The Sacred Text: Adapting Bordwell’s Cinephilia

Will DiGravio (University of Amsterdam)

Videographic tributes have been a distinct critical mode since the emergence of the video essay as a prominent scholarly form. In the second issue of [in]Transition, Chiara Grizzaffi (2014) identifies the “video tribute” as a subgenre of videographic criticism. Grizzaffi’s brief survey includes work by academics and non-academics, highlighting videos that pay tribute to living and (often recently) deceased persons. Catherine Grant (2015, 2016), a prolific creator in the genre, has paid videographic tribute to scholars and pop culture stars alike. In an accompanying statement to Days of Linda, published shortly after the death of Linda Manz, Grant (2020) called the piece “a videographic study of—and a tribute to—Manz’s central authorial contributions to Days of Heaven (1978).” Grant’s language and, of course, the video itself, demonstrate what Grizzaffi cites as the great potential of the genre: “At its best, the tribute form does not just confirm what we know about films or cineastes. Quite the opposite: it can even revive the wonder of a first encounter.”

This was certainly the motivation for The Sacred Text: Adapting Bordwell’s Cinephilia. I did not know David Bordwell beyond his work. Yet I am one of the many thousands of film students, scholars, and fans who felt the great loss that came with his passing earlier this year. Immediately after hearing the news, I visited his blog, Observations on Film Art, which he maintained with Kristin Thompson, and reread Bordwell’s post, “The Tao of RIO BRAVO; or, A Yakky Way of Knowledge.” In this post, Bordwell (2012) offers a tribute to Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959), which he refers to as “The Sacred Text.” Bordwell centers his appreciation on the film’s dialogue, identifying several lines that “carry practical wisdom and illuminate every situation.” The piece exemplifies what Bordwell (2011) himself called “cinephile criticism,” in which the critic “tries to expose the distinctive qualities he or she finds in the film.” Like videographic criticism, Observations on Film Art reaches academic and non-academic audiences. Or, as Bordwell and Thompson (2011, x) describe those who read their blog, “filmgoers interested in ideas.”

I encountered Bordwell’s piece as both a budding film scholar and devotee of Rio Bravo, the film I credit for my own cinephilia. Rio Bravo has also been a regular subject in my own videographic practice, including my year-long project, Rio Bravo Diary (DiGravio 2020), on which Bordwell’s blog post had a tremendous influence. It was not just that a scholar and cinephile of his renown shared my view of the film, but that we seemed to possess a similar impulse: to engage with the film moment by moment, as if it were under a microscope. In revisiting the essay after learning of Bordwell’s passing, I began to wonder what it might be like to pay tribute to him — and his essay — videographically.  

In a landmark essay on the critical potentials of the video essay, Christian Keathley (2011, 179) notes that digital technologies “enable film scholars to write using the very materials that constitute their object of study: moving images and sounds.” Keathley (2024) himself first grew interested in what we now call videographic criticism after wondering how one might adapt written essays into video. What I attempt here could be considered a kind of videographic adaptation —an attempt to remix Bordwell’s writing back into the fabric of the film itself. The words and moments chosen from Rio Bravo are his, the editing choices are mine. The resulting video is the byproduct of two similar, yet still individual cinephilic connections to Hawks’ film.                       

Videographic criticism and blogs like Bordwell and Thompson’s are byproducts of what Girish Shambu called the New Cinephilia, one enabled by new media and digital technologies. Shambu (2020, 28-29) writes that this new, more global cinephilia, for many, manifests in writing, an important connective tissue that runs back through the 20th century. “But is it possible,” Shambu asks, “to define this idea of writing more broadly than in the past?” He identifies a range of “writing” that takes place online: posts on social media, blogs that vary in style, tone, and length, multimedia works like video essays, and more. The New Cinephilia possesses a “multiplicity of forms” through which the 21st cinephiles can choose to express themselves. In this spirit, The Sacred Text: Adapting Bordwell’s Cinephilia functions as a New Cinephilic experiment, showcasing the generative quality of these forms and the ways they can speak to one another.

Bibliography

Bordwell, David. (2011, May-June). Never the Twain Shall Meet: Why Can’t Academics and Critics Just Get Along? Film Comment 47, no 3, https://www.filmcomment.com/article/never-the-twain-shall-meet/. 

Bordwell, David and Kristen Thompson. (2011). Minding Movies: Observations on the Art, Craft, and Business of Filmmaking. University of Chicago Press.

Bordwell, David. (2012, April 11). The Tao of RIO BRAVO; or, A Yakky Way of Knowledge. Observations on Film Art, https://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/04/11/the-tao-of-rio-bravo-or-a-yakky-way-of-knowledge/. 

DiGravio, Will. (2020, November 1). On Rio Bravo. Rio Bravo Diary, https://riobravodiary.com/on-rio-bravo. 

Grant, Catherine. (2015). Interplay: (Re)Finding and (Re)Framing Cinematic Experience, Film Space, and the Child’s World. LOLA 6, http://www.lolajournal.com/6/interplay.html. 

Grant, Catherine. (2016, July 22). For all to see, and to see the sense of: In Memory of V. F. Perkins (1936-2016). Film Studies For Free, https://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.com/2016/07/for-all-to-see-and-to-see-sense-of-in.html. 

Grant, Catherine. (2020). Days of Linda. MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture 6, https://maifeminism.com/days-of-linda/. 

Grizzaffi, Chiara. (2014). On Video Tributes. [in]Transition 1.2, https://mediacommons.org/intransition/2014/06/23/video-tributes/ 

Keathley, Christian. (2011). La Caméra-stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia. In Andrew Klevan & Alex Clayton (Eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism. Routledge.

Keathley, Christian. (2024). Pass the Salt (with audio commentary). [in]Transition 11.1, https://intransition.openlibhums.org/article/id/15362/. 

Shambu, Girish. (2020). The New Cinephilia. Montreal: Caboose. 

Filmography

Rio Bravo (1959)

Jaws (1975)

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Jerry Maguire (1996)