearance’) which presents a frozen pose assumed for an instant after an acrobatic feat” (2012, 406). And he concludes with a note about how Asian theater also inspired Eisenstein.

Throughout, Bordwell consistently uses active verbs and constructions to convey the visceral qualities of the films he is describing: “the expressive force of running, jumping, punching or kicking” (2012, 408). He wryly observes playful metaphors: writing about a popular critic’s critiques of academic film studies, “These barbs strike me like a flurry of ninja throwing stars” (2012, 396). Such language suggests that these popular films inform both his style and substance. Here, more than anywhere else in his writing, he makes fun of popular assumptions about his work as a film scholar. Such self-parody continues to the essay’s final sentence: “Approaching Hong Kong action movies as an ecstatic cinema may lead us toward understanding why so many of these movies infect even film professors, heavy with middle age and polemics if not baked brie, with the delusion that they can vault calmly over the cars parked outside the movie theater.” 

Bordwell cared about films and about ideas about films, but he also cared about good writing. He conveyed all of these passions to his students, and we have worked hard to pass them down to our students. Read this essay closely and there’s no question how much he loved popular cinema on its own terms.