André Bazin

André Bazin (French:

André Bazin was born in Angers, France on 18 April 1918. After graduating from the École normale supérieure at Saint-Cloud in 1941, he pursued a career as a teacher, but was denied a teaching post due to his stammer. He then took part in the student organisation Maison des Lettres in Paris, where he founded a ciné-club during the German occupation of Paris.^[2] Bazin met future film and television producer Janine Kirsch while working at Labour and Culture, a militant organization associated with the French Communist Party during the war. They married in 1949 and had a son named Florent.^[3] Bazin was diagnosed with leukemia in 1954. He died at Nogent-sur-Marne on 11 November 1958, at the age of 40.^[2][4]

Film criticism

Bazin started to write about film in 1943 and was a co-founder of the renowned film magazine

A selection from What Is Cinema? was translated into English and published in two volumes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They became mainstays of film courses in the English-speaking world, but never were updated or revised. In 2009, the Canadian publisher Caboose, taking advantage of more favourable Canadian copyright laws, compiled fresh translations of some of the key essays from the collection in a single-volume edition. With annotations by translator Timothy Barnard, this became the only corrected and annotated edition of these writings in any language. In 2018, this volume was replaced by a more extensive collection of Bazin's texts translated by Barnard, André Bazin: Selected Writings 1943–1958.[5] A new collection of Bazin's essays were released in 2022 under the title André Bazin on Adaptation: Cinema's Literary Imagination.

The long-held view of Bazin's critical system^[6] is that he argued for films that depicted "objective reality" (such as documentaries^[7] and films of the Italian neorealism school or as he called it "the Italian school of the Liberation"^[8]). He advocated the use of deep focus (Orson Welles, William Wyler),^[9] wide shots (Jean Renoir) and the "shot-in-depth", and preferred what he referred to as "true continuity" through mise-en-scène over experiments in editing and visual effects. For example, he extensively analyzes a scene in Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (with cinematography by Gregg Toland) to illuminate the function of deep-focus composition:

The action in the foreground is secondary, although interesting and peculiar enough to require our keen attention since it occupies a privileged place and surface on the screen. Paradoxically, the true action, the one that constitutes at this precise moment a turning point in the story, develops almost clandestinely in a tiny rectangle at the back of the room—in the left corner of the screen.... Thus the viewer is induced actively to participate in the drama planned by the director.^[10]

The concentration on objective reality, deep focus, and lack of

According to

• François Truffaut dedicated The 400 Blows to Bazin, who died one day after shooting began on the film.^[15]
• Richard Linklater's film Waking Life features a discussion between filmmaker Caveh Zahedi and poet David Jewell regarding some of Bazin's film theories. There is an emphasis on Bazin's Christianity and the belief that every shot is a representation of God manifested in creation.^[16]

Bibliography

In English

• Bazin, André. (2018). André Bazin: Selected Writings 1943–1958 (Timothy Barnard, Trans.) Montreal: caboose,
  ISBN 978-1-927852-05-7
• Bazin, André. (1967–1971). What is cinema? Vol. 1 & 2 (Hugh Gray, Trans., Ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
  ISBN 0-520-02034-0
• Bazin, André. (1973). Jean Renoir (François Truffaut, Ed.; W.W. Halsey II & William H. Simon, Trans.). New York: Simon and Schuster.
  ISBN 0-671-21464-0
• Bazin, André. (1978). Orson Welles: a critical view. New York: Harper and Row.
  ISBN 0-06-010274-8
• Andrew, Dudley. André Bazin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
  ISBN 0-19-502165-7
• Bazin, André. (1981). French cinema of the occupation and resistance: The birth of a critical esthetic (François Truffaut, Ed., Stanley Hochman, Trans.). New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co.
  ISBN 0-8044-2022-X
• Bazin, André. (1982). The cinema of cruelty: From Buñuel to Hitchcock (François Truffaut, Ed.; Sabine d'Estrée, Trans.). New York: Seaver Books.
  ISBN 0-394-51808-X
• Bazin, André. (1985). Essays on Chaplin (Jean Bodon, Trans., Ed.). New Haven, Conn.: University of New Haven Press. LCCN 84-52687
• Bazin, André. (1996). Bazin at work: Major essays & reviews from the forties and fifties (Bert Cardullo, Ed., Trans.; Alain Piette, Trans.). New York: Routledge. (HB)
  ISBN 0-415-90018-2
• Bazin, André. (2005). French cinema from the liberation to the New Wave, 1945–1958 (Bert Cardullo, Ed.) Peter Lang Pub Inc.
  ISBN 9781608010844

• La politique des auteurs, edited by André Bazin. Interviews with Robert Bresson, Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni, Carl Theodor Dreyer and Roberto Rossellini
• Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? (4 vols.), by André Bazin, originally published 1958–1962 (1958, 1959, 1961, 1962). New edition: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2003.
• André Bazin – Écrits complets (2 vol.), éditions Macula, 2018

See also

• Invisible auditor

References