Book Smart

David Bordwell contends that the way Hollywood spins its yarns, in terms of plot lines and visual style, hasn’t changed much since the early days of moviemaking.

Focusing on the last 45 years, his book takes issue with cinema scholars and critics who contend that contemporary Hollywood films have given up on the classic tradition of American storytelling.

“The book examines a wide range of movies, everything from Oliver Stone’s ‘JFK’ to ‘Two Weeks Notice,’ written and directed by a veteran of the ‘Miss Congeniality’ films, Marc Lawrence. But the film that gets the most attention is ‘Jerry Maguire,’ my personal candidate for a film that could have been made in nearly all respects in the 1930s. Or in any decade since,” Bordwell says.

“Most American films follow two lines of action: at least one involving a heterosexual romance, with the other plotline either a second romantic entanglement or something related to work life, deadlines, appointments, protagonists with flaws and so on,” Bordwell adds. In America this is true of both mainstream made-for-money films and even edgy indies, he says.

“I argue that independent films often introduce new content but tell their stories in traditional ways, as did most of the independent films that were nominated for Academy Awards this year,” he says, listing “Junebug,” in which an urban art dealer meets her Southern in-laws, and “Walk the Line,” a biography of country music legend Johnny Cash.

Even films seen as groundbreaking follow the same generic script.

“‘Brokeback Mountain’ freshened up the usual plot by having one romance be homosexual, but the overall plot structure carries on the tradition. Films from other national cinemas don’t necessarily use these plot structures. For example, Western Europe filmmakers are much less committed to linear plots and ‘character arcs’ than Hollywood is,” says Bordwell.

“Action films produced in Hong Kong are vastly different from their American cousins, Bordwell says. “Hong Kong puts action-filled set pieces ahead of plausible plot development—people sometimes complain that Hollywood action pictures are just a string of chases and gunfights, but actually films like the ‘Lethal Weapon’ series try harder to integrate the action with the overall story than filmmakers in Hong Kong do.”

Decoding the language of film has been Bordwell’s scholarly mission since growing up on an Iowa farm.

“I got interested when I was a teenager watching films on television and in the movie house in town,” he says. “I’ve always been interested in the art of film, but the more I see of films from other countries, the more I try to do comparative work, seeing the similarities between and differences in films from various countries. In doing this, I’ve been struck by the many cross-cultural similarities among films from around the world—certain storytelling techniques and performance styles are surprisingly common in many countries.”

Since retiring, Bordwell has been gathering a collection of his essays and also is writing some new pieces. “One will be a study of what I call ‘network narrative,’ movies like ‘Nashville,’ ‘Short Cuts,’ ‘Magnolia’ and ‘Crash’ that show several characters crisscrossing each other. Another is a return to my youth, a study of composition in early CinemaScope films from ‘The Robe’ to ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai,’” he says.