David Bordwell, the noted film scholar, teacher, author and researcher known for sharing his knowledge and enthusiasm of cinema with movie lovers everywhere, has died. He was 76.
Bordwell died Thursday after a long illness, the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced. He taught at the school from 1973 until his retirement in 2004 and was its Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the time of his death.
For more than two decades, Bordwell supplied commentaries, visual and written essays and interviews for films in the Criterion Collection and was seen and heard on 50 insightful episodes of Observations on Film Art on the Criterion Channel.
In a statement, Criterion called him “a great, longtime friend and a tireless champion of cinema who spent decades imparting his wisdom and passion onto film lovers around the world.”
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Bordwell wrote his essential textbooks Film Art: An Introduction,...
Bordwell died Thursday after a long illness, the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced. He taught at the school from 1973 until his retirement in 2004 and was its Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the time of his death.
For more than two decades, Bordwell supplied commentaries, visual and written essays and interviews for films in the Criterion Collection and was seen and heard on 50 insightful episodes of Observations on Film Art on the Criterion Channel.
In a statement, Criterion called him “a great, longtime friend and a tireless champion of cinema who spent decades imparting his wisdom and passion onto film lovers around the world.”
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Criterion Collection (@criterioncollection)
Bordwell wrote his essential textbooks Film Art: An Introduction,...
- 3/2/2024
- by Mike Barnes
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Schoolgirl Zoë Smith was penning lucid movie reviews back in 1932, and when our veteran film critic retired, she sent him her work. He was so impressed, he drove to her home to meet her
A few months ago a rather special present arrived on my 80th birthday, my final day as film critic of the Observer. It was a small, lined notebook, seven by four-and-a half inches. On the first page was a drawing of the matinee idol Clive Brook under the title "Film Criticisms 1932". It had been sent from south London by the 97-year-old Zoë Di Biase. She'd been a regular Observer reader since the age of 18, she said, and this was a gift to mark my retirement. "I've always enjoyed the cinema and you were a great follow-on to CA Lejeune," she wrote, referring to my predecessor who was this paper's critic from 1928 to 1960. "Turning out the other day,...
A few months ago a rather special present arrived on my 80th birthday, my final day as film critic of the Observer. It was a small, lined notebook, seven by four-and-a half inches. On the first page was a drawing of the matinee idol Clive Brook under the title "Film Criticisms 1932". It had been sent from south London by the 97-year-old Zoë Di Biase. She'd been a regular Observer reader since the age of 18, she said, and this was a gift to mark my retirement. "I've always enjoyed the cinema and you were a great follow-on to CA Lejeune," she wrote, referring to my predecessor who was this paper's critic from 1928 to 1960. "Turning out the other day,...
- 12/29/2013
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Above: Salvatore Giuliano (Francesco Rosi, Italy, 1962)
About a month ago I came across a stunning piece of decorative art masquerading as a 1960s East German poster for the 1940 Thief of Bagdad (see below) which soon became one of the most popular posters on my daily Tumblr. I’d seen the artist’s signature “Gottsmann” before on a poster for Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood and so I dug a little deeper and came up with a small treasure trove of little-known posters.
I discovered that the artist, Werner Gottsmann, died nine years ago at the age of 79. He was born in 1924 in the Ore Mountains on the border of Czechoslovakia, which, after WWII, became part of the German Democratic Republic or East Germany. After the war (during which he was a P.O.W.) he studied painting at the Robert-Schumann-Akademie Zwickau, and graphic design at the Meisterschule für Grafik Berlin...
About a month ago I came across a stunning piece of decorative art masquerading as a 1960s East German poster for the 1940 Thief of Bagdad (see below) which soon became one of the most popular posters on my daily Tumblr. I’d seen the artist’s signature “Gottsmann” before on a poster for Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood and so I dug a little deeper and came up with a small treasure trove of little-known posters.
I discovered that the artist, Werner Gottsmann, died nine years ago at the age of 79. He was born in 1924 in the Ore Mountains on the border of Czechoslovakia, which, after WWII, became part of the German Democratic Republic or East Germany. After the war (during which he was a P.O.W.) he studied painting at the Robert-Schumann-Akademie Zwickau, and graphic design at the Meisterschule für Grafik Berlin...
- 3/15/2013
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
Director who found success across film, TV and advertising
Paul Dickson, who has died aged 91, had a long, versatile and award-winning career in film, television and advertising. His critical reputation rests on two remarkable postwar documentaries, The Undefeated (1950) and David (1951, the Welsh contribution to the Festival of Britain). Episodes of The Avengers (1968) and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) in 1969 were among his best-known television credits.
Dickson first attracted notice with The Undefeated, a film about the difficulties faced by injured wartime combatants who were patients at rehabilitation centres in Roehampton, Stoke Mandeville and elsewhere, as they adjusted to life in the postwar world. A calculated but moving attempt to destigmatise state help for disabled people, the film quickly became a critical success after opening at the Edinburgh film festival. A recruitment drive for the Korean war appeared to curtail its wider circulation, but it was awarded best documentary by the British...
Paul Dickson, who has died aged 91, had a long, versatile and award-winning career in film, television and advertising. His critical reputation rests on two remarkable postwar documentaries, The Undefeated (1950) and David (1951, the Welsh contribution to the Festival of Britain). Episodes of The Avengers (1968) and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) in 1969 were among his best-known television credits.
Dickson first attracted notice with The Undefeated, a film about the difficulties faced by injured wartime combatants who were patients at rehabilitation centres in Roehampton, Stoke Mandeville and elsewhere, as they adjusted to life in the postwar world. A calculated but moving attempt to destigmatise state help for disabled people, the film quickly became a critical success after opening at the Edinburgh film festival. A recruitment drive for the Korean war appeared to curtail its wider circulation, but it was awarded best documentary by the British...
- 11/9/2011
- by Scott Anthony
- The Guardian - Film News
An ambitious attempt to write a 'personal' history of cinema is sometimes intelligent but rarely convincing
Maxim Gorky, the first major writer to record his impressions of the cinema, wrote in his local newspaper the day after seeing the first Lumière brothers show in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896: "Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there … I was at Aumont's and saw Lumière's cinématographe – moving photography. The extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances." A few years later Rudyard Kipling wrote Mrs Bathurst, the first significant work of fiction inspired by the movies, a mysteriously haunting tale of a sailor driven to his death by a brief newsreel he obsessively views in Cape Town. The new medium had the power to disturb, to fascinate,...
Maxim Gorky, the first major writer to record his impressions of the cinema, wrote in his local newspaper the day after seeing the first Lumière brothers show in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896: "Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there … I was at Aumont's and saw Lumière's cinématographe – moving photography. The extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances." A few years later Rudyard Kipling wrote Mrs Bathurst, the first significant work of fiction inspired by the movies, a mysteriously haunting tale of a sailor driven to his death by a brief newsreel he obsessively views in Cape Town. The new medium had the power to disturb, to fascinate,...
- 10/15/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Assigning the year to which a film belongs affects how we think of it – but should we choose production or release date?
Let's try to push past the wordplay: how we date movies is serious business. Literary critics seem to rub along without having to write Twelfth Night (1602), but open any film book and you will find great thickets of brackets – Date Movie (2006) – mucking up otherwise perfectly respectable sentences. Moreover, the specificity these dates purport to offer is quite illusory.
Twasn't ever thus. Early film histories, such as Paul Rotha's The Film Till Now, first published in 1930, were largely unencumbered. Within a few decades, alas, parentheses had become de rigueur – but what to fill them with? Opinions varied. In later, much-expanded editions of Rotha's book, the most influential of its kind, films were dated "by their year of production, and not, as is misleading in some film books, by...
Let's try to push past the wordplay: how we date movies is serious business. Literary critics seem to rub along without having to write Twelfth Night (1602), but open any film book and you will find great thickets of brackets – Date Movie (2006) – mucking up otherwise perfectly respectable sentences. Moreover, the specificity these dates purport to offer is quite illusory.
Twasn't ever thus. Early film histories, such as Paul Rotha's The Film Till Now, first published in 1930, were largely unencumbered. Within a few decades, alas, parentheses had become de rigueur – but what to fill them with? Opinions varied. In later, much-expanded editions of Rotha's book, the most influential of its kind, films were dated "by their year of production, and not, as is misleading in some film books, by...
- 7/5/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
In the 1920s and 30s it was a struggle against the censors to get the likes of Battleship Potemkin shown in the UK. Now the BFI is celebrating these pioneering Russian films
Some Russian films of the early 20th century that sent shockwaves through Europe, making an impact outside the realm of cinema, are celebrated in a two-month BFI Southbank season. John Lehmann, poet, Hogarth Press editor, and brother of novelist Rosamond, wrote in 1940 that their appearance in London "was an event that had a decisive formative influence on the minds of the most alert of the new generation". Yet the films' arrival was staggered to say the least.
Bedecked with endorsements from Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, the world's most famous couple, Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin had done sensational business in Germany in 1926, but distributors' hopes of repeat success in Britain ran aground. "Officialdom," complained an out-of-character Daily Express,...
Some Russian films of the early 20th century that sent shockwaves through Europe, making an impact outside the realm of cinema, are celebrated in a two-month BFI Southbank season. John Lehmann, poet, Hogarth Press editor, and brother of novelist Rosamond, wrote in 1940 that their appearance in London "was an event that had a decisive formative influence on the minds of the most alert of the new generation". Yet the films' arrival was staggered to say the least.
Bedecked with endorsements from Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, the world's most famous couple, Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin had done sensational business in Germany in 1926, but distributors' hopes of repeat success in Britain ran aground. "Officialdom," complained an out-of-character Daily Express,...
- 5/26/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
From Kevin MacDonald's examination of the YouTube phenomenon to a cab ride with Osama bin Laden's former bodyguard, cheap technology is allowing film-makers to stretch the form as never before
"Right now, documentary film-making is like malaria," says Hussain Currimbhoy, curator of the Sheffield Doc/Fest, Britain's premier showcase for new documentaries from around the world. "It's a virus that's spreading fast and far and wide."
In the past week, the festival has screened 120 new documentaries – including shorts as well as feature-length films – from 26 countries. As well as fly-on-the wall documentaries about well-known figures, such as the American comedian Joan Rivers and the English playwright Alan Bennett, there were music documentaries about subjects as diverse as Elgar and Heaven 17, and biographical documentaries about the beat poet William Burroughs, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and a taxi driver who once worked as Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard.
This year,...
"Right now, documentary film-making is like malaria," says Hussain Currimbhoy, curator of the Sheffield Doc/Fest, Britain's premier showcase for new documentaries from around the world. "It's a virus that's spreading fast and far and wide."
In the past week, the festival has screened 120 new documentaries – including shorts as well as feature-length films – from 26 countries. As well as fly-on-the wall documentaries about well-known figures, such as the American comedian Joan Rivers and the English playwright Alan Bennett, there were music documentaries about subjects as diverse as Elgar and Heaven 17, and biographical documentaries about the beat poet William Burroughs, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and a taxi driver who once worked as Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard.
This year,...
- 11/7/2010
- by Sean O'Hagan
- The Guardian - Film News
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