Film Art: An Introduction (David Bordwell)

After spending 3 years as a film major, I was cornered into the Intro to Film studies class that worked out of this absurdly expensive book. 95% of the material we covered I already understood, but reading them in Film Art and trying to understand what the heck was going on made me want to drop out of college. This text manages to take the simplest of film theories and misconstrue them into boring, dense readings using some of the strangest (not the best, by any means) examples from films, some of which you might have seen, others probably you've never heard of (and never will again, even if you're in the field). For the love of sanity somebody write a better film textbook, this one is horrible. You're much better off reading A Guide to Writing About Film and Film: An International History of the Medium. Professors, please stop assigning this book, trying to plow through this text alone has turned a lot of people I know off of film studies.

This was assigned in my film history class; but I plan to read the whole thing again later, because it is not only informative but it's also a very good read. It's well organized and puts together a cohesive look at how films go together. I don't give it full marks because it does have the usual murky areas and overly textbook-ish spots. It's also way overpriced for something that isn't available new and yet is not a 'vintage' book.

I'm learning film in the first year at college, and this text is proving its worth. It's got all the basic and major theory concepts, with bucketloads of examples, film stills and diagrams to back up the theory, so you never feel like there's no practical application for what you're learning. Most of the time, the examples are from popular and/or classic films, so you're bound to know what Bordwell and Thompson are talking about as they introduce new ideas. Nowdays I can't watch films or TV shows without noticing how obvious some of the techniques described in this book are. It's really quite satisfying knowing how to 'read' the language of film, and having an edge over your friends when you go to the movies :)

This book serves as only a general intro. to film, but even at the level of general intro., Bruce Kawin's How Movies Work or Louis Giannetti's Understanding Movies is better than this one in many respects, particularly Kawin's.Bordwell is often hailed as the giant of cinema studies. Yes, the guy has watched literally a lot of movies, but apart from his Narration in Fiction Film, which is a respectable work in its deployment of Russian Formalism, his other stuff is just commonsensical view. I personally don't find his books argumentative enough. Planet Hong Kong, for instance, although well-researched, is an extremely limited view of Hong Kong cinema and pays no attention to understand the philosophical complexities of Wong Kar-wai's movies, not to mention his ignorance of some truly innovative directors such as Fruit Chan, whose postcolonial sensibility has yet to be acknowledged.His recent book Post-theory is anti-psychoanalytic, a move that is a disgrace to students/lovers of film th... Read more

This book is useful as a university textbook, but is also excellent for filmgoers who would like to understand a bit more than the average audience.