People Who Influenced Films

David Thompson is a British film and television producer and is most famously known for being the founder of BBC films. He originally worked as a film programmer and documentary maker and then left to start his own film production company. He is now known as an executive producer and is still working in the film industry today; some of his more famous films are Revolutionary Road, The History Boys and Brideshead Revisited.

David Bordwell is an American film theorist, film critic and author. He is the Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies at the Emeritus in the department of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the founder of the cognitive film theory which is an approach to film that relies on cognitive psychology as a basis for understanding films effects. It is an alternative method to the psychoanalytic/interpretive approach which was responsible for widely dominating film studies in the 1970's and 80's. David Bordwell is married to Kristin Thompson and they have written two textbooks together, these are Film Art and Film History. Film Art is the most widely used introductory film textbook in the United States.

David Bordwell is also associated with the approach known as neoformalism; however it is his wife Kristin Thompson who has done the majority of writing on this subject. Neoformalism is an approach to film analysis that is based on an observation first made by the literary theorists known as the Russian Formalists; this means that there is a distinction between the story and the form the story puts across. An example of this would be if in a detective film the murder comes at the beginning of the story, however you don't find out any details about the murder until the end. Neoformalism also deals with the idea of de-familiarization which aims to show us familiar objects or concepts in a way that encourages us to see them in a new light.

Pam Cook is a professor in film at the University of Southampton. She was a pioneer of the 1970's Anglo-American feminist film theory along with Laura Mulvey and Claire Johnston. In the mid 1980's Cook co-authored and edited the leading textbook in film studies which is The Cinema Book for the British Film Institute and from 1985 to 1994 she was Associate Editor and contributor to BFI and Sight and Sound magazines. She retired in 2006 however still publishes books and continues to write articles.