Introduction: Revisiting André Bazin

Abstract

Andre Bazin remains the best-known film critic and theorist of the mid-twentieth century. A regular film reviewer and columnist, co-founder of Cahiers du cinema, defender of Orson Welles, champion of Italian Neo-Realism and mentor to the French New Wave, Bazin was a major figure in French film culture and beyond. 2008 marked the fiftieth anniversary of his death and of the publication of the first volume of his most influential book What is Cinema? (Qu’est-ce que le cinema?). The anniversary provided a focus for an ongoing resurgence of interest in his work, of which this special number is one example.1 Until recently, research on Bazin has been hampered by three factors. First, only a very restricted portion of his work is available. A mere fraction of his writings (some 2600 articles in total) has been republished in French in book form, and little of this material has been translated into English. Many of the republished texts are not readily accessible: the standard current French edition of Bazin’s Qu’est-ce que le cinema? reprints only twenty-six of the sixty-three essays published in the first four-volume edition;2 Hugh Gray’s two-volume translation What is Cinema? also contains only twenty-six essays, albeit not the same twenty-six.3 The second factor that has dogged the reception of Bazin’s work is the currency of a simplistic version of his ideas, what Dudley Andrew and Herve Joubert-Laurencin have called ‘Bazinism’.4 Essentially, ‘Bazinism’ reduces Bazin’s work to four elements: a realist ontology, the ‘myth of total cinema’, a prescriptive aesthetics and auteur theory. First, Bazin’s realist ontology proposes that cinema as a medium is grounded in the photographic reproduction of the real.5 Second, the history of the medium is driven by a longstanding human impulse to represent reality as fully as possible (the ‘myth of total cinema’).6 Third, the realist vocation of cinema prescribes a film aesthetics that respects spatial and temporal reality by avoiding conspicuous editing and adopting instead the techniques of deep focus