André Bazin

by Dudley Andrew, François Truffaut

André Bazin's impact on film art is widely considered to be greater than that of many directors, actors, and producers. He is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit. Updating the paperback edition of 1977, Dudley Andrew has written a completely new introduction and provided an additional essay by Jean-Charles Tacchella.

Genres: Film, Biography, Nonfiction

277 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Dudley Andrew is a Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale University.

Reviews

[Victor Morosoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

3*, parce que l’enjeu du livre n’est pas colossal (quoique bien nécessaire). Certaines pages arrivent à le rendre presque tangible (par exemple, celles où l’on parle de sa maison et de ses réunions ou son attachement pour Truffaut). C’est là qu’on peut s’exclamer : Bazin, quel brave homme. Quel idole ! 3,4/5

[Digby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bazins the man. I think cinema is all the better for Bazin existing. It’s such a pity - and this does become apparent toward the end - that Bazin died so young from leukaemia. From his adulation of Cannes, to his Christian infused sentiment towards realism in cinema he was both a theoretician and a critic - something few are today.

Proud that this is the first ebook on my phone I have finished 💪

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andre Bazin’s importance to film industry of the 50s, 60s, and 70s can’t be overstated. He identified and promulgated a series of innovations in film style which become part of the standard language of film, and, more importantly, he was able to describe better than anyone else how these styles led to new forms of artistic expression that could deepen the meaning of a film, and separates film from all the other arts. Dudley Andrew’s book explains Bazin’s insights in a clear readable way, and shows just how much work, and Bazin’s own caring personality, went into these achievements. Indispensable reading for understanding the movies.

[Carlos Valladares · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my advisors wrote it, so I figured I might as well read it. I must watch more Renoir this summer.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (NY: Oxford University Press, 1978).

"Bazin's interest in Teilhard began at St. Cloud, where the Jesuit had years before given some of his most brilliant lectures. It was the geology which first caught Bazin's attention, for Teilhard not only knew about the 'face of the earth,' but read in that face an evolutionary destiny of thrilling proportions. The earth, he said, was always striving to go beyond itself toward consciousness; and consciousness was striving to create a new evolutionary step, a 'noosphere.' Teilhard's mystical view of life transformed the daily drudgery of his actual scientific labor. He wrote,
'Throughout my whole life, during every moment I have lived, the world has gradually been taking on light and fire for me, until it has come to envelop me in one mass of luminosity, glowing from within. . . . The purple flush of matter fading imperceptibly into the gold of spirit, to be lost finally in the incandescence of a personal universe.' (cited by Andrew from *Divine Milieu,* p. 13, though not this p. in my ed.)

[Dudley Andrew continues:]

"Bazin could hardly have failed to respond to such language. Teilhard provided for him, no one knows how seriously, his own alpha and omega points. His theories justified both Bazin's propensity to look microscopically at nature for direction and his hope for the gradual creation of a new consciousness. Teilhard put Mounier's 'personalism' into the most infinite of contexts. He gave meaning to social and cultural revolution, to a search for a communion of spirit and body base on the messages inscribed in the earth itself. Cinema, for Bazin, was a new tool for observing and deciphering such messages and for uniting the millions of atomic bits of consciousness, which we call an audience, in the contemplations of the truths of nature. It was already a means for personalizing the universe, a preview of Teilhard's noosphere." 67

[Jonathan Dickstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written essay on film...