“That Fabric of Times”: A Response to David Bordwell’s “Film Futures”

David Bordwell’s essay, “Film Futures,” reveals Bordwell’s remarkable capacity to recognize the underlying patterns and structures on which films depend to make their narrative worlds. Like an Aristotle of film, he sees these patterns, names them, and hypothesizes about why they exist. In this piece, Bordwell is interested perhaps most broadly in what can be “held in mind,” or how we make sense of a narrative, and in particular in how we hold in our minds how a film forks or proliferates multiple alternative futures. Bordwell delineates over the course of the essay seven conventions on which forking-path films rely. His subsequent structural analysis of how those conventions shape the particular films that portray them demonstrates Bordwell’s “holding in mind” how these films make sense to him. In his final remarks, he comes to postulate that the more future alternatives a film presents (i.e., the more radical its potential portrayal of the future), the more it must rely on “cohesion devices,” “repetition,” and “schemas for causality and time and space” (22), (i.e., reminders, presumably, of what about each alternative has remained the same, even as the futures shift). Bordwell’s closing claim highlights the thread that I think weaves its way throughout his argument: forking-path films are narratives that reflect the limits of what we can hold in mind or how we cognitively manage.