Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art
The standard textbook. Where this wiki's definitions default to when nothing fancier is needed.
- book
- textbook
- reference
David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Jeff Smith, Film Art: An Introduction (12th edn, McGraw-Hill, 2020). Book overview ↗ · davidbordwell.net ↗
Good for
Clean, neutral definitions with worked examples. When a note on this wiki needs an uncontroversial definition of a code or convention, it defaults to Film Art and links out from there. The scan in the library is complete and its pagination is hand-checked, so page citations below can be trusted.
It is also, quietly, the source of the companion site's name. Chapter 6.8 is titled "Spatial
Continuity: The 180° System", and the text there introduces the centre line around which a
scene's space is built — "the axis of action" (fa 231). Axis of Action ↗
takes its name from that page.
Where each code and convention is defined
The wiki's reference pages map onto the book like this. Cite as fa <page>.
| Concept | Film Art | Page |
|---|---|---|
| Mise en scène | ch. 4.1 What Is Mise-en-Scene? | fa 112 |
| Setting | ch. 4.2 Setting | fa 115 |
| Lighting | ch. 4.4 Lighting | fa 124 |
| Acting | ch. 4.5–4.6 Staging; The Film Actor's Toolkit | fa 132 |
| Colour | ch. 4.8 Guiding Our Attention in Black and White and Color | fa 149 |
| Camerawork | ch. 5 Cinematography (framing at 5.5) | fa 177 |
| Format | ch. 5.6–5.7 Frame Dimensions and Shape | fa 181 |
| Editing | ch. 6.1 What Is Editing? | fa 217 |
| Chronology | ch. 6.6 Temporal Relations; 6.14 Order, Frequency, Duration | fa 226 |
| Continuity | ch. 6.7 Continuity Editing | fa 230 |
| Montage | ch. 6.15–6.16 Alternatives to Continuity; Discontinuity | fa 252 |
| Point of view | ch. 3.2–3.3 Range and Depth of Story Information | fa 88 |
| Audio | ch. 7 Sound in the Cinema | fa 264 |
| Spoken language | ch. 7.3 What Do We Hear? | fa 267 |
| Non-diegetic sound | ch. 7.8 Diegetic Versus Nondiegetic Sound | fa 285 |
| Structure | ch. 2.4 Principles of Film Form; ch. 3 Narrative Form | fa 62 |
| Character, Conflict | ch. 3 Narrative Form | fa 72 |
| Iconography, Formula, Themes | ch. 9 Film Genres | fa 328 |
Two chapters have no wiki counterpart yet and are worth mining: ch. 8, on style as the
patterned use of technique across a whole film (fa 303), and ch. 11, five sample analyses
that model the method end to end (fa 402).
Handle with care
Deliberately formalist. Codes and conventions are its home ground, and it is excellent there. For contexts — industry, censorship, reception, politics — it is thin by design, so go to the dedicated context notes and their sources instead. Its examples also skew to a canon that the book itself has helped fix in place; the definitions travel further than the examples do.
In the library
Held in Reel, the local research library of scanned and indexed film books. 76 parts, 5,585 indexed passages. Page numbering is hand-checked.
Cite passages from this book as fa <page> — for example fa 214.
Strongest on
Measured, not guessed. Each figure is how much denser this book is on a concept than the library average — so common words don't crowd out real specialisms.
- Continuity — 2.9× the library average (66 passages)
- Non-diegetic sound — 2.5× the library average (52 passages)
- Spoken language — 2.4× the library average (459 passages)
- Audio — 2.0× the library average (619 passages)
- Editing — 2.0× the library average (783 passages)
- Iconography — 2.0× the library average (29 passages)