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Kane Lecture: "Geometries of Popular Narrative: Episodes from the History of Fiction and Film" by David Bordwell

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October 26, 2020
4:00PM - 6:00PM
Virtual

Date Range
Add to Calendar 2020-10-26 16:00:00 2020-10-26 18:00:00 Kane Lecture: "Geometries of Popular Narrative: Episodes from the History of Fiction and Film" by David Bordwell In his 2017 book, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling, David Bordwell proposes that narrative innovations of that period owed a great deal to revisions of modernist technique that emerged in literature, theater, and radio. Using that premise as a starting point, Bordwell looks at some sources of one narrative strategy, the “pattern plot,” which throws its own organization into explicit relief. Arguing that this strategy emerges from trends in High Modernist writing, in middlebrow fiction, and in popular literature (especially mystery fiction), Bordwell suggests that the effects of pattern plotting emerge most saliently in handling of chronology and viewpoint, using examples from across Hollywood history.  David Bordwell is the Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Over the past forty years, Bordwell has distinguished himself as one of the preeminent film scholars in the United States, writing extensively on classical Hollywood, Asian cinema, and film style and poetics. In 2016 he served as Senior Chair of Modern Culture at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. He’s the author of Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (2017) and coauthor (with his wife Kristin Thompson) of Film Art: An Introduction and Film History: An Introduction. They blog at www.davidbordwell.net. The event is open to all members of the university community. Further details are forthcoming. Virtual Department of English english@osu.edu America/New_York public

In his 2017 book, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling, David Bordwell proposes that narrative innovations of that period owed a great deal to revisions of modernist technique that emerged in literature, theater, and radio. Using that premise as a starting point, Bordwell looks at some sources of one narrative strategy, the “pattern plot,” which throws its own organization into explicit relief. Arguing that this strategy emerges from trends in High Modernist writing, in middlebrow fiction, and in popular literature (especially mystery fiction), Bordwell suggests that the effects of pattern plotting emerge most saliently in handling of chronology and viewpoint, using examples from across Hollywood history. 

David Bordwell is the Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Over the past forty years, Bordwell has distinguished himself as one of the preeminent film scholars in the United States, writing extensively on classical Hollywood, Asian cinema, and film style and poetics. In 2016 he served as Senior Chair of Modern Culture at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. He’s the author of Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (2017) and coauthor (with his wife Kristin Thompson) of Film Art: An Introduction and Film History: An Introduction. They blog at www.davidbordwell.net.

The event is open to all members of the university community. Further details are forthcoming.

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