FOUR YEARS AGO in his foreword to the first English volume of What is Cinema? Jean Renoir spoke of the influence that André Bazin would undoubtedly exercise in the years ahead. The truth of this is already being borne out in various ways and places. In English-speaking countries, for example, his name appears increasingly in critical studies of film. In France his continued importance as an authority to be reckoned with has again been recognized by the fact that some Marxist film critics seem to have felt it essential to return to the attack against his theories with something of the urgency—if not with quite the same vituperation—yet with the identical arguments of the original assault in the pages of Positif in 1962: a protracted invective spread over two issues and running to approximately eighty pages. (They considered it their duty, they said—with the help of words like “charlatan” and “naif”—to “demystify a pope”!)
Paradoxical though it may sound in speaking of a critic whose work at first reading appears so cerebral, the key to any true understanding of the man and his work is the word love—spurned by Positif as a catch-all, a term of mystification. “He loved the cinema,” François Truffaut tells us in his foreword, “but more than the cinema, he loved life, people, animals, science, the arts.”
In the commemorative number of Cahiers du Cinéma that appeared after Bazin’s death, Truffaut likened him to a “companion of St. Francis of Assisi possessed of a kind of goodness at once comical and touching.” Nothing could illustrate this better than the charming and humorous article that appeared in Cahiers (January, 1959) after his return to France from a film festival in South America, in which he describes his efforts, happily successful in spite of every official and unofficial obstacle, to bring home a parrot.
In the same commemorative issue of Cahiers, Claude Vermorel also spoke of Bazin’s “natural Franciscan goodness.” The significance of these comparisons extends to something far beyond their surface meaning as can be seen, for example, from his essays on neorealism and from the importance he attaches to the recurrent (and, for his opponents, objectionably “idealist”) phrase “respect for reality.” If I were making a film of his life I would open on a significantly associative or symbolic shot of Bazin in his critical, beginning twenties, as he crosses the square in front of St. Sulpice, a large and somber-looking structure and long the embodiment of all that was somber and solemn about traditional French Catholicism. The name of the church is additionally significant since it was adopted by a congregation of priests of which his friend and colleague Amedée Ayfre would later become a member. Bossuet and Fénelon, equally symbolic seventeenth-century churchmen, stare frozenly down at him as he moves, his mind full of what they would consider theologically revolutionary ideas, toward his destination, the Café St. Sulpice. Gathered there at one of their regular editorial meetings are a group of writers who form part of the staff of Esprit, a literary review founded in 1932 to which André later contributed regularly, between 1949 and 1957. Among those present are the Catholic P.-A. Touchard and the Protestant—some say the non-believer—Roger Leenhardt, the one a writer, the other also a film maker, both to become close friends of Bazin. We might find there, too, Bazaine the painter and two distinguished men of the theater, Jacques Coppeau and Dullin, the author of an unusual autobiographical study of acting for both stage and screen, Souvenirs et notes de travail d’un acteur.
This would be no invented movie scene. Such a meeting actually took place some time during the period immediately preceding World War II. Bazin had come to meet Touchard with whom he had been in correspondence, at the latter’s invitation, to make his formal acquaintance and to discuss the Esprit group which Bazin had founded at the Ecole Normal Supérieure at St. Cloud, where he was training to be a teacher. These groups, centers for philosophical, theological, and sociological discussion, were encouraged and supported by the French Personalist movement, the guiding spirit and main driving force behind which was Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950). When writing later of Bazin, Touchard referred to Mounier as “their common master from whom Bazin had acquired his almost invincible passion for abstract terminology.” But he had acquired more than that from Mounier.
Bazin has left no specific philosophical testament but it appears like a watermark (to use a favorite comparison of his) in the texture of his writings and the more we examine this texture the more we see what Touchard meant when he called Mounier their common master, although one feels that it is not a case of a pupil learning at the knee, but rather of a mind that had found its fellow. The philosophy of Mounier is a variation of the Personalist movement that existed in different forms in France, the United States, England, Holland, Switzerland, and elsewhere. Its approach to life, to man and to his place in the cosmos and society and to his relations with his fellows, was initially developed while Mounier was at the University of Grenoble, his native city. Its basis was the affirmation of the existence of free and creative persons and it introduces into the structure of its thought the idea of the unforeseen which naturally rules out any desire for definitive systemization. “Nothing,” Mounier wrote, “is more repugnant than the fondness so common nowadays for a machine to think and act for us, an automatic distributor of solutions and recommendations; such a thing is a barrier to research, an insurance against disquiet (Angst) or any sort of self-testing or the taking of risks.” In order therefore to get away from the idea of Personalism as a rigid system he suggests that one should avoid talking of Personalism; rather one should think of it in the plural, that is of personalisms—Christian, agnostic, and so on. One can readily see how this openness, this pluralistic tone, with its sense of individual freedom so evidently reflected in Bazin’s writings, must irk his Marxist critics.
The thinkers who most influenced Mounier were the Russian Berdiaeff, Bergson, Bergson’s former pupil the neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain, but above all Charles Peguy (1873–1914), a poet, an ardent Catholic, and an equally ardent socialist who inscribed his first book Jeanne d’Arc to “those women and men who have dedicated their lives to the establishment of the world-wide socialist republic.”
In 1932, when he launched Esprit, Mounier summed up the position of the movement as follows: “We are looking for a camping ground somewhere between Bergson and Peguy, Maritain and Berdiaeff, Prudhon and deMan.” At that time, as Daniel de Rops the historian describes them, they were a generation without masters, trying to break free from the lesser masters of literature they had followed at the University and ignorant as yet of the works of Kierkegaard, Marx and Jaspers. But this was to change and later Mounier was to write that “the task of our age will be perhaps not to try in vain to heal the seemingly unhealable breach that now exists between the followers of Kierkegaard and Marx but to attempt to retrace our steps to the moment of what might be called the Socratic revolution of the nineteenth century, the assault on all the forces of the time that were attempting to depersonalize man. This assault unfortunately separated into two, one went in the direction taken by Kierkegaard recalling contemporary man, dazzled by the discovery and exploitation of the world, to an awareness of his subjectivity and his freedom; the other way was taken by Marx who denounced the processes of mystification in which man had been caught up by a social structure that had been grafted onto his material condition and reminded him, instead, that his destiny lay not only with his heart but with his hands.” It was a deplorable division that could only continue to grow wider. Personalism was then to attempt somehow to nullify this, to be the “third force” placed between capitalism and communism, detesting the former and sharing many ideas in common with the latter.
Mounier admired the writings of Teilhard de Chardin who, he said, had restored a cosmic perspective to the Christian message. He was likewise much concerned with existentialism. “Personalism and existentialism,” he said, “agree about one thing in particular, the struggle against the system” and he called Personalism a branch of the existential tree. It is a philosophy of existence before being a philosophy of essence, an idea which is echoed passim in Bazin, for example in the essay on neorealism: “They (the neorealist directors) never forget that the world is, before it is something to be condemned” (p. 21). Capitalism was one of Mounier’s main targets. For him it was odious and inhuman and his criticism of it is said to be superior to that of Marx. He denounced the compromise Christians have made with it. He likewise agreed with Peguy that the bourgeoisie in leaving aside grandeur for tranquility had allowed itself to be eaten away by a mortal malady and had corrupted the people. Like Bernanos, he observed that its chief fault was to inject into every level of society “the worst of poisons, namely, mediocrity” (Moix. E. Mounier, Editions du Seine, Paris, 1960).
I have dwelled at some length on these various ideas of the “master” since without a minimum, at least, of Personalist philosophy before him the reader will not know what soil it was that nourished Bazin’s theory of cinema and his aesthetics, his vision of the world and of society, or of ideals that inspired him—nor will they be aware how unjustified and ill-informed is the shallow “odium theologicum” of his Marxist critics.
The fervor of the disciple had been early evident to Touchard in the energy Bazin devoted to the Esprit group at the Ecole Normale at St. Cloud and also to a second group that he had set up during a summer vacation at La Rochelle, two members of which were a revolutionary young abbé and a Protestant pastor.
That his fervor lasted we see from various pieces of evidence, for example in his review in Esprit of Lousiana Story ten years or so later, in which he insists that his readers see the film. If they do not go or if they do not at least make a firm resolve to go, then they are not worthy to be readers of Esprit. A friend of his young days recalls, in the course of a touching obituary poem, how Bazin as a student helped to circulate “underground” copies of the writings of Teilhard de Chardin whose works were banned from publication by his ecclesiastical superiors for fear of their possible unorthodoxy. Who, reading Bazin or de Chardin, can fail to hear some of the ideas and even some of the vocabulary echoing from one to the other?
What was it that drew this young man to the cinema, his enthusiasm for which has been described as part of his passion for culture, for the truth? Bearing in mind what we have just outlined of the philosophy that appeared to attract him, and likewise his own exquisitely sensitive awareness of the beauty of the landscape of the world and of all it contains, I think it would not be wrong to conclude that the attraction in great part lay in the camera’s special relation to all of this, to life and movement, to reality. It permitted him in a special way to dwell on everything he prized. As he himself said, “The cinema more than any other art is bound up with love.” Small wonder then that he immersed himself in it, eagerly followed its evolution, and resisted any abuse of an instrument that permitted him the thrill of following this ever-moving “asymptote”—a word he characteristically borrowed from mathematics—that must reach out to, yet ever fall short of that “realism” that would be its own destruction.
These speculations arise not unnaturally from an ever closer study of his writing. What is not speculation is the influence of the man who shared with François Truffaut his dedication of the first volume of his collected essays—Roger Leenhardt. Jean Louis Tellaney says that “Bazin was conquered by Leenhardt who was passionately devoted to the cinema” and this is also the view of Georges Sadoul. We have Bazin’s own assessment of Leenhardt as the man who wrote with the most subtlety about the cinema. We have, finally, the testimony of Leenhardt himself. “He [Bazin] was kind enough to say that my column in Esprit where he replaced me had influenced him in his vocation as a critic.” One of the reasons, and not the least of them, that led Leenhardt to give up writing about the cinema “without regret” was that what Bazin wrote “was a continuation of what I was doing and he took it beyond what I was trying to do.”
Certainly, from Bazin’s review of Leenhardt’s Dernières vacances, a most deft handling of the art of making gentle criticism seem like warm praise, it is evident how far the pupil had advanced and what an accomplished critic he had already become by the time he took over Leenhardt’s column and became a regular member of the Esprit staff of contributors.
Leenhardt also tells us that Bazin was impressed and to some extent influenced by Malraux’s now famous essay Sketch for a Psychology of the Motion Picture (Verve, Vol. V, No. 2, 1940). The likeness between some of the ideas in this essay and Bazin’s Ontology of the Photographic Image is marked. Both are concerned with the art of painting as distinct from the technique of representation. Both speak in substance of the cinema as the natural climax to what Malraux describes as the “frantic headlong quest of movement by the votaries of representation at the end of the baroque period.” Both use the comparison of an “identity card.” There appear, however, to be points of divergence notably on the transition from the silent to the talking picture as discussed by Bazin in another essay. The references common to both critics that are reflected in these pages are to cinema and myth, particularly as they relate to Chaplin and to Bazin’s analysis of Monsieur Verdoux.
So widespread does Bazin’s reading seem that an addict of the hallowed process of Forschungsquellen might produce all kinds of parallels even from so far afield as de Rerum Natura of Lucretius and his theory of images.
At the editorial meetings of Esprit Bazin’s presence was strongly felt. “There was a daimon in this fellow,” a colleague wrote after Bazin’s death, “who could make people normally bored with cinema fall in love with it. When he arrived at an editorial meeting its tone would change and the subject under discussion take on a different shape. Automatically everyone would start talking film. But actually we were just spectators and Bazin made no attempt to convince us of the truth of what he was saying. Just by his being there we felt that what we were searching for in current events, even the most trivial ones, the bits and pieces of news or of political arguments, the details of our day-to-day existence, all was to be found in that troubled pool that reflected the changing world of the twentieth century.”
Of the essays in this volume those on eroticism and on the western together with the one on Gabin are from the third volume of his collected works entitled Cinema and Sociology. The rest are from the fourth volume, Neorealism: An Aesthetic of Reality. The western attracted Bazin early, in particular for what it revealed to him of the history and sociology of the West, and characteristically he sees similarities between the cowboy and the knight of courtly French literature and between the women in the new West placed by force of social circumstances upon a pedestal, and the idealized woman of courtly love. Although the statement with which he introduces his “Notes on Eroticism in the Cinema” (once more become singularly relevant) may appear less than prophetic any judgment of his views will depend to some extent on whether one agrees that the nude productions of today—their content naturally affected by their form—are theater according to the common and traditional meaning of that word, and what the role of the actor is therein. In any event it is difficult to believe that if Bazin were writing today his own views would have changed and for two reasons. First, they seem to be firmly rooted in the conception of the actor’s role as set forth by Diderot in Le Paradoxe du comédien, namely that his function is to stir the public without experiencing the emotions himself and, secondly, that making love like death cannot be performed for another. They are moments uniquely to be lived through and cannot, by definition, be treated as “objects.” It is interesting, from another point of view, to see how Bazin distinguishes between the impact of nudity on the stage and on the screen, the effect of the former being more powerful since it is in an actual place. The nude on the screen on the other hand is in an imaginary place. Does not this argue some modification ten years later of his earlier views on the essence of the theater? (“Theater and Cinema,” What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, p. 95.)
There is a quality present in some of these essays, particularly in “The Outlaw” and “The Entomology of the Pin-up Girl” and also in much of Bazin’s other work that, to the best of my knowledge, is never alluded to—his humor. Unfortunately his admirers tend to praise him with solemn intensity while his detractors excommunicate him with whatever is the solemn Marxist equivalent of bell, book, and candle. Thus the grasp of both on the quintessential Bazin is weakened.
His capacity to bring a dialectical brilliance (in the scholastic not the Hegelian sense) to the defense of lost causes or at least of causes in great need of friends is admirably illustrated in his superb analysis of Limelight and Monsieur Verdoux. The masterly essay on Verdoux is developed from an article that appeared originally in Les Temps Modernes, (December, 1947). It was in reply to an unfavorable review of the film by Natalie Moffat, also printed in Les Temps Modernes (July, 1947) which was the second of two articles by her on the film, the first describing its actual production, after she had visited the Chaplin studios. Bazin had seen the film in Czechoslovakia and found that the Czechs had had the same reaction to it as Natalie Moffat. “The Marxists,” he said, “regretted the absence of any socially useful lesson.”
Charles Brémond, reviewing Bazin’s third volume of essays in the first number of Communication, a publication of the Centre d’Etudes des Communications de Masse, founded just prior to the publication of these essays, praises it as a mine of suggestions, some of them daring and paradoxical but all of them stimulating, to be regarded, however, as the work of a critic not of a sociologist. Thus he calls it a philosophy of the social order rather than sociology. It raises the question, he says, of the relation of sociology and aesthetics, the former being descriptive, the latter normative. He is particularly disturbed by the handling of the myth of Verdoux. To grasp the dialectical relation between Charlie and Verdoux, he argues, is beyond the reach of the general public. For them the only myth is the myth of Charlie. This myth alone has been the real box-office attraction. Limelight and Verdoux were failures. Only the exceptional eye of Bazin could establish the Charlie-Verdoux relationship. He does admit, however, that the notion is ingenious, even plausible. So, perhaps he has answered his own question and in the years since this review appeared there has grown up a widespread understanding of the Charlie-Verdoux relationship.
In addition to the subject matter that is their main concern, the essays of Bazin are uniformly rich in what might be called parenthetical insights, in associations of ideas, that derive from a combination of wide reading and a synthetic spirit. The essays on neorealism are no exception. The comparison he so adroitly draws for example between the novels of the American critical realists and the neorealist directors argues a penetrating grasp of the literary scene in both countries. Above all, these essays shed an important light on Bazin’s attitude on the question of “montage as against depth of focus.” He thought the debate had died down and said so in an article in the first number of Cahiers du Cinéma entitled “A Final Word About Depth of Focus” (April, 1951). Nobody talked about it anymore, he said, because it had become common practice. In a pertinent passage he explains how in a scene in The Little Foxes Wyler had placed a metal box containing important documents in such a position relative to the two characters in the scene that no one could miss its importance. Montage would have shown all this in a series of cuts. “In other words,” says Bazin, “the single-shot sequence as used by directors today does not renounce montage—how could it without returning cinema to a state of primitive jibbering?—it makes montage part of the structure of the film.”
Bazin did not live to see that his “final word” about depth of focus was nothing of the sort. M. Gozlan of the staff of Positif saw to this on the occasion of the publication of the collected essays. Reviewing them in the protracted article to which I referred above and sarcastically entitled “Eulogy for André Bazin,” he deals at length in an attack on the whole of Bazin’s “system,” particularly with what is “rightly or wrongly the best-known part of Bazin’s system, his critique of montage.” The ultimate source of this and of everything else is reputed to be Christian theology and Bazin, presumably an “opiate” addict, is dismissed as a bourgeois idealist. The ambiguity which Bazin posits in the face of reality and of the cinematic image of reality is ridiculed alike in the text and in the title of the first installment “The Delights of Ambiguity.”
The most recent revival of the controversy was in Les Temps Modernes (December, 1970) in an article entitled “All Films are Political,” in which Christian Zimmer attempts to lay the foundations for a new criticism of cinema which would call for the elimination of any notion of the film image as an “impression of reality.” In their concern to give film a cultural status the critics had overlooked, it seems, the economic process in film production. All films therefore made under capitalism are inescapably bourgeois including those made with the best of proletarian intentions.
Hitherto most critics, being men of letters, have treated cinema as if it were literature. This, according to Zimmer, is the idealist approach and the foremost representative of that approach is Bazin. His theory and that of his followers rest upon one simple fallacy—the transparence of the cinematic spectacle, the fallacy of seeing the screen as a mirror or a window open onto the world, with, in consequence, intimations of the invisible and, by inference, of the spiritual. This fallacy is the basis for Bazin’s phobia about montage. He is confusing the thing represented with the representation. The image is not a fragment of reality, it is the produce of labor. Labor makes use of reality as an ingredient in the process, but this process does not render reality back in its original purity. Thus the obsession of Bazin with concrete reality is in line with the broad tradition of bourgeois humanism which sees in painstaking and preconceived realism the ideal of the artist, in other words a kind of photographic prowess for its own sake. The solution is to escape from this reality-related system, to speak with a “class tongue” and forget that figment of the commercial imagination “the public.” Most importantly, it would seem, concern for the impression of reality neutralizes the subversive power of the film.
Clearly here, as with all the arguments used by these critics to attack the views of Bazin, we are faced with Mounier’s “unhealable breach.” Short of taking the discussion back step by step to the historical and material dialectic from which they derive and beginning the argument from there, there is no way to deal with them, for they are arguments put forward not on their own intrinsic merits but from authority. For the rest, one is left only to deplore the treatment accorded by them to the works of a critic who approached the cinema with a rich sense of the elusive paradoxes of art and hence of aesthetics. One wonders indeed if Gozlan or Zimmer have truly examined their subject.
If they had, how can they talk of him, against the clear evidence both of Bazin’s own writings and of the philosophy of Personalism which he shared, and which I purposely outlined at some length, as bourgeois and presumably the dupe, as they would call it, of capitalist ideology? Again, if they had, they surely would have shown a fuller understanding of his position in the argument over montage and depth of focus.
Furthermore why do they insist on seeing in his concept of “reality” and of the cinema’s obligation to respect reality only an indication of the mental subservience of Bazin the pious Catholic? In fact, its antecedents date back five centuries before the Christian era. Have they never heard of the philosopher Xenophanes who, gazing up at the heavens, proclaimed “the all is one”? Or of Parmenides who saw this whole as a continuum? Indeed if there had been cinema in those days one could imagine a similar argument to the present one going on between the schools of Parmenides and Heraclitus. It was these philosophers who first saw the cosmos or “reality” as a whole. For Plato it was a structured whole, the parts of which are held together by the force of love. Bazin then, the “pious Catholic,” is in splendid philosophical company, the company not only of Plato but of the Stoics with their cosmic piety, of Boethius, of Sallustius, to cite but some of the ancients. It is a tradition likewise that saw this world, and all that is in it, as good and as such to be loved. “Everything exists,” said Sallustius, using a Platonic argument, “because of some goodness in it.” The first cause of all is the Good.
As for ambiguity—is there no mystery about the very concept of matter? No ambiguity? When Lenin proclaims that matter is infinite in itself and exists eternally is he not proclaiming a mystery as unfathomable as if he had substituted the word God for matter?
Bazin had a strong and subtle sense of the evolution of the techniques in the use of which reality is “respected.” They are the instruments of an art dedicated to reality—an art of which he used the word “asymptote,” perhaps the most illuminating of the words he borrows from the sciences. For him a paradox lay behind this word, the paradox of a realism that is profoundly aesthetic. Paradox indeed is truly the essence not only of his style, but of his mental processes. It is his own particular dialectic which, like his humor, it is dangerous to overlook.
Jean Mitry, to whom Gozlan and Zimmer turn for support, in reality stands somewhere between them and Bazin. He disagrees with the manner in which Bazin predicates reality of the image, but when one reads all he has to say one feels that while his rational processes lead him to this conclusion, something inside him, a less purely analytical sense of cinema, inclines him in Bazin’s direction. The filmic image, says Mitry, gives us an arbitrary, not a true, reality. It is not an exact image of the real. Reality is fragmented by camera angles, framing, points of view that arrange these fragments according to relative periods of duration and endow them with a meaning other than that which they had as part of the universal decor. Relations between them now exist that were not present in the original and true reality. From this there results a discontinuous spatio-temporal development different from the real space-time continuum, a statement that seems to explain why Zimmer calls Mitry to witness.
Bazin’s reply would be to agree that of course some kind of transformation takes place and by this, if one may here insert a gloss, he would mean the kind of change that is implied in the concept of mimesis as it has come down to us from Aristotle’s Poetics when we relate it to cinema. He would repeat what he has said about ellipsis as used for example by Rossellini in the presentation of events, about the filtering of reality through the director’s consciousness, a concept which gives rise to his assertion that there is no such thing properly speaking as neorealism. There are only neorealist directors whether they be materialists, Christians, Communists, or whatever. The essential thing is that in this mimetic process there be no cheating on reality however the process of “imaging” is carried out.
“The reality produced by the cinema at will and which it organizes is the reality of the world of which we are part and of which the film receives a mold at once spatial and temporal.” The word “organizes” shows that he accepts the idea of some kind of change, of artifice in short. Did not Bazin say—in praise of Eisenstein’s Potemkin, no less—that there is no art without artifice and that one must sacrifice something of reality in the process of achieving it?
Mitry on the other hand prefers to talk not of the “coefficient of reality” in the image but of the “coefficient of unreality,” of a strange quality which he admits may give a handle to the spiritually inclined. However, such a feeling is not justified, he says, arising as it does simply from the phenomenon of perception. And what is more magical, may one ask, more mystifying than the act of perception? So much for the purely philosophizing Mitry. On the final page of the second volume of his Esthetique du Cinéma, however, he takes a definite step, it seems to me, in Bazin’s direction: “If the cinema is an art it is an art created in the face of every restriction imposed on art. Certainly art is a pathway to transcendence [sic] but it owes it to itself to lead the way there rather than just to reproduce it and to lead the way via immanence and liberty. Only the cinema can do this, for its prime element is life itself!”
So far we have discussed only the French situation. Bazin’s “Defense of Rossellini” is evidence that there were (and there still are) confrontations in Italy. Rossellini also bore witness to this in an interview in Cahiers (July, 1954) in which he said that at that time the political struggle had become so feverish that people were no longer free to make judgments and directors were dictated to by their political beliefs. This was a particularly unsatisfactory state of affairs for him, since, as he said, “It is primarily from the moral viewpoint that I look at the world, only later does it become an aesthetic viewpoint” (a statement strangely reminiscent of one of Lenin’s: “Today’s ethic will be tomorrow’s aesthetic”).
At the time he was making Open City there was, Rossellini said, “a tremendous need for truth. I always respect neorealism for that. We were maintaining a moral position more than a style.” This was Bazin’s view. It was a Marxist, Ugo Barbaro, who coined the word neorealism, however, and it was the Marxists who were its films’ first critics. No actual definition of the word was ever established and a congress at Parma in December, 1952, called to try and arrive at one, failed to do so.
I spoke earlier of love as the key to an understanding of Bazin’s writings. I said also that his friends saw in him a likeness to Francis of Assisi. I also said that this association carried a special significance. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the essays on neorealism. It seems to give him a peculiar insight into the films of Rossellini, De Sica, and Fellini and into the writings of Zavattini. For Bazin, La Strada was of Franciscan inspiration. Of De Sica and Zavattini’s Bicycle Thief he writes, “Its true meaning lies in not betraying the essence of things, in allowing them first to exist for their own sakes, freely; it is to love them in their single individual reality. ‘My . . . little sister reality,’ says De Sica, and she circles about him like the birds around St. Francis. Others put her in a cage or teach her to talk, but De Sica talks to her and it is the true language of reality, that we hear, the word that cannot be denied, that only love can express.” Bazin has said he was no philosopher. He could never have denied, however, that he was a poet. What indeed could put more clearly his values, which St. Francis himself long ago foreshadowed in his immortal Canticle of All Created Things, which Mounier called “a beautiful piece of medieval realism”:
Be praised my Lord with all your creatures especially master brother Sun who brings day, and you give light by him and he is fair and radiant with a great shining and he draws his meaning most high from you . . .Be praised my Lord for sister moon and the stars in heaven . . . for brother wind . . . and for the air . . . for sister our mother earth . . .
Today we inevitably ask what would Bazin be offering us now from the treasury of his paradoxes?
One, perhaps the greatest of all, has been preserved for us by a colleague of his writing of him in Esprit after his death: “Has he not declared that the year 2000 will salute the advent of a cinema free of the artificialities of montage, renouncing the role of an ‘art of reality’ so that it may climb to its final level on which it will become once and for all ‘reality made art’”—perhaps in the way he forsees it in the concluding sentence of his essay on Umberto D.
It now remains for me to thank all those to whom I had recourse with problems of translation. In particular may I thank Professor Stephen Werner of the French Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, for his invaluable help. Likewise my good friend and editor Ernest Callenbach for his endless patience and his skillful editorial hand always gloved in the velvet of his tact.
H. G.