MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

David Bordwell is the kind of critic we need in comics. His brand of poetics overlaps quite a bit with Ken Parille’s analytical criticism”. If you’re not reading his (and Kristin Thompson’s, his wife and also a prominent film scholar) blog, you’re missing out on some great essays (always well illustrated) on film, that often [...]

A few notes from Edward Branigan’s Point of View in the Cinema (Mouton, 1984) Gerard Genette has observed that a dissymmetry exists within verbal narration. A story may very well be told in words without specifying the place where it happens and whether this place is more or less distant from the place where it [...]

This week I spent an autumn afternoon watching Yasujiro Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon (Criterion, 2008). Then I spent an autumn evening watching it a second time with the excellent commentary by David Bordwell (whose blog I highly recommend). His is one of those rare commentaries by someone who has interesting and intellingent things to say [...]

An interesting film still that not only shows three separate shots at once, but also shows a rather comics-like use of text making a visual path across the image from one character to another. (Image from David Bordwell‘s post “Lucky ’13″.)

According to Crisp, the loss of the retrospective narration, and therefore the loss of identification with the first person, is unfortunate. He contends that in the Moral Tales the retrospective narration gave the audience the pleasures of searching for ambiguity and contradiction in the ‘uneasy coexistence of these subjective reflections and of the “objective” image [...]

To the extant that these fictions work through a limited number of motifs, they pointedly critique the notion according to which true filmmakers are those who refuse to repeat themselves. For Rohmer, the art of the film director lies not in the search for new subjects, genres, or tones but in orchestrating now subtle, now [...]

In further explorations of criticism (with an eye towards specifically comics criticism), I’ve been reading (and now rereading) David Bordwell’s Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Harvard, 1989). Bordwell’s primary focus is the process of interpretation in academic film criticism with an eye towards conventional and institutional norms. It is a [...]

The picture must be better to see the second or third time than it is the first time. There musty be more in it to see at one time than any one person can grasp. It must be so ‘meaty,’ so full of implications, that everybody will get something out of it. Orson Welles quoted [...]

With all due respect to Nadel (and to Santoro himself, who chose the pseudonym in the first place), I don’t find Storeyville particularly Sirkian. Throughout his career, Douglas Sirk followed dominant Hollywood practices. His films stick close to classical storytelling and to what film scholar David Bordwell calls invisible style, the use of such formal [...]

But it’s rare to find an American ready to keep the camera still and steady and to let the actors sculpt the action in continuous time, saving the cuts to underscore a pivot or heightening of the drama. Now nearly every American filmmaker is inclined to frame close, cut fast, and track that camera endlessly. [...]

As regards content, the persistence of certain key antinomies structuring all his work has already been noted [this is from the Conclusion of the book]. While these originate in an underlying opposition between the temporal and the eternal, the human and the divine, the material and the spiritual, they are realized in a variety of [...]

In Mythologies, Roland Barthes has written, “Wrestling is not a sport, it is spectacle, and… the public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not [...]

But the moment-by-moment texture of the scene allows the individual shots, gestures, and sounds to drift somewhat free. Each image takes on a more intrinsic weight, and the juxtaposition of picture and sound acquires a resonance that we usually call poetic. A shot of Eva in the sun playing with the Rubik’s cube, unanchored in [...]

Over the weekend I watched Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds, a 1959 remake of his own earlier A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) (both available on a 2 disc set from Criterion). The story involves a wandering acting troupe, whose master takes them to a seaside town where his former lover and illegitimate son live. The [...]

Another reason [The Wire] may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood—two shows that I do admire—offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters [...]

Explaining anything involves analyzing it, at least to some degree. Analysis is a matter of breaking up whole phenomena into relevant parts and showing how they work together. [...] An academic film critic will divide a film into parts (scenes, sequences, “acts”) to see how the overall architecture works. Explaining something also involves describing it. [...]