The Pordenone Silent Film Festival mourns the loss of film historian and theorist David Bordwell, who passed away on February 29 at the age of 76 after a long illness. A regular visitor to the Giornate del Cinema Muto for many years together with his wife Kristin Thompson, David was a radical innovator of silent film studies with his penetrating analyses of cinematic works made in the first decades of the twentieth century, published in manuals of capital importance such as Film Art: An Introduction (1979, translated for the first time in Italy by Editrice Il Castoro) and Film History: An Introduction (1994), regularly reissued in updated editions. His blog “Observations on Film Art”, also presented in the 50 episodes produced by the Criterion Collection, has been for decades an indispensable point of reference for cinephiles all over the world. A film professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1973 to 2004, David was also and above all a model of enthusiasm and intellectual generosity. The Giornate will remember him as one of the brightest examples of collaboration between the film festivals, archives, and the academia, and a source of genuine inspiration for new generations of scholars.