Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Harvard Film Studies) - Hardcover

Bordwell, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674543351 ISBN 13: 9780674543355

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1989

Synopsis

David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve.

Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques--a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis.

About this title

About the Author

David Bordwell is Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Reviews

In the rarefied world of 1980s film theory, the Americans have taken over from the British in the 1970s (who took over from the 1960s French Cahiers crowd), and University of Wisconsin professor Bordwell has long been at the forefront here. In his newest book, Bordwell offers a history of post-World War II film theory; rethinks interpretation and meaning; and proposes a new course, dubbed "historical poetics," for future film study. The major complaint about academic film theory is that it means zip in the real world of movies, including most film "criticism"--that it's gibberish, written by the ivory-towered for each other. Although Bordwell writes less densely than others, he falls into the same elitest-jingoistic-linguistic quagmire. His book is important for the academics who read, grasp, teach, and write this stuff, but not for anyone off campus.
- David Bartholomew, NYPL
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674543351
• ISBN 13: 9780674543355
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352