First family of film

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson have changed the way we look at cinema

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If you’ve ever wandered into UW Cinematheque at Vilas Hall and tried to sit in the center of the first row, you’ll find those seats usually aren’t available. They’re reserved for David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, two local film scholars who have changed the way the world looks at cinema. Since the late 1970s, the couple have written books, taught classes, blogged and pioneered new approaches to examining film. Along the way, they’ve affected generations of both filmmakers and critics, and, some say, the industry itself.

“If you go to any film festival and David or Kristin walk in, they’re recognized. They’re held as celebrities,” says Peter Debruge, chief international critic for Variety magazine. “Filmmakers know them, critics know them. Anyone who wants to engage with cinema does so by first reading their work. They literally wrote the book that everyone reads.”

That book, the cornerstone of all Film 101 courses, is Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction, now in its 11th edition. Recently, it was ranked 153rd on the Open Syllabus Project’s list of most-used college textbooks, and it’s the only film book in the top 200. That might be enough of an accomplishment for any scholar, but Bordwell and Thompson continue to be prolific — and relevant. The couple’s blog, “Observations on Film Art,” contains more than 700 entries, not just on classic cinema, but on current films anyone would recognize: Mad Max: Fury Road, Paranormal Activity, Spotlight; even broad comedies, such as Sisters or Daddy’s Home.

Bordwell, who retired in 2004 after 31 years of teaching in the UW Communications Arts Department, has just published a new book on revolutionary critics of the 1940s, and Thompson is turning her attention to a surprising second career working as an Egyptologist.

“One of the things that’s fascinating is that, after David retired, he and Kristin worked more than ever,” says filmmaker and UW Faculty Associate Erik Gunneson. “The blog is just incredible. The number of things they cover, everything from the best films of 90 years ago to current analysis of popular films. They really do love cinema. They have this energy you feel when you talk to them.”

Though they work closely together, the two are markedly different as individuals. Bordwell is ebullient, brimming over with ideas that animate him. Thompson is more subdued, choosing her words more carefully, but packing a wallop with each quiet observation. The two are consistently tapped by local film programmers, including staffers for Cinematheque and the Wisconsin Film Festival, for advice and connections. Jim Healy, the director of programming for both organizations, says Bordwell and Thompson serve a critical role: “One of their contributions is that they’ve helped bridge the gap between the academic world and the popular world.”

Bordwell first fell in love with film as a boy living on a farm in upstate New York. “My family only went to town once a week,” he remembers. “I had to watch films on TV, mainly old movies from the ’40s. But I started reading books about film when I was 12, and that’s what drew me in.” Thompson’s cinephilia emerged later, when she was an undergraduate at the University of Iowa. She was a theater major who took an elective course on the history of film on a whim. “By the time I got my bachelor’s degree, I realized I didn’t want to be in theater anymore,” says Thompson.

The pair met in Iowa in the early 1970s when Thompson, who was born in Iowa City, was finishing her undergraduate degree and Bordwell was beginning his master’s. Iowa was one of the only schools to have a dedicated film school at the time, but the program was limited. When UW-Madison offered Bordwell a teaching job, the couple migrated to Madison, which was a center of film culture when they arrived in 1977.

By that time, major studios had donated thousands of films to the campus-based Center for Film and Theater Research. The respected film theory magazine The Velvet Light Trap was edited by graduate students at the UW and the University of Texas at Austin. “Plus there was a very active film society scene, maybe 25 film societies,” says Bordwell. “You could see a movie any night of the week and choose between four or five.”

While Bordwell taught, Thompson pursued her Ph.D. and even worked as a teaching assistant in Bordwell’s introductory course on the “language of film.” The class was packed each semester with hundreds of students, and eventually led to the offer to write Film Art.

“The standard template was to teach a historical survey on film,” Bordwell says. “But we wanted to teach the language of film. In other words, the elements or ingredients of film as a medium: editing, lighting, staging, sound.” With Thompson’s specialty in film history, she was brought on to help write those chapters.

Gunneson, who now works with the couple creating film segments in support of Film Art, emphasizes the book’s worldwide impact. “Whenever I visit David and Kristin, they always have it in a new language. Recently he gave me the Chinese edition. It’s just global.” Gunneson also points out that Film Art has influence far beyond academic circles. Roger Ebert was a fan of their work; Bordwell wrote the foreword to his book The Great Movies III. Well-respected filmmakers such as Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain, Life of Pi) are interested in how the couple view their work.

At the core of their reputation is Bordwell and Thompson’s passion for the art of film. “The pleasure of moviegoing is not something that has gotten lost,” says Healy. “You can talk to them for hours about movies. Then you want to go off and watch all the movies they’ve talked about. But they also give you the feeling that it’s mutual. They want to know what you’ve discovered; what you like. They have that unending curiosity.”

Partners in life and work, Bordwell and Thompson married in 1979. Their Film Art collaboration carried over into other books, including the 1994 Film History: An Introduction, which they plan to revise for its fourth edition next year. Since the beginning, their process has been the same: talking through and mapping out a book together, then going off to write separate chapters on their own. Their home offices are divided by two levels, each surrounded by their own set of books, each a tribute to the work they love and a sanctuary for each writer.

An almost life-sized cut-out of Ian McKellan as Gandalf the Great stands guard on the landing of the stairs leading to Thompson’s office. The wizard is a testament to Thompson’s passion for all things Tolkien. She’s written extensively on the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies in her book, The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood, and on dedicated blogs, including theonering.net and kristinthompson.net.

“I’ve been reading Tolkien since high school,” she says. “I had some resistance to the films because you always assume they won’t do justice to something you love. But I liked them more than I thought I would. And there were so many groundbreaking things about how they were doing them.”

Thompson is referring to the multi-tiered franchising of the films. Filmmakers worked hand-in-hand with videogame makers. Extravagant features were shot for the DVDs to help market the films for home release. “Every aspect of filmmaking, promotion and merchandising was historically new or went beyond what had been done before,” says Thompson. “I realized someone had to write about it. Then I realized it had to be me.”

The focus on a popular series isn’t unusual for Thompson or Bordwell. They both tend to see inspiration everywhere, and are just as likely to see a film at the multiplex as an arthouse cinema.

It’s also fascinating to see where the pair diverges. The Tolkien films aren’t particularly Bordwell’s interest — and neither is science fiction or fantasy. He leans more to horror or action movies, especially Hong Kong cinema. In the interest of their work, they have, as they put it, “divided up the world.” Middle Earth and the Middle East for her, Asia for him. “I think you tend to get interested in films from countries you’ve visited,” Thompson says, “and I’ve visited a lot of Middle Eastern countries.”

Especially Egypt. Thompson was fascinated with Egypt as a child, and always planned to take a trip there. In 1992, she signed up for a short tour that metamorphosed into a fascination with Amarna period sculpture, work done in the 14th century B.C. Now Thompson participates in yearly trips where she helps with statuary reconstruction. She says it’s become a second career.

Bordwell insists she’s being modest. “This is a big deal. She lectures at museums, at Oxford; she’s invited to give these talks all around the world. She’s just really smart,” Bordwell says with a laugh. For someone who has spent most of her writing career devoted to film history, Thompson’s autodidactic turn as an Egyptologist is impressive.

In a few months, Thompson will be in residence at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and next year, will publish a book on Egyptian statuary, a huge tome, mainly for specialists. Through it all, she continues to write about film. An upcoming entry about The Hobbit will hit the blog soon.

Bordwell has plans of his own. In April, University of Chicago Press will release his new book, The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture. It’s a tribute to four early reviewers — Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber and Parker Tyler — who originated approaches to film writing, shaping a generation of critics that followed, people like Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris and Roger Ebert. In July, UW Cinematheque will celebrate the book with a screening series of 1940s films where they will hand out some of the early reviews.

Bordwell is passionate about the critics, and when he talks about them, echoes of his own work come to mind. “These critics really cared about their writing, and they all had really unusual styles,” he says. “They were all bad boys in their own way. They all fought what they thought was a very pretentious and stuffy atmosphere.”

Bordwell differentiates these critics from many of today’s reviewers, who he says tend to recycle press releases and merely give a thumbs up or down. The early critics offered interpretation, but many of today’s reviewers only provide opinions. And today’s critics are too likely to follow conventions, says Bordwell: “They never give away an ending. They usually use a star rating system. They talk about acting. Finally, they praise the film. But you know, you can love bad movies and dislike good ones. Taste is not the same as evaluation.”

Bordwell’s ability to evaluate a film, regardless of whether it suits his taste, is something that stands out for Ben Reiser, coordinator of the Wisconsin Film Festival. He remembers seeing Johnny Depp’s The Lone Ranger with Bordwell. “A total flop,” Reiser recalls. “But David always has something interesting to say, and after talking to him about it, I realized there were things in it I hadn’t seen. He and Kristin are like the film Yodas of Madison.”

Like the critics he admires, Bordwell writes with intentional zing. In Rhapsodes, he calls James Cagney “a feral pug.” He writes in metaphors, invoking “the candy-box palette” of a Chagall painting or a trio of Busby Berkeley films, which he calls “three fat cherries on a delectable sundae.” The Rhapsodes is imminently readable, a slim volume that slips in your backpack just as easily as it slips into serious film discourse.

Bordwell wrote for a student newspaper as an undergraduate, and always loved that snappy, journalistic style. “I wondered if I could do journalistic-style writing that was clear enough for people to read but still had an academic dimension to it,” he says. “That was really the experiment behind our blog.”

While Bordwell and Thompson will soon head to New York City, a center of art and culture, Madison, according to Bordwell, has been essential to his work. And the presence of these two scholars has been crucial to the development of Madison’s film scene.

“Any time we have film-related guests on campus — scholars, filmmakers, anyone — if we drop [Bordwell and Thompson’s] names, a light shines in their eyes. They are just this crazy, magic movie couple,” says Reiser. New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis has attended the Wisconsin Film Festival because of her admiration for the couple, as has major Hollywood screenwriter David Koepp (Mission: Impossible, Jurassic Park, Spider-Man), who appeared last year.

While many bemoan the loss of the campus film societies that thrived when Bordwell and Thompson first arrived, the two scholars are surprisingly upbeat about the state of the art form, given the decade-long shift from theaters to home viewing. “Things have changed,” Thompson says, “but we still have places like the Cinematheque.”

Also, Bordwell adds, we still have the Wisconsin Film Festival, Sundance and outlets like the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, which screen arthouse and specialty films. Bordwell says many arthouse theaters around the country are challenged by an aging audience. But in Madison, that scene is different.

“You go to the film festival and there are a lot of young people there,” says Bordwell. “It’s the same with MMoCA, and that makes Madison kind of unique. I don’t think most towns get that 20- and 30-something range of audiences — and that’s been a constant here since the ’70s.”

Once in New York, both will continue to work on the blog, and Thompson will work on her new book about Egyptology. Bordwell plans to finish his own volume on Hollywood cinema in the 1940s that he’s been working on for the last four years. The new book is likely to brim over with analysis, culture, history and insight into the art of the cinema.

“As writers and people that have dissected film, they’re just world leaders,” says Healy. “Their influence on the international scene is just absolutely profound.”