Prof David Bordwell

Award

Doctor of Humanities, honoris causa 榮譽人文學博士

Year of Award

2023

Biography

Prof David Bordwell is the leading name in film scholarship today. He is Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published over 20 groundbreaking books and more than 100 articles and book chapters on film history, film theory, and criticism. He is writing still, having published his latest, Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder for Columbia University Press, in 2023.

Prof Bordwell is an authority on Hong Kong and Japanese cinema. His work on American cinema best exemplifies his approach to film art. It stretches across the whole span of motion pictures, from precinema to silent pictures and classic studio movies to contemporary Hollywood films. Prof Bordwell does not just cover films, directors, and production companies but the conditions needed to make, circulate, and understand movies.

Prof David Bordwell’s research is world leading; as teacher he has won a University Distinguished Teaching Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, in 1991, and an Anthology Film Archive Award for Film Preservation in 2006. He was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Copenhagen in 1997. In Hong Kong, a place he considers as second home, he received the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fund Visiting Professorship at The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in 2001; and the Asian Film Award for Excellence in Scholarship in Asian Cinema in 2007.

He was awarded Doctor of Humanities, honoris causa [in absentia].