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André Bazin, film critic, theorist, philosopher, and humanist wrote a series of essays between the years 1944 and 1958, before he died at the young age of 40. The majority of them were anthologized in their original language in the four volume set Qu’est- ce que le cinéma? Selections from these four volumes were translated by Hugh Gray and presented in two English volumes: What is Cinema? Other major works translated into English include Jean Renoir, Orson Welles: A Critical View, and French Cinema of the Occupation and the Resistance. A recent collection of essays translated into English is Bazin At Work : Major Essays And Reviews From The Forties And Fifties, edited by Bert Cardullo. Other crucial non- anthologized articles are found in the journals Esprit, Cahiers du Cinéma and Les Temps Modernes. Given the breadth of his work, I have limited myself in this introduction to his theoretical work and omitted his critical work on genre/cycles (the Western, Neo-realism) and/or specific films.
In my exposition of these writings I do not purport to be exhaustive, but rather to arrive at an understanding of Bazin’s cinematic beliefs. By expounding, commenting on, and making necessary connections I will attempt to synthesize a complex man and his works into a manageable form. Any element of criticism is a residue of the rigorous thought process propelled by his writings.
THE ESSENCE OF CINEMA
Bazin sees cinema as “an idealistic phenomenon” and only consequently technical. Being a humanist he believes that the idea precedes the invention and hence is superior to the technical means used to achieve it. He categorizes the early pioneers (Muybridge, Niepce, Leroy, Demeny, Joy, Edison, Lumiére) as “ingenious industrialists” at best. Later, in his now famous essay “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” he would extrapolate this formula of “idea necessitating technical means” into complexity of subject matter necessitating a new form/style. To Bazin the cinema is inherently realistic because of the mechanical mediation of the camera. This is not the same as saying that cinema is “objective” in any sense other than relative, and that cinema is untouched by ideological and cultural factors, as many of Bazin’s critics have said. What Bazin does do with this fact is place cinema...