What Is Cinema?, Volume 1

What Is Cinema?, Volume 1

André Bazin

Language: English

Pages: 209

ISBN: 2:00361417

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


André Bazin's What Is Cinema? (volumes I and II) have been classics of film studies for as long as they've been available and are considered the gold standard in the field of film criticism. Although Bazin made no films, his name has been one of the most important in French cinema since World War II. He was co-founder of the influential Cahiers du Cinéma, which under his leadership became one of the world's most distinguished publications. Championing the films of Jean Renoir (who contributed a short foreword to Volume I), Orson Welles, and Roberto Rossellini, he became the protégé of François Truffaut, who honors him touchingly in his forword to Volume II. This new edition includes graceful forewords to each volume by Bazin scholar and biographer Dudley Andrew, who reconsiders Bazin and his place in contemporary film study. The essays themselves are erudite but always accessible, intellectual, and stimulating. As Renoir puts it, the essays of Bazin "will survive even if the cinema does not."

"Although André Bazin died shortly before the onset of what we now regard as the modern cinema, our understanding of this cinema wouldn't be the same without him. He's also one of the most scrupulous humanists and polemicists we've had, on a par with George Orwell, and these essays map out the busy highways we're all still navigating."—Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic for the Chicago Reader

"What Is Cinema? remains an invaluable—and beautiful—landmark in film and media studies. In both my research and my classrooms I return to these essays again and again—not only for the richness of their arguments but also for their passionate belief that the cinema is a form of revelation vital to our lives."—Vivian Sobchack, Professor, Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media, University of California, Los Angeles

The Great Movies II

Jaw (BFI Modern Classics)

Independence Day (BFI Modern Classics)

Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment

Death Wish (Deep Focus, Book 2)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

death masks for example, which likewise involves a certain automatic process. One might consider photography in this sense as a molding, the taking of an impression, by the manipulation of light. 12 The Ontology of the Photographic Image This is why the conflict between style and likeness is a relatively modern phenomenon of which there is no trace before the invention of the sensitized plate. Clearly the fascinating objectivity of Chardin is in no sense that of the photographer. The

unity of the silent film and divided it off into two opposing tendencies, now let us take a look at the history of the last twenty years. From 1930 to 1940 there seems to have grown up in the world, originating largely in the United States, a common form of cinematic language. It was the triumph in Hollywood, during that time, of five or six major kinds of film that gave it its overwhelming superiority: (1) American comedy (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1936); (2) The burlesque film (The Marx

history: a shift in the material, ontological basis of images forced a reconfiguration of aesthetics and psychology in the ever-variable "balance between the symbolic and realism." The tension between these terms, which traditionally mark the limits of the functions of images, exists both in photography and in painting but in different ratios. This tension also separates the two traditions that vie for dominance in Bazin's view of the evolution of the cinema, between those filmmakers "who put

natural settings whereas the fantastic qualities of Caligari are derived from deformities of lighting and decor. The case of Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc is a little more subtle since at first sight nature plays a nonexistent role. To put it more directly, the decor by Jean Hugo is no whit less artificial and theatrical than the settings of Caligari; the systematic use of close-ups and unusual angles is well calculated to destroy any sense of space. Regular cineclub goers know that the film is

resources of the cinema, as Cocteau did in Les Parents terribles and Welles in Macbeth, or by putting them in quotation marks as Laurence Olivier did in Henry V. The evidence of a return to filmed theater that we have had during the last ten years belongs essentially to the history of decor and editing. It is a conquest of realism—not, certainly, the realism of subject matter or realism of expression but that realism of space without which moving pictures do not constitute cinema. An Analogy

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