LSAT 152, Section 3, RC Passage 2, David Bordwell

RC Passage 2 Explanation

PASSAGE TEXT: Film scholar David Bordwell refers to the years 1917-1960 as the classical era …

Paragraph Summaries

1. Bordwell defines classical Hollywood filmmaking as clear, realistic storytelling. Characters, chronology, camera work, lighting, editing, and sound all serve the plot, and techniques that call attention to the film itself are avoided.
2. 1930s musicals don’t fit this definition neatly because they pause the plot for musical performances. In Busby Berkeley’s films, these sequences often become abstract visual patterns rather than parts of the story.
3. Bordwell argues that musical conventions make viewers accept these interruptions as realistic. But this stretches “realism” too far, and the author argues we should focus more on how viewers actually experience and learn film conventions.

Analysis

The author doesn’t reject Bordwell’s response. They think it goes too far and then argue for a different method of inquiry (studying viewer perception).

The author’s actual target is sharp. Bordwell isn’t wrong to include musicals in the classical era, but his way of defending that inclusion is methodologically backwards. He invokes genre knowledge, audiences are prepared by prior exposure to theater, so they accept the conventions, but the author argues this is the wrong starting point.

Genre conventions have to be learned through experience of actual films before they can do the work Bordwell needs them to do. Telling someone to accept a jarring break in narrative because “that’s what the genre does” doesn’t eliminate the perceptual jolt.

This final critique is subtle and students often miss it because the passage seems to just be restating the musical problem. The phrase “perceptual act and not an academic exercise …” is the author’s clearest statement of their objection.

“Realistic” is used in two different senses across the passage and it’s worth disentangling them for question 9. Bordwell uses “realistic” to mean something like: the world of the story is self-sufficient and relates recognizably to our own. Audiences “accept” the musical’s structure as realistic in the sense that it matches their expectations of the genre. The author’s point is that these are two very different things. Genre familiarity is not the same as perceptual realism.