David Bordwell was a brilliant teacher and prolific scholar. His teaching and writing were influential—or more accurately, essential—to my thinking. As a student, I benefited enormously from my association with him. But our approaches to the study of film did not always line up. That led to a touch of regret that has followed me for decades. Here’s the story. 

As an undergraduate at a small liberal arts college, I majored in philosophy and also took courses in film and the other arts. I had taken the only film class offered at my college, unsurprisingly called “Introduction to Cinema.” In addition, I had written a paper for my aesthetics class on Alain Resnais’ brilliant study of human subjectivity, Providence (1977). In the film, an aging writer played by John Gielgud negotiates and responds to the destructive and troubling behavior of his family. Toward the end of the film, however, we learn that what we had taken for a bizarre and disturbing reality was in fact the old man’s bad dream. We see him wake up to the rising sun, the beautiful singing of birds, his caring family, and a tremendous feeling of peacefulness. What impressed me was the capacity of this film not only to represent these two contrasting perspectives but to make me feel them in a powerful way. So this is what “providence” means! What a powerful artistic medium!

I became convinced that I wanted to study film at the graduate level. In the late 1970s, film was still an infant discipline, and one could get into graduate film studies programs without a film major. So with my philosophy major, I entered the M.A. program at the University of Iowa, where I studied with J. Dudley Andrew, Rick Altman and others. I took a great class in Super 8 filmmaking with David Rodowick, who was a graduate student and teaching assistant at the time. 

During my second year at Iowa, David Bordwell and his partner Kristin Thompson came to the university for one semester as visiting professors. I took a course with each of them, was impressed by the quality of their teaching and thinking, and after the completion of my M.A. decided to follow them back to the University of Wisconsin, where David taught and where I was accepted into the Ph.D. program in film studies. I started the program in 1982.

While at Wisconsin, I knew that David Bordwell was an excellent teacher and scholar. But back then none of us knew the extent to which he would become a giant in discipline and that after his death, he would be called the “Aristotle of cinema study” (Naremore 2024). When the time came, I asked David to be my dissertation advisor, and he agreed to do so. I announced that my topic would be a study of the documentary film. “I’m not interested in documentaries,” he said. That statement should have meant much more to me than it did at the time. At the time, I thought to myself, “It’s my dissertation. What difference does it make that David isn’t particularly interested in the topic?” 

David Bordwell was never particularly fond of philosophy or of overarching “grand” theories. He had long advocated “piecemeal” theorizing that hews closely to the films themselves and asks small questions that require the evidence of particular films to answer. My proposed title was about as broad as one could get: “A Theory of the Nonfiction Film.” To make a long story short, I had chosen both a topic and an approach for which Bordwell had little interest or enthusiasm. Here I had the chance to work with one of the finest film scholars in history, and I do this?

The dissertation went through multiple drafts and iterations. While writing it, I was sent back to the “drawing board” several times to make major changes. Bordwell was a tough taskmaster. It was David’s Narration in the Fiction Film that was a revelation to me in 1985 when I first read it. It became an inspiration for me and provided a template for revisions of the dissertation. I finally got the thing into good enough shape to get my Ph.D., and in 1988 was offered my first job teaching film at a small liberal arts college, Hollins College, where I stayed for twelve happy years until I was lured back to my former undergraduate institution, Calvin University (where both my father and grandfather had also taught).

In 1997, I published a revised version of the dissertation, entitled Rhetoric and Representation in the Nonfiction Film, with Cambridge University Press. The book has been cited more than 1000 times and has been translated into Spanish and Chinese. People find it to be useful; what more could I ask?

Writing my dissertation under Bordwell is something I have thought about quite often in the forty-three years since I first met him. How would my experience have been different had I chosen a topic in which both of us had a strong interest? I can only speculate. Before he passed away, I had a chance to communicate with David via email. I told him that I had some regrets about choosing a topic in which he had little interest. “It’s just that I couldn’t help you,” he replied. But he did help me. David and the rest of the dissertation committee taught me how to write a book. And it was David’s scholarship that inspired me.

References

Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Naremore, James. 2024. “In Memory of David Bordwell, the ‘Aristotle of cinema study.’” British Film Institute. https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/memory-david-bordwell-aristotle-cinema-study

Plantinga, Carl. 1997. Rhetoric and Representation in the Nonfiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.