IS IT POSSIBLE THAT André Bazin’s personality has gotten in the way of the ideas he promulgated? François Truffaut’s touching foreword to this volume calls him “a creature from the times before Original Sin.” Hugh Gray urges us to read him as a modern St. Francis whose natural generosity, modesty, and humor are the virtues of a born critic. For Jean Renoir, Bazin is both poet and saint, one whose words, broadcast across a pure frequency, will survive after the noise of the power mongers in this feudal age of film has been filtered out by the sieve of history. My foreword to Volume I employs Renoir’s sieve to cull a pure Bazin, the essential strains of his abundant ideas.1 After all, for Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Bazin effectively filtered sixty-five of his own pieces from the several thousand he had written. And Hugh Gray clarified this further in choosing twenty-six items for these two English volumes.
This timeless Bazin, reduced over the simmering flame of debate to a key set of principles, attitudes, and predilections, has served those who would use or abuse him to flavor their own recipes for cinema. Moreover—and this must surely be unique—the Bazinian essence has been celebrated and emphatically quoted within movies. As the opening credits of Contempt (1963) conclude and Raul Coutard, astride his CinemaScope camera, wheels to look down directly at the audience, Jean-Luc Godard’s voice delivers his film’s epigraph: “‘Cinema,’ said André Bazin, ‘replaces our gaze with a world that conforms to our desires.’ . . . Contempt is the story of that world.” The second instance, more recent, comes dead-center in Waking Life (2001) in the nodal chapter that director Richard Linklater labeled “The Holy Moment.” On a movie screen watched by the film’s perplexed hero, an agitated experimental cineaste, Caveh Zahedi, pits Bazin against the degraded state of contemporary cinema of spectacle and story. Zahedi asserts that film renders the sanctity of everyday occurrences here and now: “The ontology of film . . . is about [a particular] guy at that moment in that space. . . . For Bazin the Christian, film is like a record of God or of the face of God or of the ever-changing face of God’s manifestations.”
Thus the unlikely Bazin became a legend. But with legendary status comes misrepresentation. Godard, it turns out, was quoting Michel Mourlet’s words, not Bazin’s. And while Linklater’s character rightly emphasizes Bazin’s promotion of documentary immediacy over the mediations of script, he makes Bazin sound cringingly pious, quite out of character for a man who aspired to be a naturalist in the domain of culture. In any case, Bazin certainly never used the term “Holy Moment.” Such exaggerations crop up on all sides as Bazin’s subtle and voluminous writing is reified, “reduced” for convenient consumption.
What is Cinema? Volume II brings us a complex Bazin with a spectrum of tastes. Less imposing than its predecessor, it samples his day-to-day contact with a changing cinema and a changing world. Here Bazin’s brilliance (what makes him so quotable in films and in scholarly papers) emerges in workaday prose meant not for posterity but for a palpable French audience. The tone of his essays on Chaplin, for example, seems to offer critical compensation for the disappointment felt by everyone who had so wished to see Charlot unravaged by age and by the war. This same concern for the public informs his overviews of actors (Jean Gabin, Bogart) and the Western, not to mention a set of articles on “children without myths” that didn’t make it into Hugh Gray’s collection. In each case he touches some universal longing that the cinema appears to satisfy, then gently adjusts his public to the reality of postwar existence, where these “mythological” entities have entered new phases of maturation or erosion.
Ultimately such essays build up theoretical positions about film and society, including stars, genres, and themes. But reading each piecemeal, the way it was written, reminds us how focused Bazin was on the assignment at hand, usually the review of a new film or of a new trend. If he returned over and over to neorealism (which he labeled immediately “The Italian School of the Liberation”), it was to respond to films that showed up on the Parisian screens, not to pursue a personal research project. There still exists no better treatment of neorealism than Bazin’s fourth French volume, because he felt out these films with alert antennae, measuring their novelty as well as their value. The sensitivity of this kind of writing cannot be matched in retrospective studies, no matter how thorough and responsible they may be.
This was immediately evident to me when in 1971 I hurried to locate What is Cinema? Volume II at the bookstore; there it sat alongside its pink predecessor. But just beside it was Stanley Cavell’s just-published The World Viewed, which I remember thumbing through on the spot. Immediately apparent was a set of shared presuppositions and tastes, as well as a talent for elaborate prose; but the tone of the books couldn’t have been more different. After all, Cavell, as a philosopher coming to grips with the cinema from his Harvard office, hardly knew his readers, who effectively eavesdropped on his personal ruminations. Bazin’s audience, by contrast, pressed constantly around him, reading him every day (in Parisien Libéré), every week (in Radio-Cinéma-Télévision) or every month (in Esprit or Cahiers du Cinéma). He had to be attentive to their interests and to the topics of the day. Nevertheless, those who read his longer pieces sensed him developing major theses, even arguments, article by article.
Bazin cherished his vocation and its particular literary form, the essay, which he perfected. Despite its inherent “impurity,” he understood writing about cinema to be attached to contingent, local circumstances, like cinema itself. Earlier film theorists had foundered by trying to upgrade this arriviste to a place among the noble arts. Bazin’s own humility, by contrast, allowed him to appreciate that of the cinema. For Bazin, cinema was not an art at all, at least not in the first place an art. Its home, he argued, lies not in the heavens of aesthetics but solidly, even clumsily, on this earth to whose material surface it is bound.
Neorealism is another name for this humility, and he championed it as distinct from traditional realist aesthetics, whose conventions painters and writers have refined and passed down for generations. Neorealist filmmakers pursue overarching artistic or moral ideas but they do so through fidelity to the specific situations they are drawn to, idiosyncracies included. Each of the six segments in Paisa (and each scene within each segment) possesses the singularity and solidity of a rock in the river of the film; together they serve as a narrative ford that Rossellini urges us to cross. Traditional literary realists like Zola or Verga, on the other hand, tend to shape their scenes to fit the narrative. Analogously, in its realist genres, Hollywood cinema molds and bevels every shot into a brick that can be smoothly attached to neighboring bricks in forming the bridge of the story. In a classic Hollywood product, the spectator passes without danger of genuine misunderstanding from the opening credits to the “finis.” But with Paisa you have to watch your step, scrutinizing the shape and placement of each stone in the film as you jump from one to the next. Occasionally you may slip or at least get your leg splashed. What is true for Rossellini is true for Bazin; each piece is important in its own way, yet points beyond itself. The little articles collected in What is Cinema? form a ford, not a bridge, to a theory of film.
Now Bazin was opposed neither to stories nor to art. He had studied French literature at the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure, and he kept up with theater and painting. But his life’s goal was never to elevate cinema to parity with these traditional arts; rather, he believed, cinema’s “documentary” attributes set it adjacent to the arts. Cinema could imitate traditional arts (for instance, by telling stories), ignore them (as in science films), or intersect with them by adapting their greatest achievements. Bazin’s essays on this last possibility are especially complex. In his view, an adaptation need neither threaten nor dilute the artwork it takes up. At its worst—when merely cashing in on a prestigious title—cinema still works to the advantage of the original, since a percentage of the audience will (re)discover its subtlety and uniqueness after experiencing its betrayal by the film. In more interesting cases, cinema treats artworks like phenomena in nature, photographing plays or novels or paintings as it might animals or social rituals. The hybrids that result from such encounters illuminate hitherto unexplored aspects of the famous original and of both media.
In a brilliant essay devoted to Bresson’s Le Journal d’un curé de campagne, Bazin undermined the doxa that good films must always be “cinematic,” as though this new medium arrived already equipped with capabilities that it had to exhibit on every occasion (such as expanse, speed, multiple perspectives, and picturesqueness). Bazin countered that the subject matter, rather than the properties of the medium, should dictate the style of any film. The only property inherent to cinema, he argued, is its photographic base, which keeps the subject (or referent) hovering like a ghost around its image. As to proper subject matter, Bazin saw no limits whatever to the deployment of what Alexandre Astruc called “la caméra-stylo.”2 Cultural topics like buildings, drawings, or poems are in principle just as available to cinema as are natural phenomena. Thus, Alain Resnais’ first professional undertaking (with Bazin’s advice) was to film Vincent Van Gogh’s oeuvre itself, not by juxtaposing shots of the paintings to shots of poppy fields, vases of flowers, or night skies. Resnais’ camera never leaves the canvases, ranging over them “as freely as in any ordinary documentary . . . [with] a realism once removed, following upon the abstraction that is the painting.”3 To take another example, why disparage “filmed theater,” when Cocteau showed in Les Parents terribles that cinema may intensify the staginess and claustrophobia of dramatic space, amplifying effects originally conceived for the theater? Adaptations offer the best chance for the “caméra-stylo” to brandish its inventiveness, enlarging cinema’s stylistic repertoire and letting it discover a new prowess.
Bazin’s defense of such “impurity” puts his essays on “Cinema and the Other Arts” in subtle dialogue with works in traditional comparative aesthetics like Aristotle’s Poetics, Lessing’s Laocöon, and Arnheim’s Film as Art. But the essays also evoke a historical dimension that brings him into the orbit of Walter Benjamin, André Malraux, and many scholars in our own day. As “The Myth of Total Cinema” argues, cinema emerged in the nineteenth century only after cultural, rather than technological, forces pressed for its existence.
Those shifting forces continue to adjust cinema’s function in relation to the other arts. Born from the modernity it has helped define, cinema nevertheless operates out of phase with poetry, painting, and theater, all of which live off a different public and under aesthetic principles and conditions that cinema inflects but rarely shares. At mid-century when Bazin was surveying things, cinema seemed in phase only with the novel, since both media deploy new narrative techniques, share a proclivity for realist representation, and address a mass audience. Bazin expected cinema to evolve in its cultural function, just as painting and poetry had, both of these growing progressively abstract after 1800. He wrote avidly about television in part because he rightly assumed it would take on some of the cultural burden of popular cinema and the popular novel, freeing these in their turn for the next phase of their development. Bazin may have been partial to his own period, to neorealism above all, but he anticipated the future with relish and surely would have written ingeniously about cinema among the digital media of the twenty-first century were he still with us today at age eighty-six.
Bazin might best be called a “cultural ecologist,” especially from the work represented in this volume, in which one can feel the heat of the immediate postwar moment. Bazin had the luck to come to grips with cinema when it was an unrivalled form of entertainment and at the height of its influence. He observed it deliver social needs and create social myths. And he recognized that it could do so only in complex interdependence with other cultural expressions and institutions. He chided his disciples at Cahiers du Cinéma for their willful ignorance of the intricate systems whose interactions permit films to exist at all. Where they recognized a single determinant, the auteur, Bazin’s vast grasp of cinema meant he simply had to cover more ground. Thus, he might analyze a masterpiece by De Sica but only while also examining the lure of a siren like Jane Russell in The Outlaw. When it came to Hollywood, he hailed “the genius of the system” rather than the vision of a Howard Hawks. More often he hailed genres like the gangster film, the erotic romance, the adventure story, or the thriller, tracking them beyond their appearance in cinema into earlier emanations in higher or lower forms, from tragedy to melodramatic theater and the dime novel. The Western became his favorite genre; he described the way it settled comfortably into a cinematic form that evolved robustly through the century, resisting or incorporating inevitable mutations in culture and in cinema. After a time, a genre like the Western takes on enough identity to behave as a nearly independent organism that grows to maturity and eventually decays largely on its own momentum. Bazin appreciated decadent as well as youthful and classic Westerns; in fact, it was the entire process of generic and cultural evolution that fascinated him.
When Bazin criticized a film, he cared mainly to point not to its putative “intrinsic worth,” but to its timeliness or awkwardness. I love his observation that in the age of Louis XIV the symbiosis that existed between the culture and the theater produced Racine’s genius. Bazin implies that every tragedy that was penned at that time spoke worthily to its public; whereas a few generations after Racine, even a writer as talented as Voltaire failed in this genre.4 The classical Hollywood cinema enjoyed a similar public fortune, at least up to 1950. It was hard to make a truly bad American film in the studios, although, by the same token, it was also hard to buck the system. Bazin’s evolutionary perspective opens onto anthropology (the morphology of storytelling, the star system, film festivals) as well as onto economics (historical pressures on technology, marketing, adaptation). He wanted to identify the factors governing whatever it is that cinema is and might be.
Everyone wants to live in dramatic times and most of us need to see whatever present we inhabit as a critical turning point in civilization. But Bazin really did have the fortune to observe cinema during the transition from its classic to its modern phase. Or did he invent this aesthetic shift in the exhilarating historical moment which carries a beautiful name in both French and English, “Libération”? He wrote as if the shift from prewar to postwar style was so pronounced that he could track developments even in the standard movies he reviewed for the daily newspaper. He was thrilled to witness what he and only a few others could tell was the “originality of the postwar cinema as compared with that of 1938 . . . [for] by 1939 the cinema had arrived at what geographers call the equilibrium profile of a river.” The war, already felt in Renoir’s prophetic masterpiece La Règle du jeu, upset this equilibrium. In 1948, Astruc declared “The Birth of a new avant-garde” on the evidence of the Renoir film, along with Welles’ Citizen Kane and Magnificent Ambersons, Bresson’s Les Dames du bois de Boulogne, and Malraux’s Espoir.
To these Bazin had already started to add the stunning films coming out of the ruins of Italy. Neorealism overturned the studio system in nearly every respect: first of all by moving out of the studio into the streets; then by relying sparingly on trained actors, and by restricting the time and space of the script—indeed by doing away with the script in its standard form. Such measures shifted values from writing and design (preproduction) to the moment of shooting, the encounter of story with its living environment. Spontaneity, surprise, and “revelation” result; “waking life” pours from the screen along with a certain ambiguity of motivation. The “mystery” of the world out of which all these films seem to emerge and into which they recede would never have been acceptable in the classical system. They are modern, Bazin tells us, like the novels of Faulkner or Malraux; through their intense scrutiny we momentarily glimpse moral relations come into focus amid an upheaval of sensations and feelings. This humanist vision takes shape within an opaque, often tragic milieu, a perceptual plenum that can be felt to exceed the story, exceed the film, exceed even the human. At its most audacious, the cinema of his time found itself in tune with and contributing to a modern—that is, a postwar, largely existentialist—sense of ordered disorder.
How definitive was this aesthetic “Libération”? Today we are more likely to see 1959 and the birth of the French New Wave—rather than 1945—as the breakthrough point in modernist cinematic form. The New Wave would have been difficult to bring off were it not for neorealism; but it would have been truly impossible without the cinematic culture that emerged with Bazin after the Second World War. Bazin observed—and brought about—a revolution in film culture on the basis of real, though not sweeping, shifts in the films produced from 1939 until his death in 1958. For a few years after the war, Italy conjured a spate of visionary films out of the debris of broken social conditions and a devastated landscape. But by 1949, with the arrival of the Marshall Plan, the Andreotti law, and the cold war, the glimmer of neorealism faded. A traditional economic and cultural order reasserted itself, and the national cinema settled back to turning out diverting comedies and touching melodramas for a world no longer on the brink of starvation and anarchy. In the dull fifties, Bazin could do little more than hold up Umberto D, Voyage to Italy, Senso, and The Nights of Cabiria “to shame” a disinterested public.5
Still, a “New Avant-Garde” had been glimpsed like a miraculous vision in the late forties, most memorably at the 1949 Biarritz “Festival of Accursed Films” and at the ciné-club of the Champs-Elysées, where Bazin introduced the charismatic Rossellini. Thrilled at the sight, a generation of cinephiles—you know the names: Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, Chabrol, Kast, Godard—demanded a new cinema with such insistence that in ten years they would have it. The same postwar flare also encouraged Sajyajit Ray, Andrzej Wajda, and untold others who were feeling their way with their cameras even before the Parisian New Wave broke, then spread to England, Japan, Latin America, and Soviet Europe.
What changed after the Second World War, then, was less the cinema itself than “the idea of cinema.” If Bazin did not concoct this idea, he promulgated it with enough force to inspire a film culture that by the sixties had made viable an ambitious new cinema. The idea has had a dramatic career, fraught with controversy from the start. Bazin battled charges of formalism lodged by communist critics, particularly after his daring “The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema” appeared in Esprit in 1950. Hugh Gray did not include this most controversial article in the first volume of What is Cinema?, finding it dated, I suspect,6 or because he did not want to muddy aesthetics with cold war politics. But Gray misjudged, for this essay is deeply aesthetic. Besides, Bazin had already been the target of a crude posthumous attack, when Cahiers’s leftist rival, the journal Positif, published an extended diatribe as a review of Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?7 When Gray came to introduce this second volume of translations, he could not ignore what had become a sustained, sophisticated Marxist polemic against Bazin, mounted in the revolutionary period following May ’68. Gray scrambles clumsily to defend Bazin by appealing to “the splendid philosophical company” he kept (Plato, Parmenides, Boethius). He fails to mention that, in the frenzy of post-1968 Marxist materialism and Maoism, Bazin’s own Cahiers du Cinéma had roughed up Rohmer, its former leader, then turned on Bazin like Brutus on Caesar.
Few in America knew how contested was the Bazin they could suddenly read in English. As courses in cinema studies mushroomed in the seventies, he arrived as though on cue to shift them into higher gear. Bazin was indispensable, for he pointed to the films and directors that had to be studied while modeling a method of study whereby close analysis clarifies questions of style and history. What is Cinema? provoked students to look intensely at both cinema as a whole and individual films. Reviewing What is Cinema? in 1968, Annette Michelson—someone who knew very well his beleaguered status in France—questioned Bazin’s proclivity for a certain realist style and its particular history, since she herself held to a quite different tradition, one anchored in the Russian school.8 Bazin may have championed a modern cinema, she wrote, but his aesthetics were anti-modernist. Where Bazin linked neorealism to the American novel (Faulkner, Dos Passos) Eisenstein was in dialogue with Joyce! Where Bazin ushered in Astruc’s idea of “a new avant-garde,” he failed to recognize the genuine avant-garde of the postwar era (Brakhage above all), one that reaches back to Constructivism and Surrealism, whose forays into film Bazin dismissed as an aborted expedition. What would Bazin have said of Godard, she asks, who in the late sixties was mixing the long take with aggressive editing? Employing the linguistic paradigm many of us relied on at the time, Michelson set Bazin against Eisenstein as metonymy stands opposed to metaphor. This distinction became the backbone of a maturing American film scholarship, visible in Brian Henderson’s 1971 Film Quarterly essay “Two Types of Film Theory.” I know it helped me organize The Major Film Theories, the fruit of teaching What is Cinema? as early as 1969.
Debates over Bazin’s poetics waned, however, as his plummeting reputation in France triggered a repudiation first in England, then in the United States. Gray’s introduction had registered the French trend without comprehending its seriousness. A litany of theorists was stacked up against What is Cinema?, all under the banner of Louis Althusser’s Marxism. Jean-Louis Baudry, Marcelyn Pleynet, Jean-Louis Comolli, and Jean Narboni warned of Bazin’s idealism, all the more insidious for being so brilliantly presented. In 1972, in the last year of Cahiers’s militant critique, Serge Daney called on Freud and Jacques Derrida to counter Bazin’s faith in the screen at the expense of montage. A rich retort, “L’Ecran du fantasme”9 digs into Bazin’s fascination with animals, with death, and with filmmaking as literal risk, so as to locate the possibility of a politicized cinema. A few years later, recounting this era after its passion had passed, Daney recognized a genuine continuity across the successive phases at Cahiers: “The interest in militant cinema is as much an effect of cinephilia as of the political superego. In Cahiers-cinephilia (the kind staked out by Bazin), there is a demand for risk, a certain ‘price’ paid for the images. In militant cinema there is also this idea of risk. No longer a metaphysical risk, but a physical one; the risk of not being there at the right moment . . . cinephilia is not just a special relationship to cinema; it is a relationship to the world through cinema.”10
This French phase began to fade in 1973 but emerged in England as an insistent program that dominated the journal Screen. A genuine school of thought formed around Ben Brewster, Stephen Heath, Christopher Williams, and Colin MacCabe, proclaiming the constructed (hence, negotiable) nature not just of films, but of technology and even of perception, the zone Bazin had held pristine. This school argued that the cinema is through and through a tool of the ruling (bourgeois) class because it “naturally” centers passive viewers before a spectacle, giving them the illusion of mastery while in fact chaining them in position as subjects of an ideology that stabilizes the socio-economic and political order.11 Bazin’s image theory, anchored in out-dated Sartrean principles, emphasizes ambiguity, freedom, and a future opened onto and by the screen. He had no idea—so it was claimed—that a complex ideology stands between the viewer and the world viewed. Nor did he understand the historical-material struggle behind the invention and perfection of “machines of the visible,” as Comolli called cinema.12 The cinema indeed evolves, Screen agreed, but not innocently toward greater realism; rather it evolves the better to serve a power elite by progressively enervating those who watch it.13 According to Martin Jay, suspicion of the image had come to replace faith in the image.14 This vehement Protestant, “iconophobic” attack on the Catholic Bazin would not be spent until the eighties.
Partly in reaction to the threnody of Continental criticism, the past twenty years has seen a deep decline in the visibility of Anglo-American film theory, especially in comparison to film history and cultural studies. Bazin should be of interest to all these disciplines. In the domain of theory, his central tenets were the target of a lengthy chapter in Noel Carroll’s 1988 Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory. Carroll explicitly exempted Bazin’s work as critic and historian, mainly challenging what I have termed his “photography axiom” and the way it limits, so Carroll believes, his definition of the medium. Then Bazin as critic and historian became the subject of generous studies by David Bordwell (History of Film Style, 1997) and Philip Rosen (Change Mummified, 2001). More recently still, under the rubric “Bazinian Contingencies,” Ivone Margulies collected ideas and debates sparked by Bazin in a cultural study Margulies calls Rites of Realism.15 Evidently the question “what is cinema?” (and Bazin’s text of that name) generates increasingly intricate academic controversy.
Beyond the university, the broader culture that bubbles into journals and now into websites has been awash with fresh feeling for Bazin’s value and values. Is this due to the popularity of Roland Barthes’ beautiful and final dirge, the 1980 La Chambre claire, a book that replays (without, however, citing) so many of Bazin’s ideas and metaphors?16 Is it due to the arrival of the digital image in the early eighties, with its threat to photographic cinema? Sylvia Harvey, who in 1980 chronicled Bazin’s eclipse,17 resurrects his image in a touching 1995 “century of cinema” essay called “What is Cinema? The Sensuous, the Abstract, and the Political.” Harvey leans on Bazin, anxious lest the iconophobes of the seventies may truly have killed the art. Bazin ever urged us to learn something, she concludes, by looking intently at images that have been intently produced. It’s time for film scholars to return expectantly to the movies, and to recover there a belief in the undisclosed possibilities of life.18
Harvey’s plea for expectant viewing celebrates not just Bazin’s work, but that of Gilles Deleuze and Serge Daney, the two most prominent figures to reinstate Bazin’s name in France. Both men acknowledged his mission as theirs. Deleuze’s monumental two-volume treatise on the cinema—volume one on the classic cinema of the “movement image,” volume two on the modern cinema of the “time image”—is divided, following Bazin, by the cleaver of the Second World War. As his lengthy list of favored films demonstrates, Deleuze matured in the postwar ambience of ciné-clubs and film journals that Bazin dominated. As for Serge Daney—easily the most revered critical voice of the last generation—his work extends Bazin’s way of thinking with and thinking through images, until cinema can scarcely sustain the cultural and moral weight it is asked to bear. As media critic for Libération, Daney hoped to do for television what Bazin had done for cinema. In his dying days he organized a new journal, Trafic, based on principles that extend those that had launched Cahiers du Cinéma forty years earlier.19
In a 1983 essay devoted to Bazin, Daney called him a “passeur” a term he reserved for a secret fellowship of irregular figures, working adroitly on the edges of culture, trafficking in “valuables” whose value is not yet calculable. The word suggests a smuggler who ferries contraband ideas to clandestine destinations. It also suggests someone steering a ferry through murky waters. In the darkness of movie theaters, for instance, Bazin scouted out and grasped an idea of cinematic modernism that he then delivered almost surreptitiously in his numerous articles to the “young turks” at Cahiers. They took it up seriously enough to demolish the flaccid “quality tradition” and build a New Wave. But Bazin inspired more than just this movement, whose energy is now spent, and he is worth far more than his realist idea, which today is challenged by digital processes. As Daney says, “there remains this man.”
To grasp him, Daney returns to the image of St. Francis, of whom William Carlos Williams said that he preached to “the chirping birds and roaring beasts,” not to teach them anything but so that he could become as natural as they.20 Daney too had no use for piety. Daney’s Bazin was devoted to cinema because it demoted the human, by bringing us into contact with animals, plants, and mutating geological forms, as well as with those who have gone before us. Bazin impressed everyone he met as being uncommonly alive to all this, to the signals emanating around us, in what for shorthand we call “reality.” Cinema apprehends, filters, and coordinates such signals in countless ways and to innumerable purposes. In turn, it was Bazin’s pleasure and supreme talent to apprehend, filter, and coordinate this brimming “cinematic reality.”
Serge Daney makes it easy to answer the question with which I began: André Bazin’s personality could not get in the way of his ideas, because in the first place, and in the fullest sense of the term, he was a man of the cinema.
Dudley Andrew
April 2004
1. For my more extended views on Bazin, see André Bazin (Oxford 1978), and the chapter “André Bazin’s Evolution,” in Peter Lehman, ed., Defining Cinema (Rutgers Univ. Press, 1997) from which some parts of this Foreword have been adapted.
2. Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-garde, la Caméra-Stylo,” in Peter Graham, ed., The New Wave (New York: Doubleday, 1968).
3. Bazin, What is Cinema? vol. I, 166.
4. Bazin, What is Cinema? vol. I, 72.
5. “Shame” is precisely his word. See infra, 80.
6. The essay is now available in English in Bill Nichols, Movies and Methods, Vol. 2 (Berkeley: UC Press, 1985); or in Bert Cardullo, ed., Bazin at Work (New York: Routledge, 1997).
7. Gérard Gozlin, “In Praise of André Bazin,” in Peter Graham, ed., The New Wave. (New York: Doubleday, 1968). Originally published in Positif, no. 42 (1962).
8. Annette Michelson, in Artforum 6, no. 10 (1968), 67–71.
9. Serge Daney, “L’Ecran du Fantasme,” Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 236–37 (1972), trans. by Mark Cohen in Ivone Margulies, ed., Rites of Realism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
10. In “Les Cahiers du Cinéma 1968–1977: Interview with Serge Daney,” The Thousand Eyes, no. 2 (1977), 21.
11. In Screen 14, no. 4 (Winter 1973/74) Christopher Williams wrote the scathing “Bazin on Neorealism.” But the fullest version of the Screen position is displayed in volume 17, no. 3 (Autumn 1976) which contains Colin MacCabe, “Principles of Realism and Pleasure,” and Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space,” an essay written in tandem with his “On Screen in Frame, Film and Ideology” published in Quarterly Review of Film Studies, August 1976.
12. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in Teresa De Lauretis and S. Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981).
13. Even this heated rhetoric betrays continuity between Bazin and the editors of the radicalized Cahiers du Cinéma. Like Bazin, Comolli wants cinema to reveal the hidden nature of the visible, though for him this nature consists of invisible social relations. Like Bazin, Comolli and Narboni maintain the priority of complex films and of complex readings of them.
14. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: UC Press, 1993).
15. Noel Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton, 1988); David Bordwell, The History of Film Style (Harvard, 1997); Philip Rosen, Change Mummified (Minnesota, 2001); Ivone Margulies, ed., Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema (Duke 2002). Rosen’s chapter was first presented in the André Bazin issue of Wideangle (Fall 1987), which I edited.
16. Published in Paris by Cahiers du Cinéma, this book was quickly translated as Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
17. Sylvia Harvey, May ’68 and Film Culture (London: BFI, 1980).
18. Harvey, in Christopher Williams, ed., Cinema: The Beginnings and the Future (London: Univ. of Westminster Press, 1996).
19. Trafic no. 50 (May 2004) signals the definitive return of Bazin to the center of French film studies. An enormous special issue—six hundred pages—it bears the title “Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?” Bazin’s name and ideas are repeatedly invoked throughout the issue, and two of his essays are reprinted with an expansive introduction by Emmanuel Burdeau of Cahiers du Cinéma.
20. Daney, “André Bazin,” in Ciné-Journal II (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1998), p 46. Daney is reviewing the 1983 French translation of Andrew, André Bazin (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1978).