André Bazin

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André Bazin on the cover of the third volume of the original edition of Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?

André Bazin (18 April 1918 – 11 November 1958) was a renowned and influential French film critic and film theorist.

Life

Bazin was born in Angers, France, in 1918. He died in 1958, aged 40, of leukemia.

Film criticism

Bazin started to write about film in 1943 and was a co-founder of the film magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1951, along with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Lo Duca. Bazin was a major force in post-World War II film studies and criticism. In addition to editing Cahiers until his death, a four-volume collection of his writings was published posthumously from 1958 to 1962 and titled Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? (What is Cinema?). A selection from this collection was translated into English and published in two volumes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They became mainstays of film courses in the English-speaking world, but were never updated or revised. In 2009, the Canadian publisher caboose, taking advantage of more favourable Canadian copyright laws, compiled fresh translations of some of the key essays from the collection in a single-volume edition. With annotations by translator Timothy Barnard, this became the only corrected and annotated edition of these writings in any language.[1]

The long-held standard and highly reductive view of Bazin's critical system, now being subjected to more sophisticated analysis by Bazin scholars worldwide, is that he argued for films that depicted what he saw as "objective reality" (such as documentaries and films of the Italian neorealism school) and directors who made themselves "invisible" (such as Howard Hawks). He advocated the use of deep focus (Orson Welles), wide shots (Jean Renoir) and the "shot-in-depth", and preferred what he referred to as "true continuity" through mise en scène over experiments in editing and visual effects. This placed him in opposition to film theory of the 1920s and 1930s which emphasized how the cinema can manipulate reality. The concentration on objective reality, deep focus, and lack of montage are linked to Bazin's belief that the interpretation of a film or scene should be left to the spectator.

Bazin believed that a film should represent a director's personal vision, rooted in the spiritual beliefs known as personalism. These ideas would have a pivotal importance on the development of the auteur theory, the manifesto for which was François Truffaut's 1954 Cahiers article "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema". Bazin also is known as a proponent of "appreciative criticism," wherein only critics who like a film can write a review of it, thus encouraging constructive criticism.

Bazin in popular culture

Bibliography

In English

  • Bazin, André. (2009). What is Cinema? (Timothy Barnard, Trans.) Montreal: caboose, ISBN 9780981191409
  • Bazin, André. (1967-71). What is cinema? Vol. 1 & 2 (Hugh Gray, Trans., Ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520020340
  • Bazin, André. (1973). Jean Renoir (Francois Truffaut, Ed.; W.W. Halsey II & William H. Simon, Trans.). New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0671214640
  • Bazin, André. (1978). Orson Welles: a critical view. New York: Harper and Row. ISBN 0060102748
  • Andrew, Dudley. André Bazin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. ISBN 0195021657
  • Bazin, André. (1981). French cinema of the occupation and resistance: The birth of a critical esthetic (Francois Truffaut, Ed., Stanley Hochman, Trans.). New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co. ISBN 080442022X
  • Bazin, André. (1982). The cinema of cruelty: From Buñuel to Hitchcock (Francois Truffaut, Ed.; Sabine d'Estrée, Trans.). New York: Seaver Books. ISBN 039451808X
  • Bazin, André. (1985). Essays on Chaplin (Jean Bodon, Trans., Ed.). New Haven, Conn.: University of New Haven Press. LCCN 84-52687
  • Bazin, André. (1996). Bazin at work: Major essays & reviews from the forties and fifties (Bert Cardullo, Ed., Trans.; Alain Piette, Trans.). New York: Routledge. (HB) ISBN 0415900174 (PB) ISBN 0415900182
  • Bazin, André. (Forthcoming). French cinema from the liberation to the New Wave, 1945-1958 (Bert Cardullo, Ed.)

In French

References

  1. ^ "Caboose launches film publications with a new translation of André Bazin’s What is Cinema?", http://www.caboosebooks.net/what-is-cinema .

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to André Bazin.

Online essays

See also

  • The André Bazin Special Issue, Film International, No. 30 (November 2007), Jeffrey Crouse, guest editor. Essays include those by Charles Warren ("What is Criticism?"), Richard Armstrong ("The Best Years of Our Lives: Planes of Innocence and Experience"), William Rothman ("Bazin as a Cavellian Realist"), Mats Rohdin ("Cinema as an Art of Potential Metaphors: The Rehabilitation of Metaphor in André Bazin's Realist Film Theory"), Karla Oeler ("André Bazin and the Preservation of Loss"), Tom Paulus ("The View across the Courtyard: Bazin and the Evolution of Depth Style"), and Diane Stevenson ("Godard and Bazin"). Introductory essay, "Because We Need Him Now: Re-enchanting Film Studies Through Bazin," written by Jeffrey Crouse.


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