David Bordwell

David Bordwell (born 23 July 1947) is a prominent American film theorist and author. He is the Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies, Emeritus in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is married to Kristin Thompson, with whom he has written two textbooks: Film Art and Film History. Film Art is the most widely used introductory film textbook in the United States. Bordwell is a prolific scholar, interested in auteur studies (Ozu, Eisenstein, Dreyer), national cinemas (Hong Kong), history of film style, and narrative theory. Bordwell is considered the founder of cognitive film theory, an approach that relies on cognitive psychology as a basis for understanding film's effects. It was established as an alternative to the psychoanalytic/interpretive approach that dominated film studies in the 1970s and '80s. Bordwell has also been associated with a methodological approach known as neoformalism, although this approach has been more extensively... full article at wikipedia