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André Bazin
Bert Cardullo(EDITOR)
Film critic, founder of the influential journal Cahiers du cinéma, and spiritual father of the French New Wave as well as creator of the auteur, theory, André Bazin (19181958) almost singlehandedly established the study of movies as an accepted intellectual pursuit. Although his career was brief, his impact on film is widely considered to be greater than that of any single director, actor, or producer.
The following article was first published in Cahiers du cinéma, no. 60 (June 1956), then reprinted in Volume 2 (''Le Cinéma et les autres arts,'' 1959) of Bazin's four-volume Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958-1962), pp. 133-142. It is translated into English here, for the first time, with the permission of Madame Janine Bazin. This is Bazin's original review of the suspense director Henri-Georges Clouzot's only documentary, The Picasso Mystery (1956). In this review Bazin attempts to come to terms with the differences between The Picasso Mystery and Clouzot's fiction thrillers (The Wages of Fear [1952], Diaboliquc [1954]), as well as with the differences between The Picasso Mystery and other documenatries about art.
The Picasso Mystery radically departs from the more or less didactic films about art being made even up to 1956. What Clouzot's film reveals, according to Bazin, is not that creation takes a certain amount of time, but that duration may be an integral part of the artwork itself. Thus the intermediate stages of a painting are not subordinate and inferior realities, mere parts of a process that will result in a final product: they are already the work itself, a work that exists in time, that has its own duration, its own life, and sometimes--as at the end of The Picasso Mystery--a death that precedes the extinction of the artist.
As ''A Bergsonian Film'' shows, Bazin had an abiding interest in the relationship between film and the other arts. Indeed, the subtitle of the volume of Bazin's collected work (in French) in which this article appears is ''The Cinema and the Other Arts,'' and included along with it are such essays as ''Theatre and Cinema,'' ''Painting and Cinema,'' and ''In Defense of Adaptation.''
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The first observation I have to make is that