The Category of System in David Bordwell’s Concept of Film Aesthetics
Mirosław Przylipiak
mprzylipiak@gmail.comUniversity of Gdansk (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7552-8112
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to analyse the role played by the category of system in the early books of David Bordwell. They have exerted an enormous influence on the understanding of film aesthetics, but little space has been devoted to their methodological background, including the category of system. In Film Art: An Introduction (1979), all elements of film form have a systemic character, which is visible in the chapter titles, such as “Form as System” or “Narration as a Formal System”. In The Classical Hollywood Cinema, the film aesthetics is based on systems of narrative logic, time and space. In Narration in the Fiction Film, the systems of syuzhet and style are foregrounded. Bordwell’s fascination with systems is rooted undoubtedly in their popularity in the 1970s. But do Bordwellian notions really fulfil the criteria of system theory, especially in its newer version, with such notions as chaos, feedback loop, self-regulation and others? Perhaps even Bordwell himself is not certain of that, since the word “system” disappears from recent editions of Film Art: An Introduction.
Keywords:
system theory, film aesthetics, David Bordwell, neoformalismReferences
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Authors
Mirosław Przylipiakmprzylipiak@gmail.com
University of Gdansk Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7552-8112
Professor of film and media studies at the University of Gdansk, film critic, translator, documentary filmmaker. His main publications include the books Kino stylu zerowego [Zero Style Cinema] (1994, 2nd edition 2016), Kino najnowsze [New Cinema] (1998), Poetyka kina dokumentalnego [Aesthetics of Documentary Cinema] (2000, 2nd edition 2004), three books on American direct cinema, over 150 academic papers on various aspects of film and media, and numerous film reviews. He translated nearly 30 books, mostly from the fields of psychology and film, and some poetry. He also made several documentary films and educational television series. He was the founder and first managing director of Academic Educational Television at the University of Gdansk. He has been awarded many grants and fellowships, from the Fulbright Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and the Polish Ministry of Higher Education, among others. His main areas of interest are theory and aesthetics of cinema, documentary film, American direct cinema, and Polish cinema.
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