André Bazin died November 11, 1958. In honour of Bazin’s centenary, a look at his
ideas.
The
prophecy was amply fulfilled, though (as is often the case with prophecies) not
quite in the way Renoir had imagined. It’s no exaggeration to say that Bazin is
the single thinker most responsible for bestowing on cinema the prestige both
of an artform and of an object of knowledge. While scattered attempts had been
made before to define the ‘essence’ of cinema (most notably in the works of
Rudolf Arnheim and Siegfried Kracauer), Bazin’s ideas were to prove the
decisive ones in establishing its credentials as a separate and legitimate
field of intellectual enquiry. In one of his essays from the 40s Bazin
projected that distant day when film studies would enter the university
curriculum – and it was Bazin more than anyone else who played the role of
midwife.
He was
born on 18 April 1918 in Angers in north-west France. Having desired from an
early age to be a teacher, he entered training college, finishing his studies
in 1941 at the école normale supérieure at Saint-Cloud. Ultimately denied a
teaching post because of his stammer, Bazin had the consolation of
participating in the Maison des Lettres, an organisation founded to look after
students whose schooling had been interrupted by the war. It was here, during
the German occupation of Paris, that Bazin set up a ciné-club, regularly
screening banned films in defiance of the Nazi authorities.
Shortly after
the liberation Bazin was appointed director of cultural services at the
Institut des Hautes études Cinématographiques, where he first began to
crystallise his ideas in oral presentations and debates. He was also employed
as film reviewer for the daily newspaper Le Parisien libéré, where his official
career as a critic began. Yet Bazin never entirely lost sight of his
educational ambitions, evidenced in a heuristic style of argument that implies
more than it states and forces readers to think for themselves.
Bazin’s blend
of the logical and the poetical drew the attention of Jean-Paul Sartre, who
commissioned him to write essays for the distinguished philosophical journal
Les Temps modernes. Thereafter his name became associated with a staggering
array of popular and specialist magazines, the most notable being L’écran
français, France-Observateur, Radio-Cinéma-Télévision, La Revue du cinéma,
Critique and Esprit – and finally the historically momentous Cahiers du cinéma,
which he founded with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze in 1951. In all Bazin is said to
have penned some 2,000 pieces (he needed to be prolific since by this time he
had a family to support – his wife Janine and a small son Florent).
The remainder
of his life was an uneventful round of festivals, conferences and editorial
meetings, progressively overshadowed by the illness with which he was diagnosed
in 1954. He died at Nogent-sur-Marne on 11 November 1958. At the time he was
completing a book-length study of Jean Renoir (later edited and arranged by his
loyal disciple François Truffaut) and working on the script for Les églises
romanes de Saintonge, a short documentary about Romanesque churches which he
planned to direct himself.
There was
always something a little medieval and monkish about Bazin. Renoir compared him
to one of the saints pictured in the stained-glass windows at Chartres;
Truffaut went so far as to call him a creature from the time before original
sin. Nearly everyone acquainted with him eulogised his wisdom alongside his
personal goodness – and couched both in terms drawn from religious asceticism.
While the merest rumour of the transcendental is enough to scandalise most film
theorists, it helps to explain Bazin’s enduring appeal among those at least
open to the possibility.
Reading Bazin,
you never have the sense of a professional flogging his specialism in return
for institutional preferment. Instead, you come into contact with a person – or
more correctly, a soul – bound by a sacred charge to enquire after truth. The
luminous quality of Bazin’s writing can no doubt be attributed in part to his
chronic frail health – reality stands out in colours all the more radiant for
being contemplated under the shadow of death. But though it comprises the
biggest stumbling block even for critics congenial to Bazin, there’s no denying
the primary source of his inspiration: faith.
At the heart
of Bazin’s strictures on cinematic realism lies the conviction that the movie
camera, by the simple act of photographing the world, testifies to the miracle
of God’s creation. It is sanctioned to do so precisely because it is an
invention of science. Throughout the ages, Bazin argues, mankind has dreamed of
being able to see the surface of the world faithfully copied in art (The
Ontology of the Photographic Image, 1945). Bazin ascribes this wish to what he
calls the “mummy complex” – an innate human need to halt the ceaseless flow of
time by embalming it in an image. But it wasn’t until the development of
photography in the nineteenth century that this appetite for the real could be
fully satisfied.
For Bazin, a
photograph holds an irrational power to persuade us of its truth because it
results from a process of mechanical reproduction in which human agency plays
no part. A painting, however lifelike, is still the obvious product of human
craft and intention, whereas the photographic image is just what happens
automatically when the light reflected from objects strikes a layer of
sensitive chemical emulsion. “Photography affects like a phenomenon in nature, like
a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable
part of their beauty.”
In Bazin’s
view, it’s this objective quality of the photograph – the fact that it is first
of all a sensory datum and only later perhaps a work of art – which gives the
medium its privileged relationship with the real. It follows that both
photography and its spawn, the motion picture, have a special obligation
towards reality. Their principal responsibility is to document the world before
attempting to interpret or criticise it. For Bazin, this moral duty is
ultimately a sacred one – the photographic media are, in effect, preordained to
bear endless witness to the beauty of the cosmos.
Predictably,
Bazin’s thesis has been assailed for placing the metaphysical cart before the
materialist horse. And as if resolved to tweak the noses of his Marxist
opponents, Bazin propounds the fanciful notion that technical change arises
less as the outcome of economic and historical forces than from an ineffable
something one can only call spiritual will (see The Myth of Total Cinema,
1946).
Still, Bazin
sets a hypothetical limit to his “myth of total cinema”. If cinema ever could
succeed in becoming the exact double of reality, it would also fail – since it
would cease to exist as cinema. Like a mathematical asymptote, filmic
representation is always doomed to fall a little short of its goal. But if
cinema never quite merges with life, that’s what allows it to be an artform
whose mission is to reveal life. Bazin concedes that there is no art without
artifice and that one must surrender a measure of reality in the process of
translating it on to celluloid. The cinematic staging of the real can be
carried out in untold ways, so it would be more suitable to speak of ‘realisms’
than of a single definitive realist mode. In this respect Bazin comes closer to
endorsing the postmodern shibboleth of pluralism than his adversaries tend to
realise – though he happily forgoes its nihilism. “Only the impassive lens,” he
writes in The Ontology of the Photographic Image, “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.”
Yet this
pristine vision remains, strictly speaking, the inaccessible alpha and omega of
the movie medium, since it is inevitably contaminated by human subjectivity.
Individual films and filmmakers carve up the unbroken plenitude of the real,
imposing on it style and meaning.
The crucial
distinction for Bazin is (in an oft-quoted phrase from The Evolution of the
Language of Cinema, 1950-55) between, “Those directors who put their faith in
the image and those who put their faith in reality.” He took a notoriously dim
view of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and other films made
in the German expressionist style because he judged their elaborate
manipulations of lighting and decor a wilful attempt to bend reality out of
shape and force it to reflect perverse states of mind. What Bazin objected to
in the work of Sergei Eisenstein was how the Soviet director splintered reality
into a series of isolated shots, which he then reassembled through the art of
montage.
Bazin
distrusted montage on the grounds that its dynamic juxtaposition of images
hurtles the viewer along a predetermined path of attention, the aim being to
construct a synthetic reality in support of a propagandist message. To Bazin
this was a minor heresy – since it arrogated the power of God, who alone is
entitled to confer meaning on the universe. But in as much as God absents
himself from the world and leaves it up to us to detect the signs of his grace,
Bazin valued those film artists who respected the mystery imbedded in creation.
One such
director was the Italian neorealist Vittorio De Sica, who in films such as
Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D (1951) humbly renounced the hubristic
display of authorial personality and thus enabled the audience to intuit the
numinous significance of people and things. “The mise en scène seems to take
shape after the fashion of a natural form in living matter,” Bazin wrote in
1951 in De Sica: Metteur en scène. Bazin recognised that film art always
condenses, shapes and orders the reality it records, but what he looked for in
filmmakers was a kind of spiritual disposition towards reality – an intention
to serve it by a scrupulous effacement of means and a corresponding
unwillingness to do violence to it through ideological abstraction or
self-aggrandising technique.
Given Bazin’s
passionate advocacy of this cinema of ‘transparency’, it may seem puzzling that
he is likewise remembered in film history as an architect of the celebrated
politique des auteurs. Under his tutelage the younger journalists at Cahiers
championed such previously patronised talents as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks
and Douglas Sirk, thereby shifting the critical goalposts forever. (Since many
of Bazin’s reviewing colleagues – Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer,
Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette among them – went on to direct their own
films, he is also often regarded as the father of the nouvelle vague.)
If Bazin’s
criticism constitutes a cine-theology, it might almost be said that the auteur
fulfils the role of saint – an inspired intercessor with reality. Bazin’s stake
in the politique can probably be traced back to his involvement in the 1930s
Christian existential movement known as personalism, which posited the creative
individual who takes risks, makes choices and exercises his or her God-given
faculty of free will.
However, it
should be added that Bazin eventually distanced himself from the priestly cult
of the director-author because he felt it ignored the commercial context in
which most films were produced. A keen observer of Hollywood cinema (whose
‘classical’ adaptability he was among the first to appreciate), he nonetheless
set its geniuses on a lower rung than those masters who answered to his chaste
and simple ideals: Renoir, Chaplin, De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Carl Dreyer
and Robert Bresson.
Despite
differences in stylistic approach, these film artists converge on the same
enigmatic reality like the radii of a mandala. If anything joins them more
specifically, it’s a concern to find the technical means for a concrete
rendering of space and time. Another charge Bazin brought against montage was
its sacrifice of the dimensional integrity of the photographed event. Though we
live in duration and extension, montage can only cheat on our experience since
it is an art of ellipsis. In the name of a higher realism, then, Bazin
celebrated the long, uninterrupted take for its capacity to simulate the most
elemental aspect of nature – its continuousness. Though Bazin knew, of course,
that the camera must restrict itself to slicing out a tiny portion of space, he
thought a tactful deployment of the mise en scène could sustain the illusion of
life spilling over the borders of the frame.
His great hero
in this regard was Renoir, who, significantly for Bazin, combined long takes
with the technique of deep-focus cinematography. Bazin considered this not just
one aesthetic option among others but perhaps the very essence of modern
cinematic realism. For him, the incalculable virtue of deep focus is its
ambiguity. Since everything in the film frame can be seen with equal clarity,
the audience has to decide for itself what is meaningful or interesting. While
a director such as Orson Welles or William Wyler (to whose 1941 The Little
Foxes Bazin would return again and again) may provide accents in the
composition of the image, a possibility is nonetheless opened up that the
viewer can, so to speak, do the editing in his or her own head. In short, deep-focus
cinematography invites an awareness of both personal freedom and ethical
responsibility. In cinema as in life, we must be free to choose our own
salvation.
On his death
an obituary notice in Esprit cited Bazin as predicting that: “The year 2000
will salute the advent of a cinema free of the artificialities of montage,
renouncing the role of an ‘art of reality’ so that it may climb to its final
level on which it will become once and for all ‘reality made art’.” In this as
in so much else, Bazin the jubilant millenarian has been proved exactly wrong.
At no other period in its history has cinema been so enslaved by escapist
fantasy – and never have we been less certain of the status of the real. Now
the digitisation of the image threatens to cut the umbilical cord between
photograph and referent on which Bazin founded his entire theory.
Moreover, the
particular forms of transparency that he admired have grown opaque in just a
few decades. Italian neorealism increasingly yields up its melodrama and fakery
while the mannered and rigid mise en scène of deep focus betrays its
theatricality. In the end, every living realism petrifies – becomes a relic in
the museum of obsolete artistic styles. But as Bazin might have said (of
himself above all), the certainty of failure doesn’t rule out the necessity for
each artist to strive to honour reality according to his or her own lights and
to those of the time. All it requires is a leap of faith.
Though he
didn’t live to see the first flowering of academic film theory in the late 60s,
the pedagogic side of Bazin would doubtless have been gratified that cinema was
no longer a trivial pursuit but henceforth a serious discipline calling for the
most concentrated attention and rigour. Yet the poet in him – the fecund
wielder of figure and metaphor, who drew on the fathomless well of his own
intuitions – would just as surely have experienced a sense of loss. For the
scholarly discourse of cinema soon developed a pomp and rigidity that
increasingly excluded those dazzling imaginative leaps at the heart of Bazin’s
style.
It was his
good fortune to write in the period just before film studies congealed into an
institution. As a working critic, contributing irregularly and – so he thought
– ephemerally to the pages of Cahiers du cinéma, Bazin could allow his mind
free play in an atmosphere as yet unhampered by Jesuitical nit-picking. He
enjoyed the privilege of a critic in being able to cut to the quick of an
argument with no other justification than his own unerring instinct. In
consequence, Bazin’s thought is infinitely more concrete, nimble and flexible
than the lucubrations of those obliged to flag each theoretical move with a
sheaf of footnotes.
Yet it was for
these very virtues that Bazin came under attack by the budding generation of
film pedants – and almost at the same moment as he was canonised as a classic.
Bazin, it was claimed, refused to follow due process. His vaunted theory of
realism amounted to little more than a loose patchwork of ideas that never
coalesced into a stringent system but remained dangerously impressionistic and
often flatly contradictory. But professional intellectuals who jumped on
Bazin’s alleged incoherence also underrated the profoundly dialectical nature
of his thinking. To put it another way, they were stone-blind to Bazin’s poetic
genius – his ability to hold contrary terms in a state of paradoxical
suspension that transcends mere theory and approaches mystical understanding.
But there was
worse to come. For Bazin, a rhapsodist of cinema and a true believer in its
perfectibility, had replied to his own sweeping question ‘what is cinema?’ with
a resounding affirmation – whereas the new breed of theorists answered it
increasingly in the negative. In the wake of the 60s counterculture
film-studies departments across Europe were transformed into hubs of
self-styled revolutionary activity. Fuelled by the absolutist views of French
structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser (who proclaimed the function of the mass
media to be an endless replication of ruling-class values), radical academics
came not to praise cinema but to bury it.
It was perhaps
impossible to avoid a head-on collision between Bazin’s meditative humanism and
a dogmatism that saw popular cinema as an ideological apparatus – an efficient
machine for turning out docile citizens. As the most eminent critic of the
preceding decade Bazin became a figurehead for the establishment and the
militant new regime at Cahiers hammered him for his political complicity (an
Oedipal rebellion if ever there was one). Crossing over to Britain by way of
the influential theoretical journal Screen, the sport of Bazin-bashing
proliferated throughout the 70s and 80s. How could anyone be fool enough to
suppose that cinema was capable of recording reality directly when the
reciprocal insights of semiotics and Lacanian psychoanalysis had demonstrated
that human perception is always mediated by language? It might almost be said
that the whole Byzantine edifice of contemporary film theory sprang out of an
irresistible itch to prove Bazin wrong.
Nowadays, of
course, it is a truth universally acknowledged that reality is a construction,
and Bazin’s reputed innocence on this score no longer raises sectarian hackles
– more like a condescending smile. It must be admitted that his earnest belief
in the intrinsically realist vocation of film puts him on the far side of
postmodern relativism and doubt. Yet in so far as a compulsive scepticism and a
jaded cynicism have become the orthodoxies of our age, this may be the moment
to start rehabilitating reality – and André Bazin.
Divining
the real: the leaps of faith in André Bazin’s film criticism. By Peter Matthews. Sight and Sound , April 18, 2018
From the
1910s into the 1960s, filmmakers, critics, and intellectuals created a
distinctive tradition of writing about cinema. These writers were seeking to
understand the nature, functions, and resources of film as an art form. Georg
Lukács, Riccioto Canudo, Louis Delluc, Leon Moussinac, Rudolf Arnheim, and
other writers contributed to this tradition, as did filmmakers like Eisenstein,
Kuleshov, Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov. These theorists advanced widely different
positions, but they held some ideas in common. For instance, they tended to
assume that the medium had an expressive essence that set it apart from other
art forms. For Delluc and his followers, that essence lay in the mysterious
quality of photogénie. For the Russians and many of their admirers, cinema’s
expressive core was to be found in the technique of editing. For Arnheim, the
essence of film was its abstraction from perceptual reality.
Another
feature of this trend was a prescriptive bent. Both filmmakers and film
theorists tended to judge some techniques superior to others, usually because
those techniques were in harmony with the purported essence of cinema. For
example, many thinkers held that a lengthy, static shot constituted merely
passive recording. The result was “theatrical” and hence “unfilmic.” By
contrast, editing was ipso facto a good thing because it manifested what cinema
was uniquely equipped to do—juxtapose moving images in time and space, with a
freedom unavailable to the drama. Essentialism and evaluation meshed: The best
films tended to be the most “cinematic” ones.
André
Bazin’s theorizing fits snugly into this tradition. His writings reflect on the
fundamental nature of film, its artistic resources, and its social and
political effects. His original contribution to the tradition lay in his
arguments for mechanical recording as a virtue, not a deficit to be overcome.
Contrary to the dominant strain of the 1920s and 1930s, Bazin believed cinema’s
essence to lie in its photographic capacity, its power to lay bare the
phenomenal reality of the world. As a result, he argued that the “unfilmic”
technique of the long take, conjoined to camera movement and depth of field
photography, respected that reality. It was editing, the technique once held to
be the supremely filmic technique, that introduced a level of artifice with which
directors would have to contend.
The
originality of Bazin’s thought challenged other traditional beliefs as well,
perhaps most radically the notion that a theory of cinema ought to be wholly
occupied with the question of film as an art. Still, he did not reject certain
assumptions of the standard position. Like his forebears, Bazin posited an
ontology of cinema that defines its intrinsic nature: in his view, its
recording capacity. Like his forebears, he based value judgments about films
and filmmakers on the extent to which they respected that nature. In these respects
he remained a classical film theorist.
Suppose,
however, we imagined another strain in film theorizing. Imagine reflection and
research that do not take Cinema as a whole as its object. This project would
concentrate instead upon certain periods, genres, styles, trends, or other
delimited phenomena. Imagine as well that this investigation holds in
suspension the idea of a cinematic essence, recognizing film’s distinct (if not
unique) resources while also exploring cinema’s many affinities with other
media. Imagine as well that this inductive inquiry seeks out regularities of
cinematic subjects, forms, and styles of a certain places or periods. Imagine
that the researcher also tries to discover how certain effects are reliably
produced by those regularities. And imagine that this enterprise is
descriptive, analytical, and explanatory, not (at least primarily) evaluative.
What
would differentiate this from the study of trends in style and form undertaken
by art historians or musicologists? The search for broader principles—be they
explicitly canonized rules or items of expertise that filmmakers know tacitly.
I take it that this search can be labeled a poetics: a systematic inquiry into
the materials, forms, and constructive principles of filmmaking within various
traditions.
The most
salient instance of this enterprise in the classical era of film theorizing is
the anthology Poetika Kino (1927). Here prominent literary critics affiliated
with the Russian Formalist school joined filmmakers to propose some general
principles governing film structure and style. Granted, the essays don’t wholly
avoid evaluation, and some make passing declarations about what the essential
conditions of cinema might be. Yet to a surprising extent for their period, the
writers try to elucidate principles of plot construction, stylistic texture,
and spectatorial uptake.
Given
this perspective, we can read other classical theorists as offering as a sort
of poétique malgré lui. For example, Arnheim valorizes significant form as a basis
for cinematic art. We do not have to accept his theory of value, or his
ontology of film art, to recognize that he discovered broad principles of
expressive form, such as the geometricization of shot composition and the
importance of changing image gestalts in the course of a shot or sequence.
These principles can help us pick out important pictorial trends, from silent
cinema (Keaton, Sternberg) through to modern times (Tarkovsky, Sokurov).
Likewise, Eisenstein’s taxonomies of types of montage (metric, rhythmic, tonal,
etc.) may apply well to his own practice, but the principles he enunciates can
be found in several filmmakers, even Ozu. Eisenstein’s pedagogical exercises
offer an even more explicit conception of poiesis, or active making, than his
better-known “official” theorizing. Vladimir Nizhny’s collection of classroom
sessions, Lessons with Eisenstein, is a rich source of “practical theory,” the
sort of fine-grained attention to creative choices that feeds directly into a
film poetics. In sum, when theorists
base their claims on inductive inferences and empirical claims, a poetician can
take those as prods, hypotheses, or bodies of evidence warranting further
inquiry.
Bazin,
of course, is traditionally thought of as a realist. Yet much in his work
points toward a film poetics. Reading him from this angle forces us to bracket
off some of his most original assumptions about photographic realism and the
strongly evaluative conclusions he arrives at. For many readers, this is too
much to surrender. But I think that the effort is worth making. My own research
is deeply indebted to his work, so in a sense this essay is a tribute. He might
not agree with how I’ve treated his ideas; I wish he were still living to
criticize me. In any event, here are what I take to be some major lessons that
Bazin’s work offers to someone pursuing an empirical and historical poetics of
cinema.
Bazin
taught us several methodological lessons. Perhaps the most striking is his
propensity for analyzing shots and scenes in exquisite detail. In his
journalistic reviews, of course, such description would have been out of place,
but in his longer essays, such as his classic study of William Wyler, and in
his book on Orson Welles, he plunged into fine-grained analysis of a sort that
was almost unprecedented in film writing. Most such passages are too long to
quote here, but I can’t refrain from a sample, from Bazin’s account of The Best
Years of Our Lives.
This scene is set in a bar. Fredric March
has just convinced [Dana] Andrews to break off with his daughter and urges him
to call her immediately. Andrews gets up and goes toward the telephone booth
located near the door, at the back of the room. March leans on a piano in the
foreground and pretends to get interested in the musical exercise that the
crippled sailor (Harold Russell) is learning to play with his hooks. The
camera’s field of view shows the keyboard of the piano dominating the
foreground, March and Russell in the middle distance, the whole barroom around
them, and, quite distinctly, Andrews in the far distance, tiny in a telephone
booth. This shot is clearly built upon two dramatic poles and three characters.
The action in the foreground is secondary, although interesting and unusual enough
to demand our keen attention, since it occupies a privileged place in the
composition. Yet the true action, the one that constitutes at this exact moment
a turning point in the story, develops almost secretly in a tiny rectangle at
the back of the room—in the left corner of the screen.
And so
on for six more paragraphs of nuanced description!
This
level of detail remains extraordinary. Most discussions of film today, in both
the popular press and academic work, don’t try for it. (Perhaps that’s partly
because after all these years both critics and researchers remain largely
uninterested in visual style.) Bazin had a sharp eye. He counted shots across
entire films and used a stopwatch to time scenes. As a result, he was the only critic I know to
realize that Hollywood films typically had an average shot length between nine
and twelve seconds. Bazin’s precision is all the more remarkable in that he was
largely working from memory and notes. He did not have our access to archives and
editing tables, let alone video copies. He wrote his final essay, a penetrating
analysis of the courtyard murder in Le Crime de M. Lange, after watching the
film in a television broadcast. If he
had done nothing else, Bazin would be remembered today for his pioneering
efforts in close visual analysis.
Analysis
can degenerate into shapeless description if there are no concepts to mold it.
Bazin’s explications gain solidity because firm ideas organize the details. The
broadest of those concepts—profondeur de champ, the long take, cinematic
narration, and the like—are commonplaces today, but it’s worth remembering that
he made them important tools for every critic and theorist. In most cases,
however, he didn’t originate them. Where did they come from? From other
writers, but also from film artisans. Hence a second methodological lesson for
poetics: Listen to the filmmakers.
In early
1941, Gregg Toland wrote an article called “Realism for ‘Citizen Kane.’” He
claimed that he and Welles had agreed on a visual approach that obliged them to
shoot in what we would now call long takes. Apart from chiming with Welles’
theatrical experience, the sustained shot would avoid cuts.
We tried to plan action so that the
camera could pan or dolly from one angle to another whenever this type of
treatment was desirable. In other scenes, we pre-planned our angles and
compositions so that action which ordinarily would be shown in direct cuts
would be shown in a single, longer scene—often one in which important action
might take place simultaneously in widely-separated points in extreme
foreground and background…. Welles’ technique of visual simplification might
combine what would conventionally be made as two separate shots—a close-up and
an insert—in a single, non-dollying shot.
What
permitted this, Toland explained was his technique of “pan focus,” the tactic
of keeping all planes of action in sharp relief. Later in 1941, he published a
more general piece on the creative work of the cinematographer, and he restated
this theme.
Hitherto
the camera had to be focused either for a close or a distant shot, all efforts
to encompass both at the same time resulting in one or the other being out of
focus. This handicap necessitated the breaking up of a scene into long and
short angles, with much consequent loss of realism. With pan-focus, the camera,
like the human eye, sees an entire panorama at once, with everything clear and
lifelike.
The idea
of optical realism, the emphasis upon sustained shots (called “scenes,” as they
often were called at the time), the possibility that a single depth shot could
contain the equivalent of two or more closer shots, and of course the technique
of “deep-focus” cinematography—all these tenets of Bazin’s aesthetic are here
in rudimentary form.
Citizen
Kane opened in Paris on 3 July 1946. Its technical innovations had already been
discussed in the French cinephile press of the time, and Toland’s second 1941
essay was translated in 1947. All critics were primed to notice the film’s
technique, and Toland’s rationale, which was part of the film’s publicity
campaign, gave critics several important concepts with which to work.
Similarly,
in early 1947 William Wyler published an article about the making of The Best
Years of Our Lives, and this teases out another implication of Toland’s
signature style.
Gregg Toland’s remarkable facility for
handling background and foreground action has enabled me over a period of six
pictures he has photographed to develop a better technique of staging my
scenes. For example, I can have action and reaction in the same shot, without
having to cut back and forth from individual cuts [shots] of the characters.
This makes for smooth continuity, an almost effortless flow of the scene, for
much more interesting composition in each shot, and lets the spectator look
from one to the other character at his own will, do his own cutting.
French
critics knew Wyler’s essay, and they picked up his idea that a densely composed
shot in depth gave the spectator a certain amount of freedom. In February of
1948, Alexandre Astruc declared that profondeur de champ “obliges the
spectator's eye to make its own technical découpage, that is to find for itself
within the scene those lines of action usually delineated by camera movements.”
In the same month, Bazin’s appreciative
essay, “William Wyler ou le janseniste de mise-en-scène,” quoted the passage
above as evidence that Wyler allows the spectator “to perform the final cutting
[l’opération finale du découpage] himself.”
It takes
nothing from Bazin’s originality to acknowledge that these concepts were
circulating in his community. For he grasped their implications more deeply and
developed them more imaginatively than anyone else. He quickly extended the
idea of depth staging to Renoir’s 1930s work, again following up comments from
the director. He distinguished Welles’
baroque use of depth from the more neutral and uninflected setups of Wyler. And
as I’ll show shortly, he developed the concept of “the viewer’s découpage” of
the action in highly original ways. In all, Bazin’s work offers an exemplary
instance of how a poetics of cinema can pick up hints from filmmakers’
explanations of their creative choices, test those statements against the
films, and elaborate the ideas in ways that point out broader principles of
construction.
This
brings me to my third methodological lesson, one we might call constrained
generalization. Film theorists, as I’ve suggested, tended to think globally,
seeking out laws that characterize cinema as a whole. Film historians tended to
think more locally—sometimes too locally. The historiography of Bazin’s day
treated film’s development as owing everything to national cinemas. Maurice
Bardèche and Robert Brasillac’s Histoire du cinema (published in 1935), the
standard book on the subject for Bazin’s generation, treated history as largely
a matter of national cinemas, each with an indigenous movement or trend at a
given period. The same plan was expanded to epic dimensions in Georges Sadoul’s
Histoire générale du cinéma, volumes of which were being published as Bazin was
starting his career.
Bazin
saw continuity where these senior historians saw change, and he posited common
tendencies across different cultures. Some of these tendencies were frankly
speculative, as when he posited that a universal yearning for a simulacrum of
reality led cinema to be invented in different countries at about the same
time. More concretely, he showed that a many postwar directors in Europe,
England, and the U.S. faced a common problem: How to adapt plays and novels in
ways that respected, indeed acknowledged, their specific identity as dramatic
or literary texts? This led him to study how modern cinematic technique could highlight
conventions characteristic of other media: the theatricality of theatre in
Olivier’s Henry V and Melville’s Enfants terribles, the use of ellipsis and
tense structures in Diary of a Country Priest.
Senior
historians had claimed that “film language” developed along a straight line,
with each artist contributing to a growing fund of expressive resources. But
Bazin saw a clash of norms. He identified an international film style, derived
from American continuity editing, that was slightly modified with the coming of
sound. Against this he located a more distinctive trend, one that was coming to
fruition in his own day. Current filmmakers seemed to be rejecting the American
découpage-based style in favor of something more faithful to the continuity of
time and space. This trend he saw in Renoir, Wyler, Welles, and the
Neorealists—linked not by country or culture, but by a shared urge to render
the phenomenal world. Bazin’s account is thus neither universal nor narrowly
local. It is fixed firmly in history but acknowledges that disparate artists
can arrive at similar solutions to shared problems. By pointing out how
filmmakers in different countries could converge on similar norms, he managed
to create middle-level generalizations that avoided vacuity and invited
refinement.
To these
three methodological lessons—scrutinize the film; listen to the filmmaker; and
build constrained generalizations—I’ll add three substantive ones. The first is
directly related to the search for middle-range trends.
Elsewhere
I’ve argued that Bazin engineered a counter-history of film style suitable for
the mature sound cinema. Through close analysis and an ingenious deepening of
arguments sketched by his contemporaries, he revised the standard account in
subtle and far-reaching ways. The
product of this effort is best seen in his essay “L’Évolution du langage
cinématographique,” assembled at the end of his life from three earlier essays.
Other essays, along with his books on Welles and Renoir, supplement and clarify
these.
The
“Évolution” essay is usually seen as offering historical support for Bazin’s
larger theory of cinema. If cinema’s ontology is based in photographic
recording, the history of cinema enacts a Hegelian unfolding: the medium’s
development gradually reveals its true essence. It goes this way: Two
tendencies of the silent cinema, sheer recording (e.g., Lumière actualites) and
artifice (abstract montage), vied with one another for supremacy until an
unstable equilibrium was reached in the early sound cinema. That international
sound style banished the extremes of montage seen in Griffith, Gance, and
Eisenstein. In the “classical découpage” of the 1930s the phenomenal reality of
space and time was respected to a considerable degree. But then Renoir, Welles,
and Wyler lifted the dialectic to a new level. They fulfilled the promise of
cinema’s ontology through techniques like camera movement and profondeur de
champ, which record phenomenal reality. These creators “surpassed the
surpassing” by building into the densely composed shot all the details that
would have been assembled through classical découpage. Editing now took its
rightful place, used when it is necessary for more abstract storytelling (e.g.,
montage sequences summarizing a passage of time). The new style of the period
after 1939 was the fulfillment of cinema’s essence.
Here
Bazin’s evaluative preferences come to the fore. The best films are those early
films that respected reality (works of Murnau, Flaherty, von Stroheim, Dreyer)
and those contemporary films that delivered cinema from decades of flirtation
with stylized artifice (works of Renoir, Wyler, Welles, the Neorealists).
The
difficulties with Bazin’s conception of film’s essence are well-known, and the
dialectical trajectory he traces can be faulted on historical grounds. For
example, classical découpage is not a creation of the sound era. It was forged
in the 1910s (only partly thanks to Griffith), and it was stabilized before the
“heresies” of German Expressionism and Soviet Montage emerged. Nevertheless, if
we decouple Bazin’s grander theoretical commitments from his investigation into
the evolution of film style, we find that he has sketched a rich research
program in film poetics.
His
claims can be tested, corrected, expanded, or rejected in the light of further
information. Has he accurately characterized the tendencies at work in the
periods he sets out? What motivates the choice of his exemplary filmmakers? If
we sample a wider range of films than he could, do his claims stand up?
To
summarize drastically, I think that contemporary research would revise Bazin’s
schema along the following lines. There was much more variety in the first
dozen years of filmmaking than he could have known. Editing, close-ups, camera
movement, and other “advanced” techniques were developed and, rather
surprisingly, sometimes abandoned. By the 1910s, two broad stylistic norms
emerged in the fiction film. European filmmakers and some in other countries,
including America, refined a tableau style based in lateral and depth staging.
Meanwhile, in the course of the 1910s most U.S. filmmakers abandoned the
tableau and embraced continuity editing as the controlling technique. The years
afterward saw the triumph of the American editing style in most film
industries, although that style was subject to some local variation.
To
continue my revision: The coming of sound ratified continuity norms, and camera
movement was integrated into them in ways that fulfilled and expanded
traditional functions. Longer takes and depth staging, to be found in every
decade and many countries during the silent era, were also assimilated into the
continuity style, not only by Renoir, Welles, and Wyler but also by Ophuls,
Mizoguchi, Hawks, and many other filmmakers. Deep-space arrays and deep-focus
filming became international trends in the 1940s and in the 1950s, at least in
black-and-white work, but such imagery remained embedded in a framework of
classical continuity editing. In sum, Bazin’s claims about dialectical breaks
and freedom of visual exploration depend on a selective use of evidence. From
the early 1910s on, international film style in mass-market cinema shows a
pattern of development in which new technical devices are harnessed to powerful
norms of cinematic construction.
My
account of this newer story is itself schematic, and it isn’t invulnerable to
criticism. It will doubtless be revised in future research. My point is simply
that Bazin offered us a new framework based on acute observation and bold
conjectures. We need not accept his ontological premises or his prescriptive
conclusions to find his empirical claims informative and his inductive
inferences plausible. By testing and recasting this framework, the study of the
history of film style has made progress.
So let’s
take Bazin’s transnational story about the evolution of style as a first
substantive lesson in poetics. A second lesson bears more on causes and
functions. How do we explain the process of continuity and change we observe in
Bazin’s scheme, or the recasting of it that I sketched? What conditions created
the “evolution of film language,” and what resulted from it?
The
influential historians of Bazin’s day offered two principal explanatory
strategies. Bardèche and Brasillach, as befitted their right-wing alliances,
saw national schools as informed by a sort of volksgeist or national character.
Sjöström, they tell us, “flooded his sober plots with a sort of radiance, with
a sort of nostalgia and all that atmosphere for which the Scandinavians have
created an untranslatable word—Stemming.” Sadoul, man of the left, tended more
towards a broadly economic mode of explanation, particularly when discussing
the class appeals of early cinema and the cartelizing conduct of Hollywood.
Bazin
admired Sadoul, and he took much from Bardèche and Brasillach (without acknowledging
them). Yet he often preferred more transcendent explanations. The most famous
instance is his claim, in “Le Mythe du cinéma total,” that the earliest
inventors were fulfilling a universal dream of capturing reality. This tendency
to posit a spirit or will to form, whereby individual historical actors fulfill
a mission inherent in the medium, can be seen in the “Évolution” essay as well.
The stylistic tendencies—“faith in the image” versus “faith in reality”—become
historical forces in themselves rather than convenient labels we apply to a
welter of individual decisions and institutional pressures.
Granted,
Bazin was sensitive to certain technological constraints, especially of lens
design and lighting. (Are these also the inheritance of Toland’s remarks on
Kane?) But his comments treat these as chiefly encouraging or inhibiting the
flowering of cinema’s true essence. For example, Bazin claims that the lenses
of early filmmaking were designed to take in a wide view of the set, as
filmmakers covered scenes in a single distant shot. Lenses of longer focal
length, he implies, were developed in tandem with cutting patterns that
isolated figures and threw backgrounds out of focus. “Progress in optics is
closely linked with progress in editing.” Again, however, Bazin was subject to
limitations of his period and limited knowledge of silent film history, so his
remarks, however pregnant with implications, tend to treat “technical progress”
as another reified force.
Abandoning
Bazin’s Hegelian evolutionary scheme, later researchers have been able to
disclose more concrete causal forces. In The Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985),
two collaborators and I sought to show that the development of classical
découpage sprang from a mix of institutional and individual action. The
American cinema developed a mode of production that, in order to be routinized,
based its work processes on the continuity scenario. That document served as a
blueprint for other phases of what Marx called “serial manufacture.” The script
broke scenes into shots for maximum control during shooting and editing; it had
the equally important effect of creating a cinema of dynamic storytelling. At
the same time, the discourses of the industry—chiefly the trade and
professional press—converged on conceptions of quality, continuity, and other
features that provided fairly clear-cut goals for filmmakers. Adjacent
Hollywood institutions, like service firms and professional associations,
affirmed these goals as well, even as they steered them to their own aims.
In sum,
the system of aesthetic norms we call “classical film style” was created by a
convergence of particular institutional forces offering historical agents a
restricted set of choices, a weighted set of solutions to recurrent problems.
Once the system was stabilized, new technologies, new stylistic devices, and
new modes of organization could be adapted to fit the traditional structures of
production and stylistic expression.
Whatever
the virtues and faults of these arguments, The Classical Hollywood Cinema
attempted to provide specific accounts of how institution-driven norms and
craft practices shaped stylistic choices in a particular era. It is to these
factors that a poetician can look for proximate causes of artistic continuity
or change. Once more, Bazin has bequeathed us a set of questions rather than
answers. By looking beyond national character and class-based interests, Bazin
reminded us that other causes might have played a role.
Bazin
floated not only causal but functional explanations for the stylistic changes
he observed. This tendency accords well with a poetics of film, which seeks to
explain how constructive principles are designed to elicit particular effects
from spectators. He assumed that we are tacitly sensitive to style, and that
even subtle stylistic choices are registered, perhaps subliminally, by
spectators. He argued that showing a child in the same frame as an approaching
lion was more arousing than creating the impression of that action by
intercutting shots of a child and shots of a prowling lion. Filming an action
in a full shot will serve to create a greater sense of concrete spatial and
temporal realism.
Most
theorists in the classical tradition assumed that pictorial devices functioned
to guide the spectator’s attention. Writers who saw editing as the central film
technique insisted that it worked to draw the viewer’s eye to what was most
important in the scene at any moment. Bazin did not question this assumption,
but he refined it in two ways. First, he suggested that classical découpage was
in this respect basically an extension of theatre, enlarging this or that
aspect of a homogeneous scene, much as if the viewer were scanning the stage
and using opera glasses to study a part of the action. More importantly, the
density of the deep-focus image, according to Bazin, worked against the linear,
univocal effects of editing. Cutting forced us to look here, then there; but
Wyler and Welles designed their shots so that spectators had more “freedom” to
discover levels of significance, to “make their own découpage,” as we’ve seen.
Further,
this activity offers a new kind of experience. Citizen Kane and The Magnificent
Ambersons use deep focus to increase the viewer’s psychological investment in
the action.
Obliged to exercise his
liberty and his intelligence, the spectator perceives the ontological
ambivalence of reality directly, in the very structure of its appearances….
[Deep-focus filming yields] a realism that is in a certain sense ontological,
restoring to the object and the décor their density of being, the weight of
their presence; a dramatic realism which refuses to separate the actor from the
décor, the foreground from the background; a psychological realism which brings
the spectator back to the real conditions of perception, a perception which is
never completely determined a priori.
Once
established, this perceptual realism can yield a daring game of vision. What is
in the foreground should be more important than action in the distant background,
but in The Best Years of Our Lives, Wyler makes the foreground action at the
piano distract us from what is taking place in the telephone booth. In The
Little Foxes, the key action of Herbert Marshall collapsing on the staircase
takes place in the background, but Wyler throws it out of focus. Bazin remarks
that this makes us strain to see it: “This artificial blurriness augments our
feeling of anxiety: as if over the shoulder of Bette Davis, who faces us and
has her back to her husband, we have to discern in the distance the result of a
drama whose protagonist nearly eludes us.”
Bazin
has selected some striking, probably atypical examples, but he shows that the
hypothesis of guiding the spectator’s attention around the frame can yield
great insights. We can go on to study how staging such scenes calls on more
basic principles of steering the viewer’s visual exploration (frontality,
position in the picture format, and so on). We can also study something that
Bazin neglected: the ways in which dialogue can highlight figures in a densely
composed shot. Moving beyond the individual scenes, we can analyze how in
earlier scenes in Little Foxes and Best Years Wyler prepares us to notice these
climactic compositions.Nonetheless, it was Bazin who made them prototypical
cases—tough, if extreme, examples that demand explanation.
My
account of Bazin’s contributions to poetics might seem to have favored only one
dimension of inquiry, stylistics. The emphasis reflects both my own interests
and one of Bazin’s abiding concerns. But poetics has many other dimensions: the
study of genre, of thematics, and of overall form, or “composition” in its
broadest sense. Bazin made contributions to all of these areas of inquiry, but
I want to conclude my survey of his curriculum by examining yet another
dimension of poetics. Besides his effort to analyze and explain film style,
Bazin proved truly pioneering in examining new strategies of narrative
construction that arose in the postwar period.
Bazin
was captivated by the Neorealist films that were pouring into Paris at about
the same time as American imports were. “It could well be that, today, Italy is
the country where the understanding of film is at its highest,” he wrote in 1948.
Most critics celebrated the fact that Neorealist films turned a new light on
the nation’s social problems and did so by using nonactors and shooting on
location. Bazin went further. He greeted these technical innovations part of
that evolution toward realism that he saw as the most progressive trend in
contemporary cinema. And another hallmark of the movement was its attitude
toward cinematic narrative, an attitude that was in harmony with the
contemporary American and European novel.
Bazin
finds, for instance, that the new Italian films display remarkably fragmented
plots. Paisá is a film of episodes, treating its stories as more or less
incomplete; even within each episode, the action is presented obliquely, and
many dramatic issues remain unresolved. “The technique of Rossellini
undoubtedly maintains an intelligible succession of events, but these do not
mesh like a chain with the sprockets of a wheel. The mind has to leap from one
event to the other as one leaps from stone to stone in crossing a river.” Hollywood’s
dramatic arcs and tight linkage of cause and effect yield to a sheer succession
of events, with scenes dwelling on conventionally undramatic moments. “The
story unfolds without regard for the rules of suspense, its only resource being
a concern with things themselves, as in life.” De Sica’s Ladri di bicyclette
“unfolds on the level of pure accident: the rain, the seminarians, the Catholic
Quakers, the restaurant—all these are seemingly interchangeable, no one seems
to have arranged them in order on a dramatic spectrum.” In such formulations,
Bazin showed himself as sensitive to narrative constuction as he was to visual
style.
Bazin’s
discussions of Neorealism laid bare several principles that would shape the
narratives of postwar cinematic modernism. The temps morts of so many 1950s and
1960s dramas were anticipated in La Terra trema, in which Visconti builds his
scenes out of “blocks of reality.” “A fisherman rolls a cigarette? No ellipsis
compresses the operation; we see the whole thing. It will not be reduced to its
dramatic or symbolic meaning.” The meandering, unpredictable string of
encounters in Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy is a logical step in the Neorealist
approach to plotting. Bazin did not live to see Hiroshima mon amour, with a
second half centering on a couple drifting through the city in a nocturnal pas
de deux, or L’Avventura and La Notte, with their languid, apparently aimless strolls.
But he would surely have recognized these wayward excursions as a logical
extension of what he found in Ladri di bicyclette: “It would be no exaggeration
to say that Ladri di bicyclette is the story of a walk through the streets of
Rome by a father and his son.”Dwight Macdonald sloganized the insight: “The
Talkies have become the Walkies.”
Bazin
invested the narrative experiments of Neorealism with an ontological and moral
weight stemming from his commitments to phenomenological realism. Once again,
those of us who don’t share those commitments can nevertheless weigh the
justice of his observations about large-scale form. Bazin’s observations have
proven very helpful in characterizing what we call in English “art cinema.”
Bazin’s analyses of Neorealism point up principles of construction basic to an
entire narrative tradition that was forming under his eyes.
Beyond
matters of methodology, beyond the empirical discoveries he bequeathed us,
Bazin shows us that any theory which takes into account the craft practices of
filmmaking, the formal and stylistic patterning that films display, and the
implications of filmmakers’ creative choices can help answer the questions
posed by a poetics. All this isn’t to say that we should strip off the
“poetics” from Bazin’s theory and toss away the rest. His theoretical arguments
are fascinating and remain relevant to the digital age. His criticism is
lyrical and eloquent. As a researcher, however, I want to explore some paths he
did not follow to the end. Barred from university posts by a chronic stammer,
he became an inspiring teacher, and we are still his students.
André
Bazin plays a central role in the history of film and media studies. Initially
praised by modernist filmmakers and proponents of French film criticism of the
1950s, Bazin shortly after became one of the most denounced thinkers in an
academic film studies informed by Althusserian Marxism, Lacanian
psychoanalysis, structuralism and, later, post-structuralism. Yet only a
handful of canonical essays from a much wider corpus of Bazin’s work were
referenced by many of his critics, which meant that there was a limited
understanding of Bazin’s ideas in the field of film studies for more than
thirty years. Therefore, one should not be overly surprised that in the 21st
century, a time of archival excavation and unexpected theoretical encounters,
the Bazinian line of thought has reappeared in a new light. A tide of academic
essays and collections of articles on Bazin’s legacy in combination with
ongoing translations of his dispersed texts have given rise to what Richard
Allen recently described as the “moment of Bazin Studies.”
André
Bazin’s New Media is an original and solid contribution to this “moment.” The
book features fifty-seven of Bazin’s essays that were selected and translated
by Dudley Andrew. In the introduction, Andrew reveals Bazin’s concern with a
broad “family of images,” including films, photos, television and moving image
technologies. By expressing his primary interest in the unexplored archive of
Bazin’s writings, Andrew sets forth the main intention of the book: “to look
beyond André Bazin’s film theory to see what kind of media critic he might have
been.” Therefore, it contains essays that either focus on television (204 pages
of the 319-page book are devoted to television criticism), or addresses
technological innovations of cinema of the 1950s. The collection is structured
into six primary parts and a ‘Finale.’ Each part consists of Bazin’s essays
written between 1952 and 1958 that were published in various French periodicals.
The
first part of the book, ‘The Ontology and Language of Television,’ demonstrates
Bazin’s captivating insights into the question of the nature of television. In
these essays Bazin admits that TV is more a technology of reproduction and
transmission than an artistic medium. Thereafter, Bazin identifies a
psychological feeling of the intimacy of television image that, from his point
of view, has the strongest effect on the viewer. For him, intimacy is generated
by “live transmission,” one of the most important ontological qualities of the
new medium. Believing that TV should not prefer the recorded image, Bazin
writes that “the aesthetic morality of the television … is one of frankness and
risk” . Subsequently, in some other essays the concept of ‘Telegénie’ is
repeatedly pinpointed by stressing that an appearance on the small screen is no
longer a question of beauty (as it is in case of ‘Photogénie’, a term coined by
French impressionists in the 1920s), but of “human authenticity” . Bazin’s
fascination with TV’s ability to present ordinary people in real time and space
– for instance, in social dramas that were shot in a single non-studio location
during a short period of time – is comparable to his admiration of neorealist
aesthetics in cinema.
In the
second part, ‘Television among the Arts,’ positing television in connection to
different arts of the time allows Bazin to delineate an exceptionality of the
conditions of television production and its spectatorship. Yet, while
acknowledging the technological innovativeness of television, Bazin advocates a
respect for “the fundamental laws” of older arts, arguing that these laws can
be modified but should be not destroyed. In fact Bazin described television as
“the presence of the theater with the ubiquity of cinema” .
In the
third part, ‘Television and Society,’ Bazin’s fervent thoughts about the
ubiquity of the emerging small screen media evoke the once lively but
unfulfilled promise of TV as a social medium able to spread culture and create
a wide community of responsible viewers. However, Bazin’s generally positive
attitude towards the expansion of television does not stop him from a critical
evaluation of the content of TV programs and their impact on the viewer. Essay
titles such as ‘Do We really Need Those Serials?’ or ‘TV Can Popularize Without
Boredom and Betrayal,’ signal his irritation with some television programs of
his time. Accordingly, the French critic rhetorically asks about the
possibility of the new medium to entice the viewers not by automatising their
daily habits (“intoxicating the imagination of the mass viewer” and functioning
as “narcotics of the mind,” as Bazin puts it , but by liberating them from
their mundane fixations and turning them into attentive spectators. Bazin’s
discontent with the stupefying nature of television serials and other solely
entertaining shows points to his concern with the broader issue of the social
mission of television.
Despite
his disappointment with some of the content of French television, Bazin
remains, as the fourth part of the book titled ‘Television and Cinema’
demonstrates, quite positive about the future of television and especially
about its significance for cinema. “With TV cinema can be rejuvenated” Bazin believes, encouraged by seeing American
auteur directors (e.g., Alfred Hitchcock) producing exceptional work for
television. Feeling a regret that none of the well-known European film
directors had yet substantially contributed to the new medium of the small screen,
Bazin held high hopes for the projects Jean Renoir and Roberto Rossellini were
starting to produce specifically for TV. In the interview with Renoir and
Rossellini, Bazin again expresses his hopes for the future of television as an
impetus for cinema.
As the
fifth (‘Cinemarama and 3D’) and sixth (‘CinemaScope’) parts of the book
demonstrate, despite his hopes for television’s future, Bazin does not see any
other medium capable of reaching cinema’s artistic status at the time.
Therefore, the evolution of the technology of the seventh art influenced by the
emergence of television and the crisis in Hollywood remains of great interest
to him. By taking into account the broad context of the media environment,
Bazin foregrounds the interdependence between technological progress, market
demands and the aesthetics of visual media. Besides his circumspect insight
into the influence of the media industry on the progress of cinematic
technology, the French critic also shows an immense interest in the potential implications
of screen and projection innovations for the evolution of film aesthetics. In
one of his essays on 3D technology, Bazin points out that “The distant future
of 3D cinema will see a leap as great as the one from L’Arrivée d’un train en
gare de La Ciotat to the train engine sequence in La Bête humaine. . . Let us
nimbly take this new and decisive step toward total cinema”. However, the more
positive and enthusiastic he is about 3D innovations, the more Bazin is
disappointed by a majority of 3D screenings he had the opportunity to attend in
Paris. Pointing to a series of obstacles – some industrial (frequent choices by
managers of Paris theaters to screen 3D films in 2D), perceptual (migraines
suffered by the viewers), and aesthetic (the visual impression that “3D
characters have shrunk” and, more
importantly, the feeling of the contradictory “impression of unreality” produced
by a stereoscopic cinema) – Bazin diagnoses that the “3D revolution did not
take place”. Similarly, he expresses disenchantment with the experience of
Cinerama screenings.
The only
technological advance in cinema that Bazin reveres, both in theory and in
practice, is CinemaScope, which substantially widened the surface of cinema’s
screen. He sees CinemaScope as a significant move towards what he calls “a
cinema of space” , which is intended to show rather than signify the real. The
enlarged and elongated screen, whose angle in relation to the viewer’s eye gets
closer to the angle of normal vision, motivates Bazin to extend his theory of
the evolution of the language of cinema – familiar to many from a well-known
essay published in What is Cinema? – by adding a technological component of the
widened screen to it.
An
outstanding ‘Finale,’ the last essay of the book, ‘Is Cinema Mortal?’, shows
that Bazin is fully conscious of the aporia intrinsic to his film criticism.
Taking into account the evolutionary nature of film technology, he modestly
recognises that “perhaps in twenty years the ‘young critics’ of some new form
of spectacle that we cannot even imagine, and which can’t be guaranteed to be
‘an art’, will be reading our film criticism from 1953 with a condescending
smirk.”
Despite
Bazin’s reservations about the relevance of his criticism for future
generations, the book proves the opposite. In André Bazin’s New Media, the
reader encounters Bazin as a critic who writes about audiovisual technology
ranging from radio and television to cinema, and whose interests oscillate
between the archaeology and sociology of the different technological
incarnations of sound and image as much as their ontologies, aesthetics, and
ethics. Yet, the diversity of Bazin’s writing on the media of his time does not
lead the reader away from the central concerns of his film theory – namely, a
strong belief in the modernist character of industrial arts, an ethical stance
for the film viewer’s freedom of choice, an advocacy of cinematic realism
beyond representation, an evolutionary approach to the history of art and technology,
and a critical analysis of the filmic portrayal of animals – but brings them
into renewed focus. This prompts the reader of the book to understand Bazin not
as an apologetic believer in cinema par excellence, but as an open-minded media
theorist of his time. Thus, André Bazin’s New Media pulls the French critic’s
work far beyond the limited interpretations that had criticised him as naïve
and illuminates the importance of the wider corpus of Bazin’s texts to the
history of film and media studies.
A Broad
Family of Images: André Bazin on the New Media of His Time. Review by Lukas Brasiskis
Screening the past , July 2015.
Also of
interest :
Introduction
to André Bazin, Part 1: Theory of Film Style in its Historical Context. By Donato Totaro. Off Screen , July 2003.
Introduction
to André Bazin, Part 2: Style as a Philosophical Idea. By Donato Totaro. Off Screen , July 2003.
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