“There Is Not One Realism, But Several Realisms”: A Review of Opening Bazin

Abstract

There was a period when André Bazin was considered by some to be a simplistic, naive thinker whose writings were only of historic interest. In 1974, Screen regular Colin MacCabe, in a widely influential article, characterized Bazin as “a theoretically naive empiricist, a kind of idiot of the family.” How times have changed. In a new essay, MacCabe writes that Bazin realized that cinema creates a “complicated series of relationships between camera and setting” and concludes that Bazin was really a modernist, and so on the right side of history after all. Bazin, a modernist? I am not so sure. However, the sea change evidenced by MacCabe is symptomatic of the state of cinema studies as a whole: Bazin is back! This must be deeply gratifying to Bazin scholar and editor of Opening Bazin: Postwar Theory and Its Afterlife Dudley Andrew, who has been Bazin's leading advocate on the American side of the Atlantic for more than three decades.