David Bordwell,
Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging.
University of California Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0 520 24197 5
330pp
US$24.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

David Bordwell is a model of efficient scholarship. His writings on directors such as Dreyer (1981), Ozu (1988), and Eisenstein (1993), for example, are stylistically attentive, structurally coherent, and theoretically prudent. His critical studies on narration (1985), interpretation (1989), and the history of film style (1997) are imbued with a no-nonsense approach to the task of mapping a ‘poetics of cinema’ on to the forms and structures of the fiction film. Even in his engagements with theory (as ‘post-theory’), Bordwell’s position is generally clear and unambiguous, and his conclusions are logical (especially, to anyone with an aversion to semiological and psychoanalytically-orientated critical theory). Film Art, the best-selling textbook that he co-authored with Kristin Thompson, is into its seventh edition (now with accompanying CD ROM) and it remains primary reading for countless teachers and students of film studies, particularly in the US. David Bordwell is the modern academic’s academic: sensible, productive, and famous – and he has his own website (http://www.davidbordwell.net). It should come as no surprise then that his latest book is yet another readable and instructive treatment of its subject (‘cinematic staging’), refining arguments and insights that Bordwell has been developing over the last two decades, most notably in the final chapter of his On the History of Film Style (1997).

Figures Traced in Light explores ‘staging strategies’ in the works of four directors: Louis Feuillade (‘storytelling’), Mizoguchi Kenji (‘modulation’), Theo Angelopoulos (‘melancholy’), and Hou Hsiao-hsien (‘constraint’). Each chapter begins with a mix of biographical anecdote and cultural history, before presenting an illustrated analysis of key staging techniques, and then concluding with some general speculations. In his introduction, Bordwell justifies his principle of selection on the grounds that these films ‘[exemplify] some typical norms and display some unusual exploitation of these’ (9). For Bordwell, each of his chosen directors also belongs to a pivotal moment in the history of film style (French silent serial films, Japanese period melodramas, European late modernist cinema, and the Asian (Taiwanese) New Wave). The four studies are framed by an introduction that establishes the book’s central thesis about the dying art of ‘cinematic staging’. The importance of this thesis – and the validity of a ‘problem/solution’ method of inquiry – is immediately demonstrated via a ‘dinner-table conundrum’: ‘You are a film director. Today the script requires four of your characters to have a conversation around a table. How might you stage and shoot?’ (1). Bordwell’s approach is didactically motivated, and throughout the book he advises students of film to attend to and learn from ‘the aesthetic possibilities and historical ramifications of the staging-based traditions’ (40). He is particularly critical of contemporary commercial cinema, with its penchant for ‘intensified continuity’ and avoidance of compositional variation and pictorial complexity: ‘Could any director today execute the opening of Les Vampires, that ballet of smooth changes of position and short, sharp instants of stasis involving so many figures in a stationary shot?’ (64). Bordwell’s stance on stylistic traditions and the uses of visual literacy is important, although formulaic questions tend to produce formulaic answers.

In general, the central chapters emerge as solid, freestanding introductions (a ‘roaming spotlight survey’ (99)) to the aesthetic procedures and stylistic achievements of Feuillade, Mizoguchi, Angelopoulos, and Hou, respectively. Despite the attractively abstract subtitle of each chapter, the book avoids a more carefree comparative approach and tends towards a critical practice that is attentive and ‘disinterested’ without being particularly inventive or radical. In the chapter on Hou, for example, Bordwell refers only fleetingly to Kitano, and the contrast between his Manga sensibility and the stylistic ‘constraint’ of Hou is never discussed. This was a missed opportunity, as was the decision not to quote directly from Kitano’s hilarious remarks on the ‘dinner-table conundrum’ and its significance in the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien: ‘To me, the dining scene is a very dirty subject to deal with. It seems inextricably linked with sex and excretion – and that’s a little too much for me. That’s why I only shoot scenes which take place either before or right after dining. I can’t ever see me shooting a scene in which characters are talking between mouthfuls of food. Hou does it well but I couldn’t. I think it has a lot to do with being Japanese’. Like Kitano, Hou is a contemporary director whose films urgently need to be written about in new and engaging ways. This said, Bordwell’s analysis of ‘staging’ in Hou’s A Time to Live, a Time to Die (Taiwan, 1985) and City of Sadness (Taiwan, 1989) leaves us in no doubt that Hou is an original and intelligent director. On the other hand, Bordwell’s insistence that we attend to the ways in which Angelopoulos (‘a stubbornly highfalutin’ artist’ (141)) has ‘blended salient techniques of two traditions of European cinema – Antonioni’s de-dramatization, and austere political modernism’ (183-84) seems polemical rather than analytical. Angelopoulos is a major minor figure in the modernist cinema of post-war Europe and this sudden promotion demotes everyone else.

Throughout the book, Bordwell cites an array of film-makers, reinforcing his various points by quoting what others have said and done in relation to shot composition and length, camera movement, ensemble staging, and cutting. There are also some provocative references to painting and art history as well as to theatre and the performing arts. However, it was disappointing to read statements such as: ‘We are not in the habit of explaining contemporary Hollywood style by reference to northern European Renaissance painting, so why should ancient aesthetic traditions be relevant to 20th century Japanese film?’ (98). Who is this ‘we’ and why not? Interestingly, Bordwell’s regard for ‘pictorial intelligence’ never complicates his faith in a conservative notion of cinematic ‘storytelling’ and the ‘denotative function’ of style. This may be one of the reasons why he provides a platform for the opinions of Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, and Cameron Crowe while avoiding any sustained critical discussion of mise en scène, and its discursive history and complex relation to the issue of ‘staging’. In the introduction, for example, Bordwell invokes Eisenstein’s notion of mise en cadre (“mise-en-shot“) as an alternative to the fascinating question of what is and is not mise en scène. Bordwell is unimpressed by French film literature per se and there is no reference anywhere in this book to the more recent ‘stylistic’ work of writers such as Jacques Aumont (2000), Pascal Bonitzer (1995, 1999), Thierry Jousse (1996), and even Raymond Bellour (e.g. ‘The Film We Accompany’, ‘http://www.rouge.com.au/3/film.html). Indeed, Bordwell seems chauvinistic at times: ‘[Mizoguchi’s] languid pace and burnished imagery embodied that mystique of mise-en-scène that was central to the Cahiers aesthetic. The ecstasy of Sarris before Madam Yuki‘s shimmering lake vista, unspoiled by subtitles, belongs to this tradition’ (90). Surely, ‘derives from’ or ‘is influenced by’ would be more truthful than ‘belongs to’?

The book’s concluding chapter draws together various strands from the four author-specific studies before launching into a critique of ‘purist’, realist, and ‘oppositional’ (Burch) stylistic histories of cinema. The book ends in an argument with the philosopher, Slavoj ?i?ek. In an act of generosity, Bordwell offers the reader a exemption option: ‘Readers with no appetite for theory can skip to the closing sections of this chapter …’ (242). This is an offer worth taking up. Bordwell’s shadowboxing with ?i?ek (which continues into a long endnote) verges on the ridiculous. ?i?ek is an ardent Lacanian and his interest in film – and popular culture in general – is cheerfully haphazard and blatantly opportunistic. He plunders the cinema to illustrate what cannot be illustrated (the ‘real’), and his writings are not relevant to any serious study of film style, especially one that is concerned with ‘the aesthetic resources of stylistic traditions grounded in cinematic staging’. If Bordwell wishes to refute ?i?ek, he should ignore him and write something about ‘cinematic staging’ in the films of Kieslowski. As ?i?ek knows only too well, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Bordwell’s book is a valuable contribution to the study of cinematic style and its treatment of issues such as the long single shot, the configuration of diagonal depth, playing space, lighting, and character and ensemble blockage/revelation is always instructive. While Figures Traced in Light is unlikely to run into seven editions, however, it does have an unmistakeable textbook quality to it (didactic prose style, problem/solution-type diagrams, hundreds of pictures, and several highlighted summary boxes), a quality that will please many even if at the cost of betraying the elegiac resonance its book’s title. As I turned the last pages of Figures Traced in Light, my initial enthusiasm for this book’s sensible style and academic attitude gave way to a sudden craving for passion rather than precision, mystery rather than materiality, poetry rather than poetics.

Des O’Rawe
Queen’s University, Belfast.

Created on: Tuesday, 7 March 2006 | Last Updated: 7-Mar-06