What Is Cinema?, Volume 2
André Bazin
Language: English
Pages: 214
ISBN: B000RB2082
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."
Movie Love: Complete Reviews 1988-1991
narrative and of the current limits of technique. Thus the cinema stands in contrast to poetry, painting, and theater, and comes ever closer to the novel. It is not my intention here to justify this basic aesthetic trend of modern cinema, be it on technical, psychological, or economic grounds. I simply state it for this once without thereby prejudging either the intrinsic validity of such an evolution or the extent to which it is final. But realism in art can only be achieved in one way-through
basicaUy a minor art. This is sometimes true even though one may actually rank the genre fairly high in the aesthetic hierarchy. It would be unjust and untrue to see such an assessment as the final measure of this particular technique. Just as, in literature, reportage with its ethic of objectivity (perhaps it would be more correct to say with its ethic of seeming objectivity) has simply J 33 U-'-hat Is Cinema? provided a basis for a new aesthetic of the novel, so the technique of the Italian
inverted, appearance is always presented as a unique discovery, an almost documentary revelation that retains its full force of vividness and detail. Whence the director's art lies in the skill with which he compels the event to reveal its mcaningor at least the meaning he lends it-without removing any of its ambiguity. lilt Thus defined, neoreaIism is Dot the exclusive property of anyone ideology nor even of anyone ideal, no more than it excludes any other ideal-no more, in point of fact, than
film which had escaped me. lt is true that the judgment of a foreigner is apt sometimes to go astray because of a lack of familiarity with the context from which a film comes. For example, the success outside France of films by Duvivier or Pagnol is clearly the result of a misunderstanding. Foreign critics admire in these films a picture of France which seems to them "wonderfully typical," and they confuse this "exoticism" with the value of these films as film. 1 recognize that these differences
certainly one of the great moments in world cinema. All the same, and indeed by its very beauty, it reveals an unhealthy condition of the myth, a pernicious infection of the character, which, if it continued, could not but destroy it utterly. Indeed, one might have expected, with some likelihood, to find nothing more in Monsieur Verdoux than the actor (prodigious undoubtedly, but still the actor) Charles S. Chaplin. Nothing of the sort, it was just that sickly condition which precedes moulting
