DAVID BORDWELL

Modern Language
Association. Combine Hegelian ambitions for a world system of thought, patched together from a passel of incompatible doctrines, with prose that wants to strut and be evasive at the same time, and you have a trend that dodges the task to which we thought academics had pledged their professional lives: producing knowledge that is reliable and approximately true. There's a difference between getting a buzz and getting things more or less right.

Some will say I'm actually aiming at “science.” I'd say, rather, that I'm trying to join the tradition of rational and empirical inquiry, a broader tradition than what we usually consider to be science. This tradition includes historical research and a mix of inductive and deductive reasoning that tries to fit the answer to the question. My aim
is to produce reliable knowledge, both factual and conceptual, about film as an art form, in the hope that this knowledge will deepen people's understanding of cinema.