What is Cinema?: Volume 2

Qu'est-ce que le cinema ? #2/2

by André Bazin, Dudley Andrew (Foreword), François Truffaut (Foreword)

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."

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Art, Philosophy, Criticism, Essays, Media Tie In

232 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1971

About the author

Writings of French critic and film theorist André Bazin influenced the development of cinema of New Wave.

André Bazin founded the renowned and pioneering journal, Cahiers du cinéma.

Bazin saw and argued to depict "objective reality," such as documentaries of the Italian neo-realism school and "invisible" directors, such as Howard Winchester Hawks. He advocated the use of deep focus as George Orson Welles and wide shots as Jean Renoir "in depth," and he preferred "true continuity" through mise en scène over experiments in editing and visual effects. This preference placed him in opposition of the 1920s and 1930s to those who emphasized ability to manipulate reality. Theory of Bazin to leave the interpretation of a scene to the spectator linked the concentration on objective reality, deep focus, and lack of montage.

Bazin thought to represent a personal vision, rooted in the spiritual beliefs, known as personalism, of a director. A pivotal importance of these ideas on the auteur; François Truffaut in 1954 wrote the manifesto "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema," article in Cahiers. People also know Bazin as a proponent of encouraging only "appreciative," constructive reviewers.

After World War II, Bazin, a major force, studied. He edited Cahiers until his death, and people then published a posthumous four-volume collection, titled Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? ( What is Cinema? ), to 1962. In the late 1960s and 1970s, people translated two of these volumes, mainstays of courses in the United States and England.

In response to widespread dissatisfaction with existing English translations, Caboos, the publisher of Montréal, in 2009 brought out a translation of selected essays from What is Cinema?

Reviews

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I studied this volume while teaching an online Film Studies class for a Bangalore-based batch—brought in as a replacement teacher, yes, but quickly swept into the role like a tracking shot into the heart of cinema itself. Bazin’s What is Cinema? Vol. 2 wasn’t just another reading on the syllabus; it was the philosophical scaffolding beneath everything I was trying to teach.

Here was a critic who believed in reality—not in the brute facts of the world, but in the moral pull of presence. His writing has this paradoxical quality: deeply theoretical yet intimately human. He wrote about Rossellini’s children, Welles’s long takes, and Chaplin’s silences with the devotion of a monk and the insight of a master craftsman. My students, many of them watching world cinema for the first time, felt it too—that Bazinian reverence for the image as truth.

Volume 2, in particular, grapples with questions of adaptation, montage, and myth. It doesn’t explain cinema so much as wonder at it. And that’s what I tried to bring into the class—a sense that film theory isn’t dry analysis, but a poetic engagement with the medium. Bazin helped me teach them how to look, and how not to rush to interpret before they’ve felt.

Teaching through Bazin taught me as well: that sometimes, cinema is most powerful when it stops “doing” and simply is. Stillness, ambiguity, faith in the frame—all became keywords in our classroom dialectic. And somewhere in that digital classroom, I like to believe Bazin’s ghost nodded in agreement.

[Dany · Rating 5 out of 5]

AN AESTHETIC OF REALITY: NEOREALISM
The recent Italian films are at least prerevolutionary. They all reject implicitly or explicitly, with humor, satire or poetry, the reality they are using, but they know better, no matter how clear the stand taken, than to treat this reality as a medium or a means to an end. To condemn it does not of necessity mean to be in bad faith. They never forget that the world is, quite simply, before it is something to be condemned.

In my view, one merit of the Italian film will be that it has demonstrated that every realism in art was first profoundly aesthetic.... The real like the imaginary in art is the concern of the artist alone. The flesh and blood of reality are no easier to capture in the net of literature or cinema than are gratuitous flights of the imagination.

But realism in art can only be achieved in one way--through artifice.

Some measure of reality must always be sacrificed in the effort of achieving it.

The style becomes the inner dynamic principle of the narrative, somewhat like the relation of energy to matter or the specific physics of the work, as it were. This it is which distributes the fragmented realities across the aesthetic spectrum of the narrative, which polarizes the filings of the facts without changing their chemical composition.



LA TERRA TREMA
The images of La Terra Trema achieve what is at once a paradox and tour de force in integrating the aesthetic realism of Citizen Kane with the documentary realism of Farrebique. If this is not, strictly speaking, the first time depth of focus has been used outside the studio, it is at least the first time it has been used as consciously and as systematically as it is here out of doors, in the rain and even in the dead of night, as well as indoors in the real-life settings of the fishermen's homes. I canot linger over the technical tour de force which this represents, but I would like to empha­ size that depth of focus has naturally led Visconti (as it led Welles) not only to reject montage but, in some literal sense, to invent a new kind of shoot­ ing script.



BICYCLE THIEF
And, by way of generalizing about this aesthetic pessimism : "realism" can only occupy in art a dialectical position-it is more a reaction than a truth.

Disappearance of the actor, disappearance of mise en scene? Unquestionably, but because the very principle of Ladri di Biciclette is the disappearance of a story.

It is in fact on its reverse side, and by parallels, that the action is as­sembled-less in terms of "tension" than of a "summation" of the events. Yes, it is a spectacle, and what a spectacle! Ladri di Biciclette, however, does not depend on the mathematical elements of drama, the action does not exist beforehand as if it were an "essence."



DE SICA: METTEUR EN SCENE
Rossellini's style is a way of seeing, while de Sica's is primarily a way of feeling.

It is by way of its poetry that the realism of De Sica takes on its mean­ing, for in art, at the source of all realism, there is an aesthetic paradox that must be resolved. The faithful reproduction of reality is not art. We are repeatedly told that it consists in selection and interpretation.

The originality of Italian neorealism as compared with the chief schools of realism that preceded it and with the Soviet cinema, lies in never making reality the servant of some a priori point of view. Even the Dziga-Vertov theory of the "Kino-eye" only employed the crude reality of everyday events so as to give it a place on the dialectic spectrum of montage. From another point of view, theater (even realist theater) used reality in the service of dramatic and spectacular structure. Whether in the service of the interests of an ideological thesis, of a moral idea, or of a dramatic action, realism subordinates what it borrows from reality to its transcendent needs. Neorealism knows only immanence. It is from appearance only, the simple appearance of beings and of the world, that it knows how to deduce the ideas that it unearths. It is a phenomenology.

To explain De Sica, we must go back to the source of his art, namely to his tenderness, his love.

In passing, we might note how much the cinema owes to a love for living creatures. There is no way of completely understanding the art of Flaherty, Renoir, Vigo, and especially Chaplin unless we try to discover beforehand what particular kind of tenderness, of sensual or sentimental affection, they reflect. In my opinion, the cinema more than any other art is particularly bound up with love.

No one better than De Sica can lay claim to being the successor to Chaplin.

I have used the word love. I should rather have said poetry. These two words are synonymous or at least complementary. Poetry is but the active and creative form of love, its projection into the world.



UMBERTO D: A GREAT WORK
The narrative unit is not the episode, the event, the sudden tum of events, or the charac­ter of its protagonists; it is the succession of concrete instants of life, no one of which can be said to be more important than another, for their ontologi­cal equality destroys drama at its very basis. One wonderful sequence­ it will remain one of the high points of film-is a perfect illustration of this approach to narrative and thus to direction: the scene in which the maid gets up. The camera confines itself to watching her doing her little chores: moving around the kitchen still half asleep, drowning the ants that have invaded the sink, grinding the coffee. The cinema here is conceived as the exact opposite of that "art of ellipsis" to which we are much too ready to believe it devoted. Ellipsis is a narrative process; it is logical in nature and so it is abstract as well; it presupposes analysis and choice; it organizes the facts in accord with the general dramatic direction to which it forces them to submit. On the contrary, De Sica and Zavattini attempt to divide the event up into still smaller events and these into events smaller still, to the extreme limits of our capacity to perceive them in time.



CABIRIA: THE VOYAGE TO THE END OF NEOREALISM
Realism, let me repeat, is to be defined not in terms of ends but of means, and neorealism by a specific kind of relationship of means to ends.

I even tend to view Fellini as the director who goes the farthest of any to date in this neorealist aesthetic, who goes even so far that he goes al the way through it and finds himself on the other side.

Let us consider how free Fellini's direction is from the encumbrances of psychological after-effects. His characters are never defined by their "character" but exclusively by their appearance.

One might say that Fellini is not opposed to realism, any more than he is to neoreal­ism, but rather that he achieves it surpassingly in a poetic reordering of the world.

In the films of Fellini, the scenes that establish the logical relations, the significant changes of fortune, the major points of dramatic articula­tion, only provide the continuity links, while the long descriptive se­quences, seeming to exercise no effect on the unfolding of the "action" proper, constitute the truly important and revealing scenes.



IN DEFENSE OF ROSSELLINI
I borrow this definition, which I consider to be as correct as it is convenient, from Amedee Ayfre (Cahiers du Cinema, No. 1 7 ) . Neorealism is a description of reality conceived as a whole by a conscious­ness disposed to see things as a whole. Neorealism contrasts with the realist aesthetics that preceded it, and in particular with naturalism and verism, in that its realism is not so much concerned with the choice of subject as with a particular way of regarding things. If you like, what is realist in Paisa is the Italian Resistance, but what is neorealist is Rossellini's direction--his presentation of the events, a presentation which is at once elliptic and synthetic.

Neorealism, then, is not characterized by a refusal to take a stand vis-a-vis the world, still less by a refusal to judge it; as a matter of fact, it always presupposes an attitude of mind : it is always reality as it is visible through an artist, as refracted by his consciousness--but by his consciousness as a whole and not by his reason alone or his emotions or his beliefs-and reassembled from its distinguishable elements.

I apologize for proceeding by way of metaphor, but I am not a philos­opher and I cannot convey my meaning any more directly. I will therefore attempt one more comparison…. One can apply the same argument to the stones of which a bridge is constructed. They fit together perfectly to form an arch. But the big rocks that lie scattered in a ford are now and ever will be no more than mere rocks. Their reality as rocks is not affected when, leaping from one to another, I use them to cross the river. If the service which they have ren­dered is the same as that of the bridge, it is because I have brought my share of ingenuity to bear on their chance arrangement; I have added the motion which, though it alters neither their nature nor their appearance, gives them a provisional meaning and utility. In the same way, the neo­realist film has a meaning, but it is a posteriori, to the extent that it permits our awareness to move from one fact to another, from one fragment of reality to the next, whereas in the classical artistic composition the mean­ing is established a priori: the house is already there in the brick.

The art of Rossellini consists in knowing what has to be done to confer on the facts what is at once their most substantial and their most elegant shape-not the most graceful, but the sharpest in outline, the most direct, or the most tren­chant. Neorealism discovers in Rossellini the style and the resources of ab­straction. To have a regard for reality does not mean that what one does in fact is to pile up appearances. On the contrary, it means that one strips the appearances of all that is not essential, in order to get at the totality in its simplicity. The art of Rossellini is linear and melodic.

In any event, it is never with arguments that one wins over a person. The con­viction one puts into them often counts for more.



THE MYTH OF MONSIEUR VERDOUX
Let us sum up all these characteristics in a single one. Charlie is es­sentially a socially unadapted person; Verdoux is superadapted. By re­versing the character, the whole Chaplin universe is turned upside down at one stroke. The relations of Charlie with society (along with women, the fundamental and permanent theme of his work) have all switched their value.

In the precise and mythological meaning of the word, Verdoux is just an avatar of Charlie -the chief and we may indeed say the first. As a result Monieur Verdoux is undoubtedly the most important of Chaplin's works. When we see it, we are seeing the first evolution of a step which could well be, by the same token, the final step. Monsieur Verdoux casts a new light on Chaplin's world, sets it right and gives it a new significance.

It would be wrong to think that Charlie is basically good. Only love makes him so, and then, there are no limits to his generosity and courage.

The audience's sympathy for Verdoux is focused on the myth, not on what he stands for morally. So when Verdoux, with the spectator on his side, is condemned by society, he is doubly sure of victory because the spectator condemns the condemnation of a man "justly" condemned by society. Society no longer has any emotional claim on the public con­science.

If we correctly interpret the symbolism of these female characters then the whole of Charlie's work would be the ever­ renewed search for the woman capable of reconciling him to society and by the same token to himself. The public, remembering only Charlie's kindness and goodness, remembers only a Charlie in love.



LIMELIGHT, OR THE DEATH OF MOLIERE
The true subject of the film remains : Can Charlie die? Can Charlie grow old? Instead of handling this two-fold and touching inquiry like a question to be answered, Chaplin exorcises it through a story of the lost fame and old age of a man who resembles him like a brother.



THE GRANDEUR OF LIMELIGHT
Nor was the melodramatic aspect of the story calculated to please people, because it was based on illusion. Limelight is a pseudo melodrama. Where melodrama is primarily defined by the absence of ambiguity in the char­acters, here Calvero is ambiguity itself; and whereas, from a dramatic point of view, melodrama requires that one should be able to foresee the outcome of the plot, Limelight is precisely a film in which what happens is never exactly what one might expect-its scenario is brim full of inven­tiveness as any ever written.

But given a level of artistic creativity, and certainly when faced with evidence of genius, a contrary attitude is necessarily more rewarding. In­stead of thinking of removing so-called faults from a work it is wiser, rather, to be favorably predisposed to them, and to treat them as quali­ties, whose secret we have not so far been able to fathom. This is, I agree, an absurd critical attitude if one has doubts about the object of one's criti­cism; it requires a gamble. One has to "believe" in Limelight to become its complete advocate in this way-but there is no lack of reasons for believing in it. The fact that they are not equally evident to everybody simply proves, as Nicole Vedres says in Le Cahiers du Cinema, that if everyone loved it, it had arrived too late.

Undoubtedly there is not a single essential ingredient of the scenario of this dubious melodrama, which on analysis is not revealed to be fundamentally ambiguous.

Chaplin's real theme is not the decline of the clown through old age and the fickleness of the public, but something more subtle-the value of the artist and the evaluation of his public.

When the camera pulls away from Calvero lying dead in the wings and goes to the ballerina onstage, dancing despite her grief, its movement seems to follow transmigration of souls: the theater and life go on.

Only Chaplin has been capable, I will not say of adapting himself to the evolution of the film, but of continuing to be the cinema.

At one stroke, he has forged ahead of everyone else; more than ever, he remains an example and a symbol of creative freedom in the least free of the arts.



THE WESTERN: OR THE AMERICAN FILM PAR EXCELLENCE
Without the cinema the conquest of the West would have left behind, in the shape of the western story, only a minor literature, and it is neither by its painting nor its novels that Soviet art has given the world a picture of its grandeur. The fact is that henceforth the cinema is the specifically epic art.



THE EVOLUTION OF THE WESTERN
Howard Hawks, indeed, at the height of the vogue of the superwestern should be credited with having demonstrated that it had always been possible to tum out a genuine western based on the old dramatic and spectacle themes, without dis­tracting our attention with some social thesis, or, what would amount to the same thing, by the form given the production.



ENTOMOLOGY OF THE PIN-UP GIRL
FIRST, LET US not confuse the pin-up girl with the pornographic or erotic imagery that dates from the dark backward and abysm of time. The pin­ up girl is a specific erotic phenomenon, both as to form and function.

At any rate, it is only too obvious that the veils in which the pin-up girl is draped serve a dual purpose: they comply with the social censorship of a Protestant country which otherwise would not have allowed the pin-up girl to develop on an industrial and quasi-official scale; but at the same time make it possible to experiment with the censoring itself and use it as an additional form of sexual stimulus. The precise bal­ance between the requirements of censorship and the maximum benefits one can derive from them without lapsing into an indecency too provoc­ative for public opinion defines the existence of the pin-up girl, and clearly distinguishes her from the salaciously erotic or pornographic postcard.

I do not value this kind of cinematic eroticism very highly. Produced by special historical circumstances, the feminine ideal reflected in the pin­ up girl is in the last analysis (despite its apparent anatomical vigor) ex­tremely artificial, ambiguous, and shallow. Sprung from the accidental sociological situation of the war, it is nothing more than chewing gum for the imagination.



THE OUTLAW
I remarked earlier that those who were disappointed by the film are either insincere or lacking in perception. Admittedly one does not "see" very much. Objectively, if one sticks purely to what is offered to view, The Outlaw is quite the most prudish of American films. But it is precisely upon the spectator's frus­ tration that its eroticism is built.

It was the censorship code that turned it into an erotic film.



MARGINAL NOTES ON EROTICISM IN THE CINEMA
It is a mistake to equate the word "dream" with some anarchic freedom of the imagination. In fact nothing is more predetermined and censored than dreams. It is true, and the surrealists do well to remind us, that this is not due to our reason. It is true also that it is only in a negative sense that censorship can be said to determine the dream, and that its positive reality, on the contrary, lies in the irresistible transgression of the superego's prohibitions.
I am aware too of the difference between cinematographic censorship, which is social and legal, and dream censorship; I only want to point out that the function of censorship is essential to cinema and dreams alike. It is a dialectical con­stituent of them.

This means that the cinema can say everything, but not show every­ thing. There are no sex situations-moral or immoral, shocking or banal, normal or pathological-whose expression is a priori prohibited on the screen, but only on condition that one resorts to the capacity for abstrac­tion in the language of cinema, so that the image never takes on a docu­mentary quality.



THE DESTINY OF JEAN GABIN
THE FILM star is not just an actor, not even an actor particularly beloved of the public, but a hero of legend or tragedy, embodying a destiny with which scenarists and directors must comply-albeit unwittingly. Otherwise the spell between the actor and his public will be broken. The variety of films in which he appears, and which seem so agreeably surprising in their novelty, should not mislead us. It is the confirmation of a destiny, profound and essential, which we unconsciously seek in the actor's continually re­ newed exploits. This is evident in Chaplin, for example, and, interestingly enough, more secretly and subtly illustrated in a star like Jean Gabin.

[Hora · Rating 2 out of 5]

I could write a proper, civilised review for this book, but I've chosen not to as it has already wasted enough of my precious time. Instead, the only comment I will make is
🔥🔥🔥 WHO LET HIM COOK🔥🔥🔥

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little hard to comprehend at times, but great essays on The Bicycle Thief, Monsieur Verdoux, the western film, and more.

[Brock · Rating 4 out of 5]

A natural progression from the first volume where Bazin writes about the unity of frame and meticulously disciplined style of Bresson to a history and dissection of the italian neorealist movement, the catharsis of Chaplin, the genre evolution of the western, and how much genitalia should be shown in a movie. A lot of these theories and points of view had already been touched upon in my film education, but Bresson writes presently with such urgency and love that it just makes it feel more real, like you were a ground floor reader of Cahiers du Cinema yourself.

[Max Downey · Rating 3 out of 5]

lo mismo que el primero.

[Levon · Rating 4 out of 5]

sometimes a little hard to follow, but since it is originally French i guess some things just got lost in translation - overall a very nice collection of essays on film and cinema

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second best 'New Wave' critical writing book.

[Kenneth Morefield]

It's French, which means a little hard to follow.

[Blake Griggs · Rating 4 out of 5]

*Dons striped sailing shirt, beret, shades, and le cigarette* “Qu’est-ce le cinéma?” I kid. Bazin gets it, of course – articulates its essential quality and builds with conviction from there to its distinct pleasures. One wonders what his ontological axiom would make of the computer effects driven cinema of today. He likely had some written thoughts on animation but neither volume had an essay or anything directly from him on it.

[Pranav · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truffaut was actually the protege of Bazin, not the other way around like it says in the Goodreads preview🤓🤓🤓

[Adam Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have always wanted to understand Bazin's philosophy for a long while. I especially wanted to understand his theory of cinema's "holy moment". In other words, insofar as reality is a reflection of God's work and creation, and the film is an attempt to capture reality, film, therefore, reflects the work of God or God itself.

Bazin is a highly respected intellectual in the field of art criticism. In his articles, he has always tried to present quality works to the public, criticising those of a commercial nature; he was convinced that culture is a way to liberate people and their consciousness. Jean-François Chevrier, an art historian, describes him as "the greatest intellectual in the art of cinema since the war." Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz considers Bazin "his hero". Whether we accept Bazin's views or not, we must admit that without him, it would be challenging to imagine post-war France's creative life, film criticism and film journalism. He had a significant impact on the creators of the time, their work and their thinking.

[Alina]

Incredible Essays. Bazin does some pretty mindblowing things, and changes his whole definition of cinema, his whole view of it, with every film mentioned. If you're into photography or film at all, these essays are a MUST read.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quintessential film theory, part 2. Topics under discussion time time focus on Italian neorealism and specific directors and films.

[H Bebcnof · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book, a wonderful look into the world of cinema in the 1950s.

[Alan Alves · Rating 4 out of 5]

Indispensable for you who want to do something more meaningful that marvel movies.