Bazin, André

Bazin, André (1918-1958), French film critic. Though he succumbed at 40, André Bazin became perhaps the most influential of all film theorists. Born in Angers, he was a brilliant student of literature who had hoped to teach, but a speech impediment cost him that opportunity in 1942, the year he founded a successful ciné-club at the Sorbonne. In 1945 he published his most famous essay, 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image', quickly becoming the pre-eminent figure in post-war film circles, bringing Italian Neo-Realism into vogue. A founding editor of Cahiers du Cinéma (1951), Bazin upgraded the medium’s status to that of painting and literature. With Jean Cocteau he started 'Objectif 48', a refined club where Orson Welles, Roberto Rossellini, and Robert Bresson discussed their newest work. Yet as a left-wing Catholic, Bazin also established film clubs in labour unions and cultural centres. He wrote upwards of 2,000 articles for the popular press, attempting to improve films by raising the standards of viewers.

Bazin believed cinema to have inherited the mission of realism largely abandoned by painting and literature in the 20th century. In any case, unlike realism in the other arts, which is constructed by conventions, cinema’s realism is “congenital”, passed directly from the outside world onto celluloid through the automatic photo-chemical action of light. While its realist base need not set cinema’s agenda, it necessarily affects every kind of film made. In fact Bazin appreciated a vast range of genres, generally pointing to tensions between the human force of creativity and the supra-human matter it struggles to shape. For instance, literary adaptations often exhibit the way style (what is valued in the original artwork) struggles to appear to be a natural part of the material world. This struggle is best conducted by an auteur, a film-maker with a consistent perspective who does not concoct realistic effects so much as “filter” reality by placing the camera in a telling way and by editing the scenes so that they most eloquently express what is latent in them. The auteur’s style consists partly in paying attention to what lies beyond the frame. Thus cinema brings reality through style to our attention and awe.