| dc.description.abstract | This book is not so much a study on André Bazin as it is a study with him
on film. Deceased in 1958 at the age of forty, his ideas and theories have
been praised, criticized, defended and appropriated to the point where
much scholarship on him is either antagonistic or apologetic. Whereas
the following pages are invested in testing the relevance of his work for
contemporary film and media studies, I do not aim to defend nor appropriate
Bazin. Instead, I wish to make his criticism (the metaphors, the references,
the paradoxes) reverberate with contemporary perspectives and thereby
extend the potential of his lineage today.
Studying film… Bazin’s time as a f ilm critic in the 1940s and 1950s,
spanning from the Nazi occupation of France into the post-war era in
which film culture started to flourish in Paris, was marked not only by the
gradual institutionalization of film studies at universities but also by the
emergence of the first comprehensive film history books. Established at the
Sorbonne right after the Second World War, the Filmology movement can
be said to have initiated the ‘serious’ study of cinema, leaning on academic
methodologies that were anthropological, sociological, psychological or
philosophical in nature. With their laboratories set up to perform cognitive
and behavioural experiments; their books, lectures, and conferences on
cinema; and – let’s not forget – a theater for screenings, the university
embarked on a rigorous analysis of film. And, as the seventh art started to
outgrow its critics, there was a real necessity to document its evolution in
film histories. Bazin, though a passionate teacher and supportive of film
books (historical or other), was not a film historian nor was he a scholar.
As the other visionary French critic Serge Daney puts it, ‘Bazin, educator,
would never become professor. He became more than that: an initiator’.1
… with Bazin. To him, education and cinema were inextricably linked,
but rather than finding place in the sterile laboratories or lecture halls at
the Sorbonne, his work was socially oriented. By the time of the Liberation,
he had brought film clubs to factories, farming communities and literary
as well as student societies, on a national and international level. Around
1945, along with the immense amount of written criticism he would produce
for newspapers, weekly and monthly magazines, he became responsible
for the film programs at Travail et culture, an organization involved in
popular education. | |
