What do you think?
Rate this book
What is Cinema? #1
What is Cinema? Volume I
The philosophy and unique insights of the late French film critic are revealed in these essays
192 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1967
About the author
André Bazin
117 books152 followersWritings of French critic and film theorist André Bazin influenced the development of cinema of New Wave.
André Bazin founded the renowned and pioneering journal, Cahiers du cinéma.
Bazin saw and argued to depict "objective reality," such as documentaries of the Italian neo-realism school and "invisible" directors, such as Howard Winchester Hawks. He advocated the use of deep focus as George Orson Welles and wide shots as Jean Renoir "in depth," and he preferred "true continuity" through mise en scène over experiments in editing and visual effects. This preference placed him in opposition of the 1920s and 1930s to those who emphasized ability to manipulate reality. Theory of Bazin to leave the interpretation of a scene to the spectator linked the concentration on objective reality, deep focus, and lack of montage.
Bazin thought to represent a personal vision, rooted in the spiritual beliefs, known as personalism, of a director. A pivotal importance of these ideas on the auteur; François Truffaut in 1954 wrote the manifesto "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema," article in Cahiers. People also know Bazin as a proponent of encouraging only "appreciative," constructive reviewers.
After World War II, Bazin, a major force, studied. He edited Cahiers until his death, and people then published a posthumous four-volume collection, titled Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? ( What is Cinema? ), to 1962. In the late 1960s and 1970s, people translated two of these volumes, mainstays of courses in the United States and England.
In response to widespread dissatisfaction with existing English translations, Caboos, the publisher of Montréal, in 2009 brought out a translation of selected essays from What is Cinema?
André Bazin founded the renowned and pioneering journal, Cahiers du cinéma.
Bazin saw and argued to depict "objective reality," such as documentaries of the Italian neo-realism school and "invisible" directors, such as Howard Winchester Hawks. He advocated the use of deep focus as George Orson Welles and wide shots as Jean Renoir "in depth," and he preferred "true continuity" through mise en scène over experiments in editing and visual effects. This preference placed him in opposition of the 1920s and 1930s to those who emphasized ability to manipulate reality. Theory of Bazin to leave the interpretation of a scene to the spectator linked the concentration on objective reality, deep focus, and lack of montage.
Bazin thought to represent a personal vision, rooted in the spiritual beliefs, known as personalism, of a director. A pivotal importance of these ideas on the auteur; François Truffaut in 1954 wrote the manifesto "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema," article in Cahiers. People also know Bazin as a proponent of encouraging only "appreciative," constructive reviewers.
After World War II, Bazin, a major force, studied. He edited Cahiers until his death, and people then published a posthumous four-volume collection, titled Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? ( What is Cinema? ), to 1962. In the late 1960s and 1970s, people translated two of these volumes, mainstays of courses in the United States and England.
In response to widespread dissatisfaction with existing English translations, Caboos, the publisher of Montréal, in 2009 brought out a translation of selected essays from What is Cinema?
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 72 reviews
August 21, 2009
Excellent book of essays by Andre Bazin, widely regarded as one of the best film critics ever. Judging by this book, I would have to agree. The best thing about this book is you don't have to have a Master's degree in Film Studies to understand them. There is an excellent essay about adapting novels into cinema, which should be of particular interest to Goodreads members. It's too bad he died in 1958 when he was only 40, it would have been interesting to hear his thoughts on movies from the 60's to the 90's with the advances in technology as time went on such as computer graphics etc., as well as increased nudity in film, the tendency to more and more graphic violence etc. Unfortunately, we'll never find out what he would have thought. Too bad.
July 20, 2016
Just a sort of disclaimer: know the history of cinema before the 50s; you'll get much more out of Bazin's essays.
A few quotations:
"Death is but the victory of time."
"It is this religious use, then, that lays bare the primordial function of statuary, namely, the preservation of life by a representation of life."
"The creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny."
"Photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption."
On early cinema; "Its capacity for invention was in inverse proportion to its powers of expression."
"When someone makes a film of Madame Bovary in Hollywood, the difference of aesthetic level between the work of Flaubert and the average American film being so great, the result is a standard American production that has only one thing wrong with it--that it is still called Madame Bovary."
"A good adaptation should result in a restoration of the essence of the letter and the spirit."
"Cocteau the film-maker understood that he must add nothing to the setting, that the role of the cinema was not to multiply but intensify"
Cocteau once said "cinema is an event seen through a keyhole."
A few quotations:
"Death is but the victory of time."
"It is this religious use, then, that lays bare the primordial function of statuary, namely, the preservation of life by a representation of life."
"The creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny."
"Photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption."
On early cinema; "Its capacity for invention was in inverse proportion to its powers of expression."
"When someone makes a film of Madame Bovary in Hollywood, the difference of aesthetic level between the work of Flaubert and the average American film being so great, the result is a standard American production that has only one thing wrong with it--that it is still called Madame Bovary."
"A good adaptation should result in a restoration of the essence of the letter and the spirit."
"Cocteau the film-maker understood that he must add nothing to the setting, that the role of the cinema was not to multiply but intensify"
Cocteau once said "cinema is an event seen through a keyhole."
Read
January 16, 2022So very happily sad that Ive just seen a path to see things (ie. creative works) in a psychological philosophical way, far away from a cliche technical way that most review essays follow. Skip some essays that I find myself irrelatable, but some bring quite good times, eg. seeing short films and reading the author's analysis as a practice exercise. May consider translate some into Vietnamese.
Read
March 23, 2023Great collection but some essays/points are skippable because Bazin is very rooted in his period of film history and has no imagination about the future possibilities of cinema. Strikingly so. He can't seem to imagine the future of filmmaking at all. The Chaplin chapter rules and "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" is one of the all time great art essays.
October 13, 2022
Su estilo de argumentación me encanta. Asume la postura que esta rebatiendo, la profundiza al máximo y después va uno por uno desmontando los argumentos. Usa muchos ejemplos concretos, entonces hay que conocer un poco del cine previo a los 60, pero no es necesario haber visto las películas. Algunos ensayos son super densos eso sí.
Tiene algunas cosas sobre la esencia del cine que trascienden hasta hoy en día, pero muchas de las cosas que se creían como propiedades del cine en esa época resultaron ser accidentes temporales. Otras discusiones son sobre elementos absolutamente aceptados o superados, entonces tampoco hacen mucho sentido en el cine de ahora, a pesar de que sea valioso entender de dónde viene.
Susan Sontag dijo que en lugar de una hermenéutica, necesitamos una erótica del arte y eso me hace mucho sentido al mirar a los teóricos del arte del siglo XX. Estaban tan concentrados en ver el arte a través de las nuevas disciplinas académicas, que se les paso el hecho evidente de la estimulacion sensorial y de que muchas veces el arte apela a elementos que percibimos como propios de nuestra individualidad, no a una estructura universal de la mente o la sociedad.
Tiene algunas cosas sobre la esencia del cine que trascienden hasta hoy en día, pero muchas de las cosas que se creían como propiedades del cine en esa época resultaron ser accidentes temporales. Otras discusiones son sobre elementos absolutamente aceptados o superados, entonces tampoco hacen mucho sentido en el cine de ahora, a pesar de que sea valioso entender de dónde viene.
Susan Sontag dijo que en lugar de una hermenéutica, necesitamos una erótica del arte y eso me hace mucho sentido al mirar a los teóricos del arte del siglo XX. Estaban tan concentrados en ver el arte a través de las nuevas disciplinas académicas, que se les paso el hecho evidente de la estimulacion sensorial y de que muchas veces el arte apela a elementos que percibimos como propios de nuestra individualidad, no a una estructura universal de la mente o la sociedad.
December 16, 2017
A B C سينما :D
وعيب اقرأه في مرحلة متأخره كده بعد العمر ده كله والله، بس أخيرًا عملتها/ لقيته
وعيب اقرأه في مرحلة متأخره كده بعد العمر ده كله والله، بس أخيرًا عملتها/ لقيته
Read
September 4, 2023I don't know anything about Andre Bazin besides what I read here but I think he would have liked Jackass
September 4, 2008
I think that, in the early days of film theory, this was an essential text. Bazin was so prescient in his reflections on the way in which cinema should portray realistic, daily life. Aside from being the grandfather of the Nouvelle Vague, Bazin made us think about cinema's presence as a new art form, one that embraced pretty much every artistic medium known to modern man. I particularly enjoyed his essay on Bresson. I haven't read the novel of Diary of a Country Priest, but it seemed like Bresson was one of the first pioneers of film adaptations of novels. He keeps the dialogue scarce, and ultimately expresses the psychological state of his characters through physical gesture, and transcendental imagery. Also included are writings on Italian Neo-realism, Nanook of the North, Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, and the important distinction between cinema and the theater.
I enjoy Eisenstein as well, and for the most part find that the possibilities of formal editing more easily manipulative than the stylistic restrictions of realism. Decades later, on a commentary track to Tape, Richard Linklater criticizes Dogme 95 by saying that if you film a scene in a hotel room, it is essentially contrived; you have to light it, gather the actors, create a fictional story, etc. Cinema is a contrived medium like any other, but I think that this demarcation is important to the history of which. However contrived it may be, Bazin goes further beyond this difficulty in making the point that film almost functions as a realistic documentary of a filmed event. It's amazing how he tears away so many layers of the medium.
So, in the end I have a difficult time siding with one or the other. Ultimately, I think that this argument, said argument being the distinction between realist/formalist cinema is the genesis of important film theory.
I enjoy Eisenstein as well, and for the most part find that the possibilities of formal editing more easily manipulative than the stylistic restrictions of realism. Decades later, on a commentary track to Tape, Richard Linklater criticizes Dogme 95 by saying that if you film a scene in a hotel room, it is essentially contrived; you have to light it, gather the actors, create a fictional story, etc. Cinema is a contrived medium like any other, but I think that this demarcation is important to the history of which. However contrived it may be, Bazin goes further beyond this difficulty in making the point that film almost functions as a realistic documentary of a filmed event. It's amazing how he tears away so many layers of the medium.
So, in the end I have a difficult time siding with one or the other. Ultimately, I think that this argument, said argument being the distinction between realist/formalist cinema is the genesis of important film theory.
October 15, 2021
The first five essays are great. André Bazin explains the relationship between montage and deep focus perfectly in "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema" and "The Virtues and Limitations of Montage," makes a great argument against the idea of 'pure cinema' in "The Myth of Total Cinema and "In Defense of Mixed Cinema," and clearly establishes his ultimate idea of cinema in "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." These essays are the most essential. The last five essays are a slog. Most of the essays from that point are obscured by references to literature and the theater and by obscuring his own original arguments. This is in part my fault, since I know noting of French high art, but Bazin proves that he is capable of writing for any audience, earlier in this very book. His essays on Robert Bresson and Charlie Chaplin are okay, but are less of a formal analysis than I was hoping.
July 22, 2023
I'm just 30 pages into this book and I had to write a review!
The beauty of studying art is sure lined by its ambiguity and different personal perceptions on the matter. With art It is usually much harder to produce something coherent still containing the magic of personal reflection.
The writing was very concise with just the right amount of jargon avoiding the overcomplicating of the technical world most critics get drowned in.
To cut it short, I'm in love with anything that teaches you how to approach and perceive and Bazin the best!
The beauty of studying art is sure lined by its ambiguity and different personal perceptions on the matter. With art It is usually much harder to produce something coherent still containing the magic of personal reflection.
The writing was very concise with just the right amount of jargon avoiding the overcomplicating of the technical world most critics get drowned in.
To cut it short, I'm in love with anything that teaches you how to approach and perceive and Bazin the best!
December 3, 2022
Bazin's obsession with realism is a bit annoying, but he was also writing in a particular time and place. Overall, the writing is fine and none too difficult. The only essays that left me cold (cold enough I skipped through them) were the two comparing the cinema and theater. As with most film theory/criticism books, this book is most enjoyable when you are reading about films or filmmakers that you're already familiar with.
Want to read
November 6, 2021eserin aslı Fransızca yazılmış ama buraya edisyon olarak eklenmemiş, harika :))
January 5, 2023
bazin head
Read
April 19, 2023This was a school book so I won’t review it🙏🏻
February 23, 2024
I wonder what Bazin would have written of the new cinema auteurs (Spielberg, Denis, Lanthimos, etc).
Read
April 16, 2016Bazin pioneered new territory. He wasn't a philosopher, wasn't a filmmaker, and it's hard to call him a film critic as we now understand the term. Rather, his work is in the vein of those old titans of the Frankfurt School. And within that vein, he seeks to clarify the role of the cinema in the modern artistic landscape. Unlike that perennial mope Adorno (as much as I love the grumpy fuck), Bazin sees cinema as a way to forge new artistic language. Against the charges that cinema was replacing the time-honored traditions of literature and theater, Bazin argues that cinema favors more “cinematic” expressions, while literature and theater ought to focus on that which they do best-- render unto theater that which is theater's, and unto cinema the things which are cinema's. It remains bold, and remains some of the best writing about cinema I've ever read, up there with the high-water marks set by Ebert and Kael.
February 26, 2009
I'm not that interested in film theory, but I liked this book more than I thought I would. Bazin really is a wonderful writer, and he has some very interesting ideas. I don't totally buy his theory that the photograph is completely objective and lacking in human participation, but it's interesting to see how he plays it out. And his dissection of the different ways that audiences experience and respond to theater and cinema is fantastic.
January 30, 2022
Very possible I just don't know enough about 50s cinema (especially French cinema) to really grasp this outside of some references to Welles and Olivier, but large portions definitely went way over my head. That said, the chapter on Chaplin was excellent.
April 19, 2022
"Memory is the most faithful of films—the only one that can register at any height, and right up to the very moment of death. But who can fail to see the difference between memory and that objective image that gives it eternal substance?"
……..
“There is, then, no doubt as to Bazin's influence on the future. Let me say however that it is for his influence on his contemporaries that I hold him so deep in my affections. He made us feel that our trade was a noble one much in the same way that the saints of old persuaded the slave of the value of his humanity.” - Jean Renoir
“Bazin's "Evolution of the Language of Cinema" concludes by suggesting that the new realist impulse in cinema has made the filmmaker the "equal of the novelist": the ability to carve stories out of complex space invites the spectator to view the world as inflected-but not utterly dominated-by the consciousness of the artist. Space remains partly independent of the artist who delivers it to us. Hence we are permitted (and sometimes encouraged) to look beyond the artist's organization of things to the complexity of the world, to the "mystery" and "ambiguity" that outlast every view of it. Cinema reveals to the anxious and alert spectator a world alive with possibilities that ask for recognition and response. In cinema, aesthetic issues lead immediately to moral ones.” - Dudley Andrew
“The values Bazin found in the cinema-including the discovery of nature, the mystery of human expressions and motivations, and fresh approaches to tired arts-derived from a personal and Personalist philosophy that sustained him throughout a life of relative deprivation and constant illness.” - Dudley Andrew
The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities. It is not for me to separate off, in the complex fabric of the objective world, here a reflection on a damp sidewalk, there the gesture of a child. Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love. By the power of photography, the natural image of a world that we neither know nor can see, nature at last does more than imitate art: she imitates the artist.
The guiding myth, then, inspiring the invention of cinema, is the accomplishment of that which dominated in a more or less vague fashion all the techniques of the mechanical reproduction of reality in the nineteenth century, from photography to the phonograph, namely an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time. If cinema in its cradle lacked all the attributes of the cinema to come, it was with reluctance and because its fairy guardians were unable to provide them however much they would have liked to.
Our intention is certainly not to preach the glory of form over content. Art for art's sake is just as heretical in cinema as elsewhere, probably more so. On the other hand, a new subject matter demands new form, and as good a way as any towards understanding what a film is trying to say to us is to know how it is saying it.
All that matters is that the spectator can say at one and the same time that the basic material of the film is authentic while the film is also truly cinema. So the screen reflects the ebb and flow of our imagination which feeds on a reality for which it plans to substitute. That is to say, the tale is born of an experience that the imagination transcends.
It is nonsense to wax wroth about the indignities practiced on literary works on the screen, at least in the name of literature. After all, they cannot harm the original in the eyes of those who know it, however little they approximate to it.
If we take another system of reference we must say of the cinema that its existence precedes its essence; even in his most adventurous extrapolations, it is this existence from which the critic must take his point of departure. As in history, and with approximately the same reservations, the verification of a change gees beyond reality and already postulates a value judgment. Those who damned the sound film at its birth were unwilling to admit precisely this, even when the sound film held the incomparable advantage over the silent film that it was replacing it.
It seems to us however that normal editing is a compromise between three ways of possibly
analyzing reality.
( 1 ) A purely logical and descriptive analysis ( the weapon used in the crime lying beside the corpse ) . ( 2 ) A psychological analysis from within the film, namely one that fits the point of view of one of the protagonists in a given situation. An example of this would
be the glass of milk that may possibly be poisoned which Ingrid Bergman has to drink in Notorious, or the ring on the finger of Theresa Wright in The Shadow of a Doubt. ( 3 ) Finally, a psychological analysis from the point of view of spectator interest, either a spontaneous interest or one provoked by the director thanks precisely to this analysis. An example of this would be the handle of a door turning unseen by the criminal who thinks he is alone. ("Look
out," the children used to shout to the Guignol whom the policeman is about to surprise.)
It was indeed Cocteau who said that cinema is an event seen through a keyhole.
The camera puts. at the disposal of the director all the resources of the telescope and the microscope. The last strand of a rope about to snap or an entire army making an assault on a hill are within our reach. Dramatic 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.
For a time, a film is the Universe, the world, or if you like, Nature.
If the paradox of the cinema is rooted in the dialectic of con crete and abstract, if cinema is committed to communicate only by way of what is real, it becomes all the more important to discern those elements in filming which confirm our sense of natural reality and those which destroy that feeling.
The cinema being of its essence a dramaturgy of Nature, there can be no cinema without the setting up of an open space in place of the universe rather than as part of it.
So, probably for the first time, the cinema gives us a film in which the only genuine incidents, the only perceptible movements are those of the life of the spirit. Not only that, it also offers us a new dramatic form, that is specifically religious-or better still, specifically theological; a phenomenology of salvation and grace. (On Diary of a Country Priest)
I am confident that in all Charlie's pictures there is not one where this mechanical movement does not end badly for him. In other words, mechanization of movement is in a sense Charlie's original sin, the ceaseless temptation. His independence of things and events can only be projected in time in the shape of something mechanical, like a force of inertia which continues under its initial impetus. The activity of a social being, such as you or I, is planned with foresight and as it develops, its direction is checked by constant reference to the reality that it is concerned to shape. It adheres throughout to the evolution of the event of which it is becoming part. Charlie's activity on the con trary is composed of a succession of separate instants sufficient to each of which is the evil thereof. Then laziness supervenes and Charlie continues thereafter to offer the solution proper to a previ ous and specific moment. The capital sin of Charlie, and he does not hesitate to make us laugh about it at his own expense, is to project into time a mode of being that is suited to one instant, and that is what is meant by "repetition."
Subject to a more precise check, I would be willing to suggest that every time Charlie makes us laugh at his own expense and not at that of other people, it is when he has been imprudent enough, one way or another, to presume that the future will resemble the past or to join naively in the game as played by society and to have faith in its elaborate machinery for bulldng the future . . . its moral, religious, social and political machinery.
Memory is the most faithful of films-the only one that can register at any height, and right up to the very moment of death. But who can fail to see the difference between memory and that objective image that gives it eternal substance?
The picture frame polarizes space inwards. On the contrary, what the screen shows us seems to be part of something prolonged indefi nitely into the universe. A frame is centripetal, the screen centrifugal.
Films of paintings are not animation films. What is paradoxical about them is that they use an already completed work sufficient unto itself. But it is precisely because it substitutes for the painting a work one degree removed from it, proceeding from something already aesthetically formulated, that it throws a new light on the original. It is perhaps to the extent that the film. is a complete work and as such, seems therefore, to betray the painting most, that it renders it in reality the greater service.
……..
“There is, then, no doubt as to Bazin's influence on the future. Let me say however that it is for his influence on his contemporaries that I hold him so deep in my affections. He made us feel that our trade was a noble one much in the same way that the saints of old persuaded the slave of the value of his humanity.” - Jean Renoir
“Bazin's "Evolution of the Language of Cinema" concludes by suggesting that the new realist impulse in cinema has made the filmmaker the "equal of the novelist": the ability to carve stories out of complex space invites the spectator to view the world as inflected-but not utterly dominated-by the consciousness of the artist. Space remains partly independent of the artist who delivers it to us. Hence we are permitted (and sometimes encouraged) to look beyond the artist's organization of things to the complexity of the world, to the "mystery" and "ambiguity" that outlast every view of it. Cinema reveals to the anxious and alert spectator a world alive with possibilities that ask for recognition and response. In cinema, aesthetic issues lead immediately to moral ones.” - Dudley Andrew
“The values Bazin found in the cinema-including the discovery of nature, the mystery of human expressions and motivations, and fresh approaches to tired arts-derived from a personal and Personalist philosophy that sustained him throughout a life of relative deprivation and constant illness.” - Dudley Andrew
The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities. It is not for me to separate off, in the complex fabric of the objective world, here a reflection on a damp sidewalk, there the gesture of a child. Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love. By the power of photography, the natural image of a world that we neither know nor can see, nature at last does more than imitate art: she imitates the artist.
The guiding myth, then, inspiring the invention of cinema, is the accomplishment of that which dominated in a more or less vague fashion all the techniques of the mechanical reproduction of reality in the nineteenth century, from photography to the phonograph, namely an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time. If cinema in its cradle lacked all the attributes of the cinema to come, it was with reluctance and because its fairy guardians were unable to provide them however much they would have liked to.
Our intention is certainly not to preach the glory of form over content. Art for art's sake is just as heretical in cinema as elsewhere, probably more so. On the other hand, a new subject matter demands new form, and as good a way as any towards understanding what a film is trying to say to us is to know how it is saying it.
All that matters is that the spectator can say at one and the same time that the basic material of the film is authentic while the film is also truly cinema. So the screen reflects the ebb and flow of our imagination which feeds on a reality for which it plans to substitute. That is to say, the tale is born of an experience that the imagination transcends.
It is nonsense to wax wroth about the indignities practiced on literary works on the screen, at least in the name of literature. After all, they cannot harm the original in the eyes of those who know it, however little they approximate to it.
If we take another system of reference we must say of the cinema that its existence precedes its essence; even in his most adventurous extrapolations, it is this existence from which the critic must take his point of departure. As in history, and with approximately the same reservations, the verification of a change gees beyond reality and already postulates a value judgment. Those who damned the sound film at its birth were unwilling to admit precisely this, even when the sound film held the incomparable advantage over the silent film that it was replacing it.
It seems to us however that normal editing is a compromise between three ways of possibly
analyzing reality.
( 1 ) A purely logical and descriptive analysis ( the weapon used in the crime lying beside the corpse ) . ( 2 ) A psychological analysis from within the film, namely one that fits the point of view of one of the protagonists in a given situation. An example of this would
be the glass of milk that may possibly be poisoned which Ingrid Bergman has to drink in Notorious, or the ring on the finger of Theresa Wright in The Shadow of a Doubt. ( 3 ) Finally, a psychological analysis from the point of view of spectator interest, either a spontaneous interest or one provoked by the director thanks precisely to this analysis. An example of this would be the handle of a door turning unseen by the criminal who thinks he is alone. ("Look
out," the children used to shout to the Guignol whom the policeman is about to surprise.)
It was indeed Cocteau who said that cinema is an event seen through a keyhole.
The camera puts. at the disposal of the director all the resources of the telescope and the microscope. The last strand of a rope about to snap or an entire army making an assault on a hill are within our reach. Dramatic 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.
For a time, a film is the Universe, the world, or if you like, Nature.
If the paradox of the cinema is rooted in the dialectic of con crete and abstract, if cinema is committed to communicate only by way of what is real, it becomes all the more important to discern those elements in filming which confirm our sense of natural reality and those which destroy that feeling.
The cinema being of its essence a dramaturgy of Nature, there can be no cinema without the setting up of an open space in place of the universe rather than as part of it.
So, probably for the first time, the cinema gives us a film in which the only genuine incidents, the only perceptible movements are those of the life of the spirit. Not only that, it also offers us a new dramatic form, that is specifically religious-or better still, specifically theological; a phenomenology of salvation and grace. (On Diary of a Country Priest)
I am confident that in all Charlie's pictures there is not one where this mechanical movement does not end badly for him. In other words, mechanization of movement is in a sense Charlie's original sin, the ceaseless temptation. His independence of things and events can only be projected in time in the shape of something mechanical, like a force of inertia which continues under its initial impetus. The activity of a social being, such as you or I, is planned with foresight and as it develops, its direction is checked by constant reference to the reality that it is concerned to shape. It adheres throughout to the evolution of the event of which it is becoming part. Charlie's activity on the con trary is composed of a succession of separate instants sufficient to each of which is the evil thereof. Then laziness supervenes and Charlie continues thereafter to offer the solution proper to a previ ous and specific moment. The capital sin of Charlie, and he does not hesitate to make us laugh about it at his own expense, is to project into time a mode of being that is suited to one instant, and that is what is meant by "repetition."
Subject to a more precise check, I would be willing to suggest that every time Charlie makes us laugh at his own expense and not at that of other people, it is when he has been imprudent enough, one way or another, to presume that the future will resemble the past or to join naively in the game as played by society and to have faith in its elaborate machinery for bulldng the future . . . its moral, religious, social and political machinery.
Memory is the most faithful of films-the only one that can register at any height, and right up to the very moment of death. But who can fail to see the difference between memory and that objective image that gives it eternal substance?
The picture frame polarizes space inwards. On the contrary, what the screen shows us seems to be part of something prolonged indefi nitely into the universe. A frame is centripetal, the screen centrifugal.
Films of paintings are not animation films. What is paradoxical about them is that they use an already completed work sufficient unto itself. But it is precisely because it substitutes for the painting a work one degree removed from it, proceeding from something already aesthetically formulated, that it throws a new light on the original. It is perhaps to the extent that the film. is a complete work and as such, seems therefore, to betray the painting most, that it renders it in reality the greater service.
February 19, 2022
Andre Bazin provides and intimate look into the first half decade of film.
With that in mind, many of the essays didn't not hold up the test of time.
Bazin provides a juxtaposing ideology that film (in the 1950s/60s) had both reached it's peak and had fallen, while also containing a bright hope for the future of film.
Other ideals that feel opposite from each other is his idea that film derived from literature is a cardinal sin while film derived from theater brings a balance to the storytelling of theater.
There were definitely times when I wanted to fight Bazins ideals or felt great sorrow that he didn't get to see all his hopes for film come true and more.
Definitely an interesting read and I found myself reflecting on and creating my own opinions based off of his writtings.
Is it an amazing read? Not nessecarily. Is it a wonderful and impactful work of film history? For sure!
With that in mind, many of the essays didn't not hold up the test of time.
Bazin provides a juxtaposing ideology that film (in the 1950s/60s) had both reached it's peak and had fallen, while also containing a bright hope for the future of film.
Other ideals that feel opposite from each other is his idea that film derived from literature is a cardinal sin while film derived from theater brings a balance to the storytelling of theater.
There were definitely times when I wanted to fight Bazins ideals or felt great sorrow that he didn't get to see all his hopes for film come true and more.
Definitely an interesting read and I found myself reflecting on and creating my own opinions based off of his writtings.
Is it an amazing read? Not nessecarily. Is it a wonderful and impactful work of film history? For sure!
November 13, 2023
A seminal work of film philosophy and extremely insightful. Bazin clearly delineates the history of cinema from the 1870s to the 1950s which helped me better grasp the importance of Citizen Kane and also other sound films by Wyler or Renoir. He also discusses the importance and evolution of montage. Lastly, there are pieces emphasising the independence and uniqueness of cinema over literature, painting or theatre. It is all very well argued. I think the one shortcoming is the fact that this book is 70 years old. Bazin's central thesis of cinematic realism and objectivity of the image cannot account for the later movements of surrealism or the French New Wave. He also mostly focuses on studio filmmaking and I would have liked to see him discuss the early independent films of Bunuel, Deren, Anger or Cassavetes.
Read
September 10, 2023rly enjoyed 2 of the essays (chaplin was esp fun! the stand out of the book), was slightly interested in some of the stuff the others had to say just bc i'd been introduced to the ideas before in a more engaging context (class discussions) but i think not having seen a lot of the films/directors used as the basis of the analyses made this a real doozy for me. got so excited when i did though!!!! also realizing i'm not a nonfiction girl...or could b i'm approaching it wrong..but could also b me just loving a narrative and a more cohesive thread in my essay collections.....
wouldntve finished or given it the effort i did to get through it if it didn't come to me as a recommendation from someone rlly excited abt it :,)
wouldntve finished or given it the effort i did to get through it if it didn't come to me as a recommendation from someone rlly excited abt it :,)
February 3, 2021
the essay on chaplin was especially beautiful, you can tell how much bazin is delighted by him. better off reading about bresson in schrader. (although: [Sounds] are there deliberately as neutrals, as foreign bodies, like a grain of sand that gets into and seizes up a piece of machinery.) did also love the first few essays, on developments in cinema and editing. overall: very accessible, doesn't always make very stunning conclusions, sometimes better understood as giving historical context.
January 4, 2022
It felt a little bit outdated considering the developments in Film studies and theory after Bazin wrote this book in the 50s. Nonetheless, that doesn't change the fact the he was a pioneer in film theory, alongside Einsenstein, Arnheim, Kuleshov or Kracauer. And as the founder of the renowned magazine Cahiers du Cinema, his influence on film criticism is undeniable. His contribution to cinema as a legitimate field of intellectual enquiry is crucial.
November 23, 2019
Pour les connaisseurs des études cinématographiques. Bazin fait mention de plusieurs théories du cinéma. Le livre n'est donc pas accessible, malheureusement, au grand public. Articles intéressants sur le langage cinématographique tel que le montage, le transfert du muet au sonore, etc.
February 9, 2024
I was introduced to this book by my History of cinema professor. As I make my way through the different classes and subjects (as the film student that I am), I keep finding myself going back to Bazin.
February 17, 2024
A collection of some essays by the critic listed as author. The essays are of variable quality - the first half is more about film generally, the second half of the collection more about the history and development of film as an artform.
May 22, 2024
A fascinating exploration of the development of cinema as an artistic form: its evolution of conventions, its synthesis with other modes of expression, and its inherent virtues/limitations. Not a great introductory text thanks to Bazin's weighty language and metaphor, but well worth the challenge.
October 11, 2018
Not what I was looking for, but still some insight for a novice film study.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 72 reviews