International symposium to honor emeritus film professor

Scholars from Denmark, Italy, Hong Kong and the United States will convene at UW–Madison April 21-23 to honor Professor David Bordwell with a special symposium in honor of his retirement.

Bordwell, Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies in the UW–Madison Department of Communication Arts for the last 31 years, has become one of the world’s leaders in the study of film aesthetics worldwide.

The symposium, “Film Style in Question,” will investigate how and why particular films and groups of films look and sound the way they do, and the ways in which cinema is able to tell stories, express emotion and convey meaning.

Symposium presenters will address such subjects as a history of film style and the public’s “taste;” the film styles of directors Theodore Dreyer (Denmark), Josef Von Sternberg (Germany and the United States), classic Mandarin film, Italian Realism and Neorealism and more.

Bordwell himself will speak on Saturday, April 23 at 2:45 p.m. on how various disciplines approach issues of style and how film scholars employ these techniques.

The author of several textbooks on film history and art, Bordwell also has written “Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment” (Harvard University Press, 2000); “Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema” (Harvard University Press, 1989); and “Narration in the Fiction Film” (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). His most recent book is “Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging” (University of California Press, 2005). It examines the ways in which four international directors – Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Taiwan), Theo Angelopoulos (Greece), Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan) and Louis Feuillade (France) – organized their staging to command their audiences’ attention.

“In narrative filmmaking, the directing of attention to key information in the frame is a crucial concern, although not the only one,” Bordwell says. “This project is part of my ongoing effort to explore how attention to craft practice, design principles, and aimed-for effects can enlighten us about movies.”

Indeed, the symposium will offer a rare public screening of Feuillaude’s 1919 12-part serial “Tih Minh.” In it, a French explorer, an Indochinese princess and an English diplomat squre off against a Hindu fakir and a resurrected vampire gang for a hidden war treasure. The serial has only played a handful of times in North America in the past 85 years; UW Cinematheque will present the Wisconsin premiere with live accompaniment by renowned silent film pianist David Drazin on Friday and Saturday, April 22 and 23 at 7:30 p.m.