David Jay Bordwell

David Jay Bordwell was born in Penn Yan, New York. He earned his master's and PhD in speech and dramatic art from the University of Iowa. In 1973, he joined the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught for over three decades, establishing Madison as one of the world's leading centers for film analysis.

With his wife and frequent co-author Kristin Thompson, Bordwell published Film Art: An Introduction in 1979, which became the definitive, globally adopted textbook on film aesthetics and cinematic grammar, read by generations of students worldwide. Bordwell pioneered neoformalist film analysis and historical poetics, examining how visual style, editing techniques, and narrative structures construct meaning. He authored foundational books on Yasujiro Ozu, Sergei Eisenstein, Hong Kong action cinema (Planet Hong Kong), and classic Hollywood continuity, and reached hundreds of thousands of cinephiles through his scholarly blog Observations on Film Art.