ANDRÉ BAZIN wrote about film better than anybody else in Europe. From that day in 1948 when he got me my first film job, working alongside him, I became his adopted son. Thereafter, every pleasant thing that happened in my life I owed to him.
He taught me to write about the cinema, corrected and published my first articles, and helped me to become a director. He died only a few hours after I had finished my first day’s shooting. When, on being sent for by his friend Père Léger, I arrived at his home in Nogent, he looked up at me but could no longer speak and was in acute pain. The previous evening he had been watching Le Crime de Monsieur Lange on television and making notes for the book he was preparing on Jean Renoir.
If I were asked to give a picture of André Bazin the first thing that would occur to me would be a caption from an American magazine: “The most unforgettable character I’ve met.”
André Bazin, like the characters in the plays of Giraudoux, was a creature from the times before Original Sin. Although we all knew him for a good and honest man, his goodness was nevertheless an endless surprise, so abundantly was it manifest. To talk with him was what bathing in the Ganges must be for a Hindu. Such was his generosity of spirit that I sometimes found myself deliberately running down a common acquaintance just for the pleasure of hearing André defend him.
While he had a heart as big as a house he was also logic itself, a being of pure reason and a superlative dialectician. He had complete faith in the power of argument and I have seen him win over the toughest policeman, being helped rather than hindered by a stammer thanks to which he was able to rivet people’s attention. He would expose a dishonest argument by first taking over his adversary’s thesis, developing it better than had the man himself, and then demolishing it with rigorous logic. Only in the articles of Sartre, whom Bazin particularly admired, does one find a comparable intelligence and similar intellectual honesty.
His chronic physical ill health was paralleled by his constantly surprising moral strength. He would borrow money aloud but lend it with a whisper. In his presence everything became simple, clear, and aboveboard. Since he considered it wicked to ride in a four-seat car all alone, he often picked up three other people at the bus stop in Nogent, whom he would then drop off along his route in Paris. Whenever he and his wife and small son went away for a few weeks he would look about among his innumerable friends for a couple not so comfortably housed to whom he could lend his house, and then find someone to lend his car to.
He loved the cinema, but still more he loved life, people, animals, the sciences, the arts; just before he died he planned to make a short film about the little known romanesque churches of France. He kept all sorts of pets, a chameleon, a parrot, squirrels, tortoises, a crocodile and other creatures I cannot list because I don’t know how to spell their names; not long before he died, he had been force-feeding some kind of lizard, an iguana from Brazil, stuffing pieces of hard-boiled egg into its mouth with a little stick. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that I’ll die before this poor creature does.”
Whether the world be good or evil I cannot say, but I am certain that it is men like Bazin who make it a better place. For, in believing life to be good and behaving accordingly, André had a beneficial effect on all who came in contact with him, and one could count on the fingers of one hand those who behaved badly toward him. Everyone who ever talked with him, even if only once, could call him their “best friend,” since in meeting him, overwhelmed by such integrity, it was impossible not to give the best that was in one.
André Bazin was too warm a person to allow us to use such hollow phrases about him as “living still” or “still in our midst,” and so on. The cruel, the truly desolating, the profoundly sad fact is that he is dead. All we can do is to weep and reread him. Not long ago I came across a passage in a letter of his that characterizes his critical approach: “I’m sorry I couldn’t see Mizoguchi’s films again with you at the Cinémathèque. I rate him as highly as you people do and I claim to love him the more because I love Kurosawa too, who is the other side of the coin: would we know the day any better if there were no night? To dislike Kurosawa because one loves Mizoguchi is only the first step toward understanding. Unquestionably anyone who prefers Kurosawa must be incurably blind but anyone who loves only Mizoguchi is one-eyed. Throughout the arts there runs a vein of the contemplative and mystical as well as an expressionist vein.”