Projections

David Bordwell's passing in 2024 reverberates throughout film studies, but especially for his many colleagues, mentees, former students, and cinephiles generally. It would be hard to exaggerate David Bordwell's role in the development of cognitive film studies. His work pointed the way for many of us in its rigor and precision. His attention to form and style and how they relate to viewer psychology has been unsurpassed. Bordwell was a tireless writer and blogger, and his work has a central place in film scholarship. He showed how fruitful the combination of cinema poetics and cognitive psychology could be. In fact, a poetics of film that ignores viewer perception and comprehension now seems thin and incomplete.

It's hard to know where to start when trying to capture, in a few sentences, the enormous contribution that David made to my life, and those of my peers—such was its depth and extent. So I will begin at the beginning, or at least what was the beginning for me. Just after finishing up my undergrad degree in English at the University of Liverpool in 1984, I was looking to throw myself into the world of film. I'd taken a single film course, for which we'd been assigned the first edition of Film Art. These people seem to know a thing or two about film, I thought, so I guess I'll apply to their program, even if it is in this strange place called Wisconsin. I sent a handwritten note of inquiry to David, along with formal applications to Madison, NYU, and USC. David wrote back—and remember, this is the mid-1980s, when even a short reply required rather more effort than a few clicks on a computer keyboard—with a characteristically warm and encouraging response. (Meanwhile, from the East Coast and the West Coast: silence.)

In Planet Hong Kong and other writings, David Bordwell greatly advanced the academic study of Hong Kong cinema. From a perspective of “stealth poetics,” Bordwell illuminated the craft practices, aesthetic norms, and spectatorial effects that characterize filmmaking in the region. Yet his work drew the ire of scholars wedded to an allegorical hermeneutics of Hong Kong cinema. In this article, I contrast Bordwell's bottom-up analysis with the culturalism that governs the scholarship. I rebut several tenacious criticisms that have clung to Bordwell's account of Hong Kong film, from Bordwell's status as a cultural outsider to his reliance on Hollywood cinema as a key frame of reference. Lastly, I seek to extend Bordwell's work by advancing a poetics of Hong Kong acting and performance.

Contrary to common opinion within film scholarship, viewers experience inconspicuous mobile long takes as no more engaging, immersive, or continuous than scenes with cuts. Their primary aesthetic benefits, if any, lie in the transitions between different arrangements of camera positions and mise-en-scène elements. We should think of the mobile long take as a type of transition device with some distinct aesthetic benefits: Whereas cuts typically toggle between discrete stagings, long takes with camera and character movement enable spectators to observe one staging rearrange into another. Touch of Evil's second long take has none of the self-conscious virtuosity of the film's famous opening shot, yet it was as carefully choreographed and difficult to stage. Analyzing the shot helps us determine whether inconspicuous mobile long takes add aesthetic benefits to a film. Such shots may offer no benefit, but, if they do, it's primarily in the transitions—when, right before our eyes, objects rearrange into multifarious, visually interesting, unpredictable, organic-seeming, and narratively meaningful movements of the camera and mise-en-scène.

This article explains how David Bordwell's theory of classical Hollywood cinema changed over the years, comparing his writings from 1985 with later publications such as Reinventing Hollywood. While Bordwell continued to argue that narrative was a dominant principle in classical cinema, his definition of narrative grew more expansive, placing less emphasis on the causal chain and more emphasis on narrative dynamics. Extending this insight about classical narration to the study of classical style, I argue that stylistic devices, such as cinematography, do much more than causal clarification. Even in a storytelling context, a classical film may use cinematography to hint, conceal, mislead, and reveal. Classical style can be eye-catching and emotionally charged, not in spite of narrative, and not in addition to narrative, but because of it.

Building on David Bordwell's praise of Ken Kwapis as a “director of consequence” and his formalist approach to studying directing, this article examines Kwapis's TV work to demonstrate how network television directors can achieve artistic distinction through conventional work. Drawing on interviews, his personal papers, and close episode analysis, this study shows how Kwapis's philosophy that “emotional content is where directorial authority lies” helped him create meaningful variations within standardized commercial frameworks. Using the two episodes of Freaks and Geeks (1999–2000) Kwapis directed as a case study, the article contributes to television studies’ understanding of directorial agency while expanding scholarly approaches to studying television authorship beyond “quality TV” and showrunner-centered analyses.

David Bordwell tirelessly championed interdisciplinary approaches to the cognitive study of cinema, which inspired generations of film and media scholars. While his impact on cognitive psychologists is indelible, we are at an inflection point in the field of film psychology. Many psychological researchers now use fiction film as experimental material because it arguably mimics a naturalistic context to study attention, perception, and cognition. It is time to follow Bordwell's lead and make the same interdisciplinary argument to scholars within the fields of media psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience who use film as a naturalistic stimulus in their studies. Their programs of research will be incomplete if uninformed by theories and scholarship from the perspective of film studies because that scholarship helps characterize the practices of filmmaking, which affect how a film is cognitively and affectively experienced. To make our argument, we reflect upon Bordwell's influence on our own programs of research.

Mainstream complex films like Pulp Fiction and Memento have captivated audiences while challenging classical norms through narrational complexity. David Bordwell's seminal work mapped these formal strategies, emphasizing they are not qualitatively different from classical ones. However, there is growing recognition that these films offer a unique experience, where coherence is built through effortful and variable processes. Building on this, we introduce the TENCo model—Triadic Engagement with Narrational Complexity—which moves from narrative structure to how complexity is experienced. Drawing from media psychology and cognitive film theory, TENCo conceptualizes engagement as a dynamic process involving cognitive, affective, and appreciative dimensions. It distinguishes between narrational complexity (formal disruptions), complication (informational density), and perceived complexity (subjective experience), offering a framework to explain why some viewers persist through confusion while others disengage. TENCo emphasizes iterative meaning-making and emergent understanding, expanding Bordwell's analytical rigor to account for how complexity is processed, felt, and appreciated.

David Bordwell's reformulation of film historiography reintroduced style as a historical and empirical category, positioning it between the formalist rigor of semiotics and the contextual concerns of social and industrial history. Drawing from Jan Mukařovský’s concept of the aesthetic norm, he reinterpreted it through Ernst Gombrich's problem–solution model and the cognitive-psychological framework of schemata and mental models. By integrating sociological, psychological, technological, and functional dimensions of film style, Bordwell's historical poetics established a method for understanding how filmmakers negotiate competing functions and constraints to solve expressive problems. The “norm” thus serves as his Archimedean point—a balance between individual agency and collective convention that renders film stylistics intelligible without recourse to deterministic or essentialist histories.

The concept of contingent universality was introduced by David Bordwell in “Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision,” in response to generalized cultural constructionism. It was a valuable alternative to the dominant theoretical ideas of the time, especially that of arbitrariness (applied to film due to a misguided analogy with Saussurean “signifiers”). The present article begins by sketching Bordwell's account of contingent universality and briefly noting some of its benefits. It goes on to outline some of the problems raised by the concept of a contingent, cinematic universal and how these might be resolved, concentrating on the case he explores—shot/reverse shot—and drawing examples from Med Hondo's Soleil Ô.

David Bordwell's work has been widely received as primarily focusing on cognitive aspects in film aesthetics and its experience by spectators. Indeed, he specifically emphasized cognitive inferences in narrative films, even explicitly excluding affective aspects from his approach. But at the same time, he put forward a multi-level understanding of film aesthetics and spectatorship and followed a holistic understanding to filmic spectatorship that could not be reduced to “higher cognition.” The article will revisit Bordwell's concept of narrative cues to reflect on its implications and potentials for embodied and affective approaches to film aesthetics. It will be discussed whether and how stylistic devices can channel “explicit meanings” on an embodied and affective level, also beyond culturally and cognitively grounded meanings.