Background

Andre Bazin was born on 18 April 1918 in Angers, Pays de la Loire, France.

Education

As a child, Bazin was moved from Angers to La Rochelle. He studied there and at Versailles, and in 1938 he entered the Eeole Nórmale Superieure at St. Cloud. His academic record was exceptional, but he was denied teaching credentials because of his stammer. So, in the war years, he joined the Maison de Lettres, a formol schooling for the working classes and for those whose education had been disrupted by war.

Career

After the war, Bazin collaborated in the journal L'Ecran francais, taught at IDEK, and was closely associated with the movement of film clubs. He founded and edited the magazine Cahier du Cinema, which provided the theoretical basis for the New Wave movement and became a kind of blacksmith for cadres of the new French cinema.

Bazin started to write about film in 1943. After 1944, he was made film critic on Le Parisién Liberé; he wrote for several other papers and magazines; he was made a teacher at IDHEC (Instituí des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques); and he founded, with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Les Cahiers du Cinéma. He wrote books about Orson Welles and Vittorio de Sica, and at his death (from leukemia) he was at work on a large book about Renoir. But he was also the author of a variety of essays and reviews that make a coherent definition of cinema.

Andre was a co-founder of the renowned film magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1951, along with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. He edited Cahiers until his death, and a four-volume collection of his writings was published posthumously, covering the years 1958 to 1962 and titled Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? (What is Cinema?). A selection from this collection was translated into English and published in two volumes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They became mainstays of film courses in the English-speaking world but were never updated or revised.

Achievements

• Andre Bazin’s contributions to film criticism have earned him respect from film critics, filmmakers, students, and fans. A frequent contributor to French journals during the 1940s and 1950s, Bazin also founded two periodicals devoted to film criticism, La Revue du Cinema and Cahiers du Cinema.
  
  Some critics credit Bazin for inspiring the French New Wave cinematic movement through his associations with Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and others. These men were Cahiers du Cinema critics who later became film directors. Decades after his death, members of the film world continue to find Bazin’s writings insightful and stimulating.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Orson Welles 1950
  • Orson Welles: A Critical View 1978
  • Qu'est-ce que le cinema ? 1967
  • Jean Renoir 1971
  • Le cinema de la cruauté 1975
  • Essays on Chaplin 1985
  • Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties 1997

Politics

Bazin propagandized Italian neo-realism, films by Charlie Chaplin, Orson Wells, Stroheim, Fritz Lang, Dreyer, Bunuel, Hitchcock, Marcel Carnay, Jacques Becker, Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa, in many ways laying the foundation for the future Kreustetika Tryuff.

Views

In his passionate and intellectual writings, Bazin argues that film is a form of high art and challenges the accepted forms of film-making.

He viewed the tendency towards capturing untouched reality while preserving its space-time unity as an expression of the “ontological essence” of cinema and a cross-cutting pattern connecting the silent and sound periods. He particularly emphasized the importance of the deep stage setting and episodes shot by a single plan (plan-episode). The director's technique based on the use of these techniques was contrasted with “the tricks of technology and installation”. This theoretical concept was spread in Western film criticism and among practitioners-directors.

Despite its one-sidedness, it contributed to the development of realistic trends. Another important point in his theoretical works is the consideration of cinema as folk art associated with folklore roots and collective consciousness. At the same time, he attached great importance to the creative individuality of the director, defended the principle of "copyright cinema."

Personality

Andre was so widely esteemed as a man. Jacques Rivette has called him “saintly.” Jean Renoir said that his work would outlast cinema itself. Robert Bresson observed how he “had a curious way of taking off from what was false to arrive ultimately at what was true.” And for Francois Truffaut, of course, Bazin was nothing less than a surrogate father, a friend, and teacher bringing the wild child into being, and dying the day after shooting on The 400 Blows had begun (that film is dedicated to Bazin’s memory).

Andre was a humanist, devoted to the idea of performance, and a lover of Chaplin and all kinds of natural acting. Though he was not overly fond of montage, or fragmented points of view, he was one of the first to grasp the importance of Bresson.

Connections

colleague:

Jacques Doniol-Valcroze

colleague:

Joseph-Marie Lo Duca

References

• André Bazin André Bazin, often dubbed the father of the French New Wave, has had an immense impact on film art. He is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit.
  1978