Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife

374 Pages·2011·5.82 MB·English

by  Dudley Andrew

Opening Bazin
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Opening Bazin
Postwar Film Th eory and Its Aft erlife
e dited by
Dudley Andrew
w ith
Hervé Joubert-Laurencin
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Opening Bazin : postwar fi lm theory and its aft erlife / edited by Dudley Andrew; with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-973388-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-19-973389-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Bazin, Andr?, 1918–1958—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Motion pictures—Philosophy.
I. Andrew, Dudley, 1945– II. Joubert-Laurencin, Hervé.
PN1998.3.B39O64 2011
791.43092—dc22
[B]
2010019161
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
A Binocular Preface
Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin i x
Acknowledgments xvii
p art o ne Lineage
1. A Bazinian Half-Century 3
Th omas Elsaesser
2. Cinema Across Fault Lines: Bazin and the French School of Geography 13
Ludovic Cortade
3. E volution and Event in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? 32
Tom Conley
4. Th e Reality of Hallucination in André Bazin 42
Jean-François Chevrier
5. B eyond the Image in Benjamin and Bazin: Th e Aura of the Event 57
Monica Dall’Asta
6. Bazin as Modernist 66
Colin MacCabe
7. F ilm and Plaster: Th e Mold of History 77
Jean-Michel Frodon
8. F rom Bazin to Deleuze: A Matter of Depth 85
Diane Arnaud
9. Deconstruction avant la lettre : Jacques Derrida Before André Bazin 95
Louis-Georges Schwartz
p art t wo Aesthetics
10. Belief in Bazin 107
Philip Rosen
11. Th e World in Its Own Image: Th e Myth of Total Cinema 119
Tom Gunning
vi Contents
12. Th e Aft erlife of Superimposition 127
Daniel Morgan
13. Th e Diff erence of Cinema in the System of the Arts 142
Angela Dalle Vacche
14. Malraux, Bazin, and the Gesture of Picasso 153
Dudley Andrew
15. Incoherent Spasms and the Dignity of Signs: Bazin’s Bresson 167
Noa Steimatsky
16. Animals: an Adventure in Bazin’s Ontology 177
Seung-hoon Jeong
17. Bazin’s Exquisite Corpses 186
Ivone Margulies
18. Rewriting the Image: Two Eff ects of the Future-Perfect in André Bazin 200
Hervé Joubert-Laurencin
p art t hree Historical Moment
19. Th e Eloquent Image: Th e Postwar Mission of Film and Criticism 215
Philip Watts
20. Bazin in Combat 225
Antoine de Baecque
21. Bazin the Censor? 234
Marc Vernet
22. Waves of Crisis in French Cinema 240
Jeremi Szaniawski
23. Bazin’s Chaplin Myth and the Corrosive Lettrists 246
Rochelle Fack
24. Radical Ambitions in Postwar French Documentary 254
Steven Ungar
25. Bazin on the Margins of the Seventh Art 262
Grant Wiedenfeld
26. Television and the Auteur in the Late ’50s 268
Michael Cramer
27. André Bazin’s Bad Taste 275
James Tweedie
p art f our Worldwide Influence
28. Montage Under Suspicion: Bazin’s Russo-Soviet Reception 291
John MacKay
29. From Ripples to Waves: Bazin in Eastern Europe 302
Alice Lovejoy
30. Bazin in Brazil: A Welcome Visitor 308
Ismail Xavier
31. Bazin and the Politics of Realism in Mainland China 316
Cecile Lagesse
Contents vii
32. Japanese Readings: Th e Textual Th read 324
Kan Nozaki
33. Japanese Lessons: Bazin’s Cinematic Cosmopolitanism 330
Ryan Cook
Notes on Contributors 3 35
Index of Names 339
Index of Films 3 45
Index of Terms 3 49
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A Binocular Preface
New Haven: Dudley Andrew
Th e oeuvre of André Bazin (April 1918–November 1958) goes well beyond the particular
genre of its expression, fi lm criticism, reaching out to the full history of the twentieth century
and to a variety of theories of art. As a child of the photographic revolution, cinema trans-
formed the century it chronicled, a century of artistic modernism of which it has been the most
troubling case. Bazin intuited its special place between art and history, positioning himself as a
philosophical observer of the world and the world’s inhabitants seen through the screen. Never
a fl aneur, he was both systematic surveyor and militant cinephile, a daily critic of the hundreds
of fi lms on Paris’ screens during the most crucial period of this art, a man who never let a new
fi lm or a new idea escape him. Writing without interruption for fi ft een years (1943–1958) and
producing some 2,600 articles, he must be considered the sound fi lm’s master-thinker and the
fi rst to register the eff ervescence of a cinematic modernism that began to come to prominence
during his professional life. We are fi ft y years beyond Bazin and have entered another century.
Yet rather than dreaming about him, we can dream with him, for “each epoch dreams the one
to follow,” according to Jules Michelet. But to dream with Bazin we must delve into his oeuvre
where the man still lives, opening an archive that needs to be opened out to the questions of
concern to us today. O uvrir Bazin! Let us open André Bazin. He has much to tell us.
W e should all be ashamed—I more than anyone—that it took the fi ft ieth anniversary of
his passing to goad us into genuinely exploring André Bazin. Did we believe that we possessed
all we needed in the collection he put together on the eve of his death? Were the fi ft y-two arti-
cles (twenty-six in the standard English translation) comprising Q u’est-ce que le cinéma? suffi -
cient to fund his brand of fi lm theory, letting us stand him up against Eisenstein in some battle
of the titans? For that is eff ectively what we’ve done for four decades. In the modest preface he
composed for Q u’est-ce que le cinéma? Bazin consigned most of his writing to ephemera, as he
“reviewed” everyday fi lms or ordinary moments few of which merited resurrection. However,
each moment did demand that he take a position, and we’ve come to value those positions and
learn from many of those moments. His friends and followers eventually gathered additional
collections of his writing (on Renoir, on Chaplin, on Welles, on the Occupation and Liberation,