Abstract
In the wake of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, the exploration of human creativity became central to reestablish the humanity of humankind. By closely following the art documentary, French film critic André Bazin focused on this genre in relation to painting, because the latter was the most elitist of all media. In the case of Alain Resnais’s Van Gogh (1948), Bazin used the encounter of cinema and painting as an example of symbiosis between the objects of still life and the objectifying impact of the camera lens. The critic’s writings on the art documentary also underlined the anti anthropocentric and cosmological vocation of the cinema. By turning the pictorial frame into the screen of cinema, Resnais’s Van Gogh de-centers the viewer into an introspective world of landscapes and rooms, where the painter himself is an absent participant or an anonymous figure rather than a protagonist in control. While self-portraiture in Van Gogh is elusive and Bazin’s scientific metaphors are vitalistic, the depth of human psychology remains as mysterious as the creativity of nature on this earth and the origin of life in the cosmos.
Highlights
The artificial oppositions that are often set up a priori between the arts count decidedly less than the spirit of invention and novelty (Bazin 1956b, 23)
In 1951 André Bazin, the French film critic and founder of Cahiers du Cinéma, reported that the film on art had “snowballed since the war ... becoming the most important development in the past twenty years in the history of documentary, maybe in the history of cinema itself.” (Andrew 2011, 153-166)3 Despite this enthusiastic statement, among painters and art historians, the encounter of painting and film triggered a wave of hostility due to the invasive nature of technology
I shall rely on little-known sources from the André Bazin Archive at Yale University
Summary
In contrast to painting, which tells us more about the painter and less about the world, cinema, for Bazin, was an anti-anthropocentric medium because it brought the world to the lens in ways much more unpredictable than the human eye can perceive by itself. Interested in literature and theatre, Bazin never wrote extensively about music, sculpture, dance, and architecture in film Interested was he in nature and in the sciences that he preferred to advocate for the art documentary based on painting, while he was a staunch admirer of the scientific film genre. When he discussed Jean Painlevé’s surreal work in marine biology, Bazin celebrated how natural living forms display an expected degree of accidental beauty. It is as if, after 1945, the deformities of Hiroshima and the traces of the Holocaust had taken on a new kind of abstract, surreal, grotesque biomorphism
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