What is Cinema?, Volume 1
André Bazin
Language: English
Pages: 172
ISBN: 2:00262750
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
André Bazin's What Is Cinema? (volumes I and II) have been classics of film studies for as long as they've been available and are considered the gold standard in the field of film criticism. Although Bazin made no films, his name has been one of the most important in French cinema since World War II. He was co-founder of the influential Cahiers du Cinéma, which under his leadership became one of the world's most distinguished publications. Championing the films of Jean Renoir (who contributed a short foreword to Volume I), Orson Welles, and Roberto Rossellini, he became the protégé of François Truffaut, who honors him touchingly in his forword to Volume II. This new edition includes graceful forewords to each volume by Bazin scholar and biographer Dudley Andrew, who reconsiders Bazin and his place in contemporary film study. The essays themselves are erudite but always accessible, intellectual, and stimulating. As Renoir puts it, the essays of Bazin "will survive even if the cinema does not."
The Bigamist (BFI Film Classics)
Amores Perros (BFI Modern Classics)
The Primal Screen: Essays on Film and Related Subjects
subject and to preserve him from a second spiritual death. Today the making of images no longer shares an anthropocentric, utilitarian purpose. It is no longer a question of survival after death, but of a larger concept, the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny. “How vain a thing is painting” if underneath our fond admiration for its works we do not discern man’s primitive need to have the last word in the argument with death by means of the form
development and hence aesthetically justified? What again does one say about Byzantine miniatures in stone enlarged to the dimensions of a cathedral tympanum? And to turn now to the field of the novel, should one censure preclassical tragedy for adapting the pastoral novel for the stage or Madame La Fayette for her indebtedness to Racinian dramaturgy? Again, what is true technically is even truer of themes which turn up in all kinds and varieties of expression. This is a commonplace of literary
prior to the war. When he took up the project again in 1946 he decided to go back to the original text. As we shall see, a little later he also virtually preserved the original stage settings. Whether it has been in the United States, England, or France, both with the classics and the contemporary plays, the evolution of filmed theater has been the same. It has been characterized by an increasingly exacting demand for fidelity to the text as originally written. It is as if all the various
causes and effects have no longer any material limits to the eye of the camera. Drama is freed by the camera from all contingencies of time and space. But this freeing of tangible dramatic powers is still only a secondary aesthetic cause, and does not basically explain the reversal of value between the actor and the decor. For sometimes it actually happens that the cinema deliberately deprives itself of the use of setting and of exterior nature—we have already seen a perfect instance of this in
alternatives. CHARLIE CHAPLIN From D.O.C., 1948 CINEMA AND EXPLORATION A combination of two articles that appeared in France-Observateur in April, 1953, and January, 1956. p. 156, Salle Pleyel. A well-known Paris concert-hall (named after the Austrian composer) often used for the showing of travel films. PAINTING AND CINEMA Source unknown; not given in French edition INDEX Adventurer, The, 146 ff. Afrique vous parle, L’, 155 Agel, Henri, 132 Alice in Wonderland, 42 Allemania Anno Zero,
