Reel Politique: Blog Watch, Bordwell on Bourne
Perhaps one of the best uses of the “blog” format comes from Professor Emeritus David Bordwell, at his website. On the general site, the retired professional keeps readers informed of his travels and his forthcoming books, and also offers up PDFs of hard-to-find essays. Professor Bordwell is bibliographing and archiving himself, and that is one of the best, but most under-utilized functions the ‘net has to offer. In addition, Professor Bordwell has a blog, which he shares with his wife, the equally important film scholar Kristin Thompson, whose book Storytelling in the New Hollywood is one of the greatest film books ever published. In the blog, the duo pursue their various interests, in Ms. Thompson’s case animation and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and in the case of Professor Bordwell, the application on contemporary releases his particular film practice, which is, to riot in brevity, to scrutinize film narrative through the choices directors make within the overall dominant conventions of concurrent filmmaking. The latest film to receive his scrutiny is The Bourne Ultimatum.
What’s interesting about this three-part blog entry series is that Professor Bordwell starts out not liking the film too much. After noting that Bourne has “about 3200 shots in 105 minutes, yielding an average of about 2 seconds per shot,” Professor Bordwell continues by analyzing the historical background of the film’s shaky camera work. Quoting a Hong Kong filmmaker who once said that the “handheld camera covers three mistakes: Bad acting, bad set design, and bad directing,” Professor Bordwell goes on to add that it is “worth considering … what [director] Greengrass’s style may serve to camouflage.” In a long section in the second part, Professor Bordwell breaks down a sequence in which Bourne exits a train station after looking up an address in a telephone book. If I read Professor Bordwell correctly, he objects to the padding in Mr. Greengrass’s directorial style. “A very simple piece of action has been broken into many shots, some of them restating what we’ve already seen.” Professor Bordwell’s analysis of the sequence is fascinating, though he doesn’t figure into the effect of the scene composer John Powell’s music, which I have supplied here, for the reader to listen to while reading Mr. Bordwell’s blog entry.
However, by the third entry, where he tackles some of the narrative issues, Professor Bordwell has warmed up to the movie some, based on certain facets of the film pointed out to him by readers. The whole sequence of blog entries is a fascinating account of an interested and interesting film mind thinking out loud in public.