Drawing inspiration from film theorists such as Noel Burch as well as from art historian
Ernst Gombrich, Bordwell contributed books and articles on classical film theory, the history of art cinema, classical and contemporary Hollywood cinema, and East Asian film style. However, his more influential and controversial works dealt with cognitive film theory (
Narration in the Fiction Film being one of the first volumes on this subject),
historical poetics of film style, and critiques of contemporary film theory and analysis (
Making Meaning and
Post-Theory were his two major contributions to this subject).
Neoformalism Bordwell was also associated with a methodological approach known as
neoformalism, although this approach has been more extensively written about by his wife,
Kristin Thompson. Neoformalism is an approach to film analysis based on observations first made by the literary theorists known as the
Russian formalists: that there is a distinction between a film's perceptual and semiotic properties (and that film theorists have generally overstated the role of textual codes in one's comprehension of such basic elements as
diegesis and closure). One scholar has commented that the
cognitivist perspective is the central reason why neoformalism earns its prefix (neo) and is not "traditional" formalism. Much of Bordwell's work considers the film-goer's cognitive processes that take place when perceiving the film's nontextual, aesthetic forms. This analysis includes how films guide our attention to salient narrative information, and how films partake in "
defamiliarization", a formalist term for how art shows us familiar and formulaic objects and concepts in a manner that encourages us to experience them as if they were new entities. Neoformalists reject many assumptions and methodologies made by other schools of film study, particularly
hermeneutic (interpretive) approaches, among which he counts
Lacanian psychoanalysis and certain variations of
poststructuralism. In
Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, Bordwell and co-editor
Noël Carroll argue against these types of approaches, which they claim act as "Grand Theories" that use films to confirm predetermined theoretical frameworks, rather than attempting mid-level research meant to illuminate how films work. Bordwell and Carroll coined the term "S.L.A.B. theory" to refer to theories that use the ideas of
Saussure,
Lacan,
Althusser, and/or
Barthes.
Influence Bordwell's considerable influence within film studies reached such a point that many of his concepts are reported to "have become part of a theoretical
canon in film criticism and film academia." ==Archive==