The lasting legacy of David Bordwell's scholarship goes well beyond the body of his writings, outstanding as they are. "We all make films," confessed one of Lev Kuleshov's disciples, himself a film director; "Kuleshov made cinema." Across humanities, it is not unusual to see this or that movie presented to students as a side dish to an academic plat de jour—Neo-Freudian psychology or Neo-Marxist modernolatria. Bordwell found little use for method-driven studies with their disappointingly predictable results. Let your research question define the methodology you use, not the other way around, was Bordwell’s favorite quote from Boris Eikhenbaum’s rebuff to Leon Trotsky’s 1924 critique of Formalist poetics. Take notice of things unknown—there are enough unknowns to spend a lifetime on. How does this or that movie relate to every other movie ever made? What is it that makes a film a film—an Ozu film, a Dreyer film, or a film by Eisenstein? Back in 1918, it was a set of film-related unknowns that fueled a series of Kuleshov’s experiments; in our days, the quest for the unknown brought into being Bordwell’s project named cinema’s “historical poetics.” We study films; Bordwell created film studies—conceived not as an academic discipline but as a school of thought. Thoughts, when shared, beget thoughts. Which means David wanted us, who go on living, to carry on.  

"This picture was taken in 1995 in Riga during the conference on film acting organized by the Riga Film Museum and timed to cinema’s 100th anniversary, on the art-nouveau Alberta St. built around 1904 by Eisenstein’s father Mikhail Eisenstein. 

In the image, David Bordwell is seen photographing the photographer, while Yuri Tsivian, the conference organizer, is kneeling in front of the other participants,among whom a shrewd beholder will recognize Caspar Tybjerg, Ivo Blom, Mel Gordon, Roberta Pearson, Frank Kessler, Kristin Thompson, Barry Salt, John Fullerton. And others."