David Bordwell
Bordwell's 2016 book, "The Rhapsodes," is a tribute to the early film critics who shaped the generation that followed.
David Bordwell’s impact on the Wisconsin cinema community is evident in how two leaders of the Wisconsin Film Festival remembered him following the announcement of his death last week. He was 76.
“David Bordwell was an advisor to me as an undergraduate and graduate student at UW-Madison as well as an enthusiastic and indispensable advisor to the Wisconsin Film Festival, connecting us to incredible Festival guests ranging from Roger Ebert to emerging indie directors and filmmakers from around the world,” writes Mary Carbine, the festival director from 1999-2005. “His passion for cinema was matched only by his generosity and caring for his colleagues and students at UW-Madison. He will be sorely missed.”
“Being treated as a colleague by David Bordwell was surreal enough — did he just leave a signed copy of his latest book in my mail slot thanking me for everything I do?” writes Ben Reiser, the festival’s current operations director since 2020. “But what I will never forget about David was the generosity with which he shared his time and enthusiasm (he and [wife] Kristin [Thompson] came to my family’s Passover Seder one year in Brooklyn when they were temporarily living in NYC), and the genuine warmth and sympathy both he and Kristin showered me with when my father died in 2018.”
Thanks to Bordwell’s influence after he arrived in the early 1970s, UW-Madison expanded its reputation for being a hotbed of film study. The admiration displayed by Carbine and Reiser is typical of those who worked with or studied under him, and the sentiment even extended to legendary Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert, perhaps film criticism’s most respected voice, particularly in the internet age.
“Kristin and Bordwell are the authors, together and separately, of countless wonderful books. They are revered academics at the University of Wisconsin, even though they write in English and can be read by any intelligent person,” Ebert wrote in a 2011 blog post dissecting Bordwell’s thoughts on viewing films from the “front zone” of a movie theater. “If you took any kind of film class in college, the odds are excellent that they wrote the textbook.”
Bordwell retired in 2004 after 31 years with the university’s communication arts department, at which point he turned his attention to a blog that earned him a loyal following well beyond Wisconsin. He and Ebert often referenced each other’s blogs until Ebert died in 2013.
In a 2016 Isthmus profile on Bordwell and Thompson by Laura Jones, UW-Madison faculty associate Erik Gunneson notes that after he retired, he and Thompson were busier than ever.
“The blog is just incredible,” Gunneson says. “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.”
Read the full 2016 profile of Bordwell and Thompson HERE.
Read the UW-Madison obituary HERE.
