David Bordwell, the most cited film scholar in English, Chinese, French,Danish and many other languages, has been a regular visitor to the Hong Kong International Film Festival since the early 1990s.This year we had the opportunity to talk to him about the formation of film studies as a recognized academic discipline in the United States. We discussed the subject’s later diffusion driven by the “grand theory” of psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, neo-Marxism, feminism, queer theory, and cultural studies in the humanities. Instead of paying heed to the top-down model of grand theory, Bordwell suggested we take a different approach and see it as an accumulative, “progressive” intellectual undertaking. This progressive undertaking organizes itself around a problem-based agenda that seeks answers
to clarify key issues in film as a communicative and industrial enterprise