André Bazin's Film Theory: Art, Science, Religion 0190067306, 9780190067304

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André Bazin's Film Theory: Art, Science, Religion
 0190067306, 9780190067304

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: The Soul of Cinema
2 Art
3 Science
4 Religion
5 Epilogue: Wind and Dust
Notes
Bibliography
Index of Names and Films
Subject Index

Citation preview

André Bazin’s Film Theory

André Bazin’s Film Theory Art, Science, Religion A N G E L A DA L L E   VAC C H E

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–​0–​19–​006730–​4  (pbk.) ISBN 978–​0–​19–​006729–​8  (hbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America

This book is dedicated to Dudley Andrew, Véronique Godard, and Hervé Joubert-​Laurencin

Contents List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: The Soul of Cinema The Structure of the Book Conceptual Key Words Cinema’s Special Eye Lady in the Lake Cinema as Mind-​Machine

ix xi xiii

1

3 7 9 12 13

2 Art

16

3 Science

55

A Christological Ontology Impure Cinema Pure Cinema The Postwar Art Documentary Painting as Object, Cinema as Event Frame and Screen The Objects of Still Life and the Camera Lens as Object From Painting to Biology Darwin and Bergson Evocative Affinities Bergson, Einstein, Heisenberg Geometry and the Snowflake Mathematics and the Policier Miraculous Mathematics Neorealism and Calculus Michael Faraday

4 Religion

Immanence and the Supernatural Catholics and Communists Taking Risks Looking at Oneself from the Outside Charlot and Cabiria

16 22 25 29 30 34 39 49 55 61 64 67 69 77 81 93

98

101 104 109 113 117

viii Contents Saint Sulpice and Max Ophuls Robert Delannoy’s Religious Adaptations Bazin’s Ontology, Bresson’s Stylistics

127 129 133

5 Epilogue: Wind and Dust

142

Notes Bibliography Primary Sources: Articles and Essays by André Bazin, cited in each chapter Primary Sources: Compilations of essays by André Bazin Secondary Sources Index of Names and Films Subject Index

167 191

Anti-​Anthropocentric Anthropocosmomorphism The Wild Grass of Saintonge

143 147

191 194 195 207 213

Illustrations 1.1 André Bazin with cat. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-​Share Alike 4.0 International license.

2

2.1 Henri Cartier-​Bresson, Paris. Place de l’Europe. Gare Saint Lazare. 1932. © Henri Cartier-​Bresson/​Magnum Photos.

18

2.2 Vitruvian Man. Leonardo Da Vinci, Artist, and Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich. Study of Proportions. 1949. Photograph. https://​www.loc.gov/​ item/​00650441/​.

23

2.3 Jean Painlevé, L’hippocampe femelle (Female Seahorse), 1931. © 2019 Archives Jean Painlevé/​LDC, Paris.

27

3.1 École Normale d’Instituteurs de La Rochelle. Courtesy Angela Dalle Vacche.

56

3.2 Magnetic field of bar magnets attracting. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

94

5.1–​5.7  Views of Saintonge churches, photographed by André Bazin. Courtesy Janine Bazin and Dudley Andrew.

150

5.8 12th-​century lantern of the dead at Fenioux, Charente-​Maritime, France. Classed as a historic monument since 1862. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons: licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-​Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

164

5.9 Église Sainte-​Radegonde de Talmont-​sur-​Gironde. Fortified church (11th, 12th, and 16th century) as seen from east with renewed ramparts and bedrock. Talmont-​sur-​Gironde, Charente-​Maritime, France. Photo: JLPC /​Wikimedia Commons /​CC BY-​SA 3.0. 165

Preface On December 16, 2018, Hervé Joubert-​Laurencin presented his edition of two elegant and weighty volumes (2,848 pages) titled André Bazin:  Ecrits complets. Before this event, the André Bazin Archive consisted of photocopies of some 2,600 essays and reviews written by the French film critic between 1941 and 1958, copies of which are still located at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut (YABA), and at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) in Paris. In the preface to the anthology Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife, this archive is described as an “explorer service” for anyone who wishes to “riffle” through the titles of Bazin’s articles in French, “locating every instance where he analyzed or mentioned a director or film.” Access to this archive at Yale offered me an incredible research opportunity, since only approximately 15 percent of Bazin’s work is published and translated into English. When I first began my exploration, this collection of photocopies of reviews and articles was a treasure trove, which I read from top to bottom during five years of note-​taking. Simultaneously, I created my own mini-​archive of index cards based on every direct or implied reference to art, science, and religion I could find. On the basis of this research, I devoted five more years of writing on Bazin’s thought. Little by little, I formulated my own ideas on Bazin, theater, and painting, because Yale professor Dudley Andrew, who edited Opening Bazin, included me in all sorts of debates in the United States and France as early as 2008. That particular year, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Bazin’s death in 1958, Professor Andrew cosponsored a transoceanic conference with the Université Paris Diderot-​Paris 7, in which I participated. In 2014, Dudley Andrew organized a symposium, “Tracking Specificity:  The Fluctuations of Cinema,” at the Yale Whitney Humanities Center in New Haven. During this event, I presented my paper “André Bazin’s Idea of Cinema’s Unique Ontology,” where I discussed his lack of interest in the concept of medium specificity and his passion for impure cinema, with numerous exceptions of pure cinema variously defined. During the summer of 2016, my colleague Weihong Bao, invited me to Shanghai University in China, where I presented a paper on Bazin and

xii Preface science. That very same summer, Linda Bertelli hired me to teach a class on Bazin, cinema, painting, and the museum at IMT (Institutions, Markets, and Technologies) in Lucca, Italy. In November 2018, I was the recipient of the Goggio Visiting Professorship at the University of Toronto, which allowed me time to fine-​tune my book draft. The relationship between cinema and the other arts has always been a major interest of mine. In addition, I  have always thought of all religions in anthropological terms, as did Bazin. Moreover, teaching at the Georgia Institute of Technology for twenty years has helped to educate me in the history of science. My general purpose is to offer a film theory book where each chapter stands on its own, while the three sections on art, science, and religion also relate to each other. I have also paid close attention to Bazin’s way of handling specific films, so that the reader can count on broad overviews next to close analyses. Since I was working with photocopies at the Yale André Bazin Archive, in many cases the page numbers were incomplete or missing. Alternatively, every single piece of writing was clearly filed with the name of a newspaper or journal, the year, and information concerning volume or number. For all these reasons, in my bibliography I have not included page numbers in citing a piece of film criticism from a newspaper or magazine. Additionally, French newspapers carry their own spelling mistakes. From time to time, I have encountered a word that could not be found in any French dictionary. In these instances, I concluded that a printing error had taken place, and I did my best with the translation. Every effort has been made to be as accurate as possible throughout the book, but I accept responsibility for any errors or omissions. In comparison to my previous books, this particular project has brought me much closer to the cinema as a technology, even though Bazin always privileged the question “What is a human?” over technological determinism or innovation. Precisely because the technological terminology of filmmaking changes from one language to another, in the most unpredictable ways, I have included in the Notes the original text of any citation translated for this book. Translations are mine, unless noted.

Acknowledgments Innumerable colleagues and friends offered their insights and support to this project. Besides the always thoughtful, patient, and enthusiastic Dudley Andrew, Hervé Joubert-​Laurencin has been an invaluable colleague. He and Dudley Andrew developed the Bazin archive together. Thanks to a memorable travel grant from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2011, Hervé and I drove all over the Saintonge region to better understand Bazin’s fascination with the humble, little Romanesque churches of this region. Thanks to his generous hospitality in Paris during my research at the Bibliothèque Nationale François Mitterand, Hervé’s own ideas and his detailed 2014 book on Bazin, Le sommeil paradoxal, have helped me to clarify my own position on our shared topic. Besides Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-​Laurencin, I am also grateful to Véronique Godard, who introduced me to Eric Le Roy, director of the Centre National du Cinéma (CNC) in Bois d’Arcy, France. There, I was able to see many films discussed by the famous critic which are not available in the United States. These screenings enabled me to make sense of sentences and arguments which would have otherwise remained most difficult to summarize. My project also benefited from two residencies in France. In 2013, thanks to the support of the Brown Foundation, linked to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, I was a Fellow at Dora Maar House in the beautiful village of Ménerbes in Provence. In 2016, I became the recipient of a Camargo Fellowship in Cassis, a lovely little town on the Mediterranean, not far from Marseille. These two experiences in France were very helpful for writing, thinking, and exchanging ideas on French culture in the fifties. Throughout this endeavor, I have been assisted by the copyeditor Nadine Covert, who also helped with translations. In addition, I benefited from the editing assistance of Dana Benelli, who patiently removed my Italian accent from the writing and helped me with crucial insights. My home institution, the Georgia Institute of Technology, was always behind me, every step of the way. I am especially grateful for Jay Telotte’s

xiv Acknowledgments probing questions and calming influence, and to all my colleagues in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. In the context of my teaching, I presented three seminars related to this book:  Film Color:  Between Art and Science; Art, Film, and the History of Science; and Classical Film Theory:  Science and Technology. Dean Jacqueline Jones Royster, Dean Janet Murray, and Chair Richard Utz repeatedly approved time for research and summer funding. Also at Georgia Tech, Kenneth Knoespel, Vinicius Navarro, Qi Wang, Lisa Yaszek, and Gregory Zinman offered timely words of support. Beyond Atlanta, Georgia, there are many other colleagues I wish to acknowledge for their reactions and suggestions: Richard Allen, Paula Amad, Nico Baumbach, Linda Bertelli, Ivo Blom, Marta Braun, Keith Bresnahan, Colin Burnett, James Cahill, Walter Cahn, Julie Chenot, Michele Cone, Tom Conley, Ludovic Cortade, Marianne Dautray, Antoine De Baecque, Susan Delson, Patrizia Di Bello, Rima Djanine, Thomas Elsaesser, Jane Gaines, Romy Golan, Marco Grosoli, Tom Gunning, Rula Halawani, Feroz Hassan, Simon Hodgkinson, Steven Jacobs, Blandine Joret, Dimitrios Latsis, Mélisande Leventopoulos, Ivone Margulies, Brian Molanphy, Daniel Morgan, Rafik Ouadi, Marie Pascal, Richard Peña, Tony Pipolo, Dana Polan, Philip Rosen, Karl Schoonover, Louis-​Georges Schwartz, Antonio Somaini, Noa Steimatsky, Gwen Strauss, Christophe Wall-​ Romana, Raymond Watkins, Philip Watts, Jennifer Wild, Sarah Wilson, Prakash Younger, and Alberto Zambenedetti. My apologies to anyone whose name I’ve omitted among those who assisted me through ten years of research and writing. As always, I am indebted to personal friends who offered support over the years: Zette Emmons, Charo Garaigorta, Sandra Gibson, Liz Helfgott, Martha Hollander, Jerry Kearns and the late Nora York, Lucy Kostelanetz and Steve Schrader, Corrado Levi, Sara Levi, Ellen Levy and David Levy, Susan Madden, Jake Perlin, Luis Recoder, Cindi Rowell, Andrea Simon, Amresh Sinha, Esteban Torres Ayastuy, Karole Vail and Andrew Houston, Silvia Vega-​Llona, and Silvia Venier. Finally, now that Hervé Joubert-​Laurencin’s French edition of André Bazin’s entire opus has been published, one can only hope that, in the near future, an American publisher will take on an English edition of the complete collected works of André Bazin. The more the discipline of film and media studies fine-​tunes translations and editions of key texts in different

Acknowledgments  xv languages, the more this field will deepen itself and contribute to the landscape of the humanities in a vital and indispensable way. Angela Dalle Vacche January 2019 Early versions of some chapters of this book have appeared in the following publications:

Dalle Vacche, Angela.“The Art Documentary in the Postwar Period.” Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image 1:2 (2014): 292–​313. Dalle Vacche, Angela. “Miraculous Mathematics: André Bazin’s Film Theory.” Discourse 38:2 (Spring 2016): 117–​141. Dalle Vacche, Angela. “André Bazin’s Film Theory and the History of Ideas.” In Film as Philosophy, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath, 132–​ 160. Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Dalle Vacche, Angela. “André Bazin and the Romanesque Churches of Saintonge.” In The Golden Age of the Art Documentary:  Cultural Identities, Historiography, and Experimental Film, edited by Steven Jacobs and Dimitrios Latsis. London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2020.

1  Introduction The Soul of Cinema

André Bazin was born in 1918 in Angers, a city in western France, and received a Catholic education as a child. From 1934 to 1937, he attended the École Normale d’Instituteurs in the Protestant city of La Rochelle, located on the western coast of France in the department of Charente-​Maritime. There Bazin experienced the French secular education system and proved to be a brilliant student in the sciences. His academic achievements enabled him to gain admission to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure de Saint-​Cloud, near Paris, where he continued his education in literature and the arts. Bazin’s interest in cinema developed during his military service in Bordeaux, where he was assigned. He frequently attended the cinema with a friend whose family owned a chain of theaters. After returning to Paris to resume his studies, Bazin became involved with the Maison des Lettres, where he started a film club. Bazin perceived the need for a new kind of film criticism, and for a serious journal devoted to the art and craft of cinema, leading eventually to his founding of Cahiers du Cinéma in 1951, with Jacques Doniol-​Valcroze and Joseph-​Marie Lo Duca. During the fifties Bazin (Figure 1.1) mentored the filmmakers who rose to the forefront of the French New Wave in the sixties: François Truffaut, Jean-​Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette. They all started out their careers as cinéphiles and all were Bazin’s colleagues in film journalism. Besides Cahiers, Bazin was a regular contributor for the conservative Parisien Libéré, the socialist France Observateur, and the communist Écran Français. He also published in prestigious journals such as Temps Modernes and Esprit. Due to Bazin’s chronic bad health, he eventually became unable to go to the movies and turned to television criticism, writing for Radio Cinéma et Télévision. He also wrote about radio. He died of leukemia in 1958, leaving behind a groundbreaking body of work that influenced the cinemas of Europe, Asia, and Latin America. André Bazin’s Film Theory. Angela Dalle Vacche, Oxford University Press (2020) © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190067298.001.0001

2  André Bazin’s Film Theory

Figure 1.1  André Bazin with cat. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-​Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Bazin was not involved in the French Resistance and never became a registered member of any political party. He was an independent, left-​wing social activist throughout his life, and an advocate of dissidence, inclusion, and nonviolence. Bazin’s writings are intensely original, and they continue to surpass in scope and insight all the film theorists who preceded him, such as Hugo Münsterberg (1863–​1916), Jean Epstein (1897–​1953), Sergei Eisenstein (1898–​1948), and Rudolph Arnheim (1904–​2007). In comparison to his predecessors, Bazin was the first to systematically bring together theory, criticism, and history in regard to film. In contrast to Epstein and Eisenstein, who were both filmmakers as well as theorists, it was only toward the end of his life that Bazin planned to shoot a documentary about the tiny rural churches of the Saintonge region of western France where he had grown up. Unfortunately, time ran out on him and the film was never completed.1

Introduction  3 To speak of Bazin’s film “theory” means that this thinker developed an open-​ended “idea” of the cinema with the same degree of attention to all the components of the filmmaking process. For Bazin, the cinema is comparable to a living organism in a state of evolution. It is a medium gifted with an ontological status, or a photographically genetic way of being grounded in both irrational belief and the physical world. Bazin is the first critic to associate spectatorship with free will and universalism simultaneously. Bazin’s “idea” of the cinema is comparable to a school of life or a general education to think through the complexities of today’s world. More interested in the interface of the medium and the phenomenal world than in rhetorical flourishes, Bazin is the very first theorist to understand that popular cinema is the best way of objectifying human behavior for a mass audience. Bazin’s “idea” of the cinema is as a medium that calls attention to philosophical depth and moral responsibilities. To this day, fewer than three hundred texts written by Bazin have been translated and published in English. Although his work used to be fragmented and dispersed, Bazin’s thought is systematic and comprehensive. By dealing with approximately eighty untranslated texts, I focus mostly here on French and Italian fictional films of the forties and fifties, while also paying attention to some documentaries and Hollywood films. To be sure, Bazin’s famous question—​What is cinema?—​probes what a human is and why cinema is indispensable for humankind. Thus, the interrogation of human ethics is this thinker’s most urgent topic, to the point that it overrides his commitment to aesthetics. Bazin believes that a human is simultaneously an irrational being and a rational animal.2 He argues that unless human irrationality becomes creativity through art, or spirituality through religion, it can result in cruelty and madness. Likewise, an excess of scientific rationality can reduce human beings to unfeeling machines or to exploitable objects. Due to Bazin’s double-​sided definition of humankind, one must deal with his metaphors from art, science, and religion to fully appreciate his film theory.

The Structure of the Book Art is relevant to perception, self-​expression, and the imagination, while science strives for cognition and proof in the course of studying life, change, and contingency. Religions deal with origins and the afterlife. For Bazin, religion

4  André Bazin’s Film Theory is more important than art, while science is at the bottom of his tripartite paradigm. Nevertheless, my book sequences art, science, and religion to create a maximum of momentum for readers. Placing science in the middle shows that logic and knowledge fight against superstition and fanaticism; likewise, putting art at the beginning calls attention to the differences between human and natural creativity. In line with this critic’s openness toward the irrational, contingency or grace may bring hope to the universal realities of human sin and suffering. Bazin was passionate about quantum physics; there, wave and particle coexist through the medium of light. Bazin’s essays allude repeatedly to Michael Faraday’s (1791–​1867) discovery of electromagnetic energy. In this experiment, a single magnet attracts many iron filings by making them all move together at the same time. Each thin piece of metal, however, finds its own special position in relation to the magnet which, for the critic, is comparable to the screen of cinema. This combination of a collective draw and many individual responses subtends Bazin’s preferred model of independent spectatorship in his idea of the cinema. My chapter on art begins with Bazin’s groundbreaking claim that a photograph is an incarnational exception, the one and only example of a natural image in the history of Western image-​making. By calling attention to the activity of recording as an artistic choice, various examples of “pure” cinema precede a section on the postwar art documentary. This discussion clarifies why the medium is mostly impure. The “Art” chapter concludes with the ontological differences between fictional literary adaptations and nonfictional mobilizations of the static canvas on the screen of cinema. The chapter on science argues that biology is the most important discipline for this thinker. In contrast to mathematics, biology allows Bazin to place life and contingency above the self-​contained, static equations of algebra and the interchangeable solids of Euclidean geometry. The climax of my “Science” chapter amounts to a redefinition of Italian neorealism, which reveals Bazin’s familiarity with differential calculus. Significantly, the phenomenological realism of postwar Italian cinema stands for what this theorist hopes the cinema can achieve with its future.3 Here, “phenomenological” refers to the unfolding of a perceptual, subjective process based on change, displacement, and discovery in regard to one’s own relations with others. In comparison to other realisms perpetuating the so-​called déjà vu or a quantitative naturalism based on details,4 Italian neorealism proposes the jamais vu of a perceptual displacement, namely the

Introduction  5 objectification of human behavior onto a self-​conscious and altruistic moral choice. Finally, in my chapter on religion, through close readings of Catholic and Protestant films, I  maintain that Bazin disapproves of religious hypocrisy, which detracts from spirituality in human life. As a Catholic dissident, Bazin dislikes dogmatic and rule-​bound positions in all camps. Thus, he does acknowledge that miracles can happen—​incredibly rare as they may be—​and that the irrational is indispensable for humankind. As inexplicable events, miracles call attention to the limitations of human science. Sensitive to the unknown and searching for an inner transformation, Giulietta Masina in Federico Fellini’s The Nights of Cabiria (1957) and the nameless protagonist (Claude Laydu) in Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951) open themselves to risk and adventure. In contrast to Charlie Chaplin, whose virtuosic acting skills depend on subtle mathematical precision, Masina’s acting and Bresson’s performer suggest a leap of faith into irrational belief. While Bazin relies on cinema’s parallel universe to interrogate human behavior through art, science, and religion, my chapters intentionally overlap with each other in such a way as to highlight a thematic continuity based on Bazin’s anti-​anthropocentric moral stance in his film theory. Unsurprisingly, my Epilogue starts with Bazin’s anti-​anthropocentric compatibility with Edgar Morin’s (1921–​) “anthropo-​cosmomorphism,” according to which memory and imagination thrive in the cinema to interrogate nature and the cosmos.5 Despite some significant differences between their respective understandings of the cinema, Bazin’s approval of Morin’s work confirms that perceptual rejuvenation through the cinema is necessary for humankind. It enables us to preserve emotional resources in a world that is becoming less and less creative and increasingly more regimented. By expanding our range of emotions and insights, the cinema can generate alternative perceptions. In contrast to the concept of defamiliarization, from Russian formalism, these occasional moments of epiphany do not make things look strange. On the contrary, they disrupt our own stale ways of seeing by making us “see” in an objectifying and revealing way, as if it were happening for the very first time. In the cinema, the interrogation of the world’s origin is intertwined with the illusion of an afterlife or parallel universe on screen. Thus I have devoted most of my Epilogue to Bazin’s very last essay on the region of Saintonge, near La Rochelle. This location marks where he grew up and where his mind transports him before he dies. In this lyrical piece, the metaphor of the wind

6  André Bazin’s Film Theory takes on positive and negative connotations. On one hand, it refers to the mobilizing energy of spiritual encounters, as well as to the transformative power of time. Just as the wind turns seeds into wild grass, cinema’s moving image carries inside itself and across the world the record of the twentieth century. On the other hand, the wind also has a destructive impact on the walls of the little Romanesque churches. There, sculptures of skeletons and skulls decay into porous surfaces that are abstract enough to rekindle our imagination toward a lost past and a transformative future. Written while he was dying, Bazin’s essay speaks to how the cinema as a mass medium enables humankind to reflect on time and space. In line with Henri Bergson’s (1859–​1941) insight that we can control space but are helpless in front of time, Bazin’s film theory confronts us with how cinema’s illusory motion can suggest the internal and external passing of time, with personal as well as social implications. Bazin’s work acquires even more originality when compared to other intellectual voices speaking during his own epoch. To begin with, Jean-​Paul Sartre (1905–​1980) dominates the intellectual landscape of Bazin’s youth. They meet each other in Bazin’s ciné-​club on Rue Soufflot, near the Sorbonne, during the German Occupation.6 While they both write on the cinema, the famous philosopher and the young critic share a passion for American literature, until they politely disagree on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). Most importantly, Bazin’s tragic optimism is antithetical to Sartre’s atheist nihilism. Neither a materialist nor an idealist, Bazin is aware of the world’s energy and cinema’s materiality. To be sure, he appropriates a famous phrase from Sartre: “existence precedes essence,” a concept Sartre lifts from Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927).7 Besides Sartre, Maurice Merleau-​Ponty (1908–​1961) is the other intellectual celebrity of Bazin’s generation, when film theory does not yet exist as a serious area of inquiry. Art theory, instead, differentiates Bazin from Merleau-​Ponty, for whom painting is more of a conduit toward philosophy than literature or the cinema. Involved with ciné-​clubs in factories, Bazin is a cultural activist who operates outside the Sorbonne and the Collège de France. Thus, the pioneering film theorist and the academic Merleau-​Ponty never enjoy the opportunity to meet in person. Only, after the critic’s death, does Merleau-​Ponty begin to signal an interest in cinema’s ontology, with an explicit reference to André Bazin.8

Introduction  7 In film studies, recent books have addressed the relationship between cinema and science.9 In our current age of genetic engineering and religious fundamentalism, classes on art and science, as well as on religion and science, have emerged in the teaching curriculum. Based on these developments, Bazin’s legacy is especially timely since his film theory establishes an explicit dialectic of art with science, on one hand, and science with religion, on the other, not to mention overlaps between art and religion through the use of the Turin Shroud to explain photographic ontology. In addition to art, science, and religion, Bazin pays steady attention to technological history in famous essays such as “The Myth of Total Cinema” (1946) and “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” (1951), which I discuss in my chapter on science to emphasize this critic’s Darwinian and anti-​Platonic stance. The reader may wonder why I do not devote a separate chapter to technology alone, given its undeniable role in Bazin’s film theory. However, Bazin’s approach to technology—​and to photography in particular—​is subordinate to his views on the life sciences. Furthermore, Dudley Andrew’s André Bazin’s New Media deals with Cinerama, cinemascope, color, 3-​D, and television. Likewise, Bazin’s views of deep focus and depth of field in the films of Orson Welles and Jean Renoir have already been discussed in Dudley Andrew’s critical biography.10

Conceptual Key Words Perception, cognition, and hallucination are not only part of cinematic spectatorship, but they also point back to art, science, and religion as unavoidable frames of reference for the cinema. Bazin is the first film theorist to grasp all these intersections so deeply and thoroughly. His writings coalesce around conceptual “key words.” Besides “pure” and “impure” cinema, some of these words are “realism,” “centripetal,” “centrifugal,” “paradox,” “dialectic,” and “anthropocentric.” “Realism” refers to cinema’s photographic origin and to how this kind of mechanical and automatic reproduction is based on recording. By outlining an inward and an outward orientation, “centripetal” and “centrifugal” allow Bazin to address the off-​screen. Besides elucidating photography’s absent presence, “paradox” refers to how an irrational side can be intertwined with a rational one. The term “dialectic” rejects all binary oppositions; it upholds

8  André Bazin’s Film Theory symbiotic relationships; it describes dialogical exchange, but it does so outside of any Hegelian synthesis. “Anthropocentric” is the most negative word in the young theorist’s critical vocabulary: “Today the making of images no longer shares an anthropocentric, utilitarian purpose.”11 In contrast to powerful rulers immortalized in expensive portraits for a few, cinema, instead, is the bastard child of modern life: it dabbles in the ephemeral, it entertains a popular audience, and it can also become an art form. Anthropocentrism stands for the self-​centered and humanist culture of the Renaissance, which Bazin’s mentor Emmanuel Mounier (1905–​1950) criticizes and dares to reinvent in the light of his anti-​ utilitarian Personalist philosophy.12 In this sense, the term “humanist” does not quite apply, because Bazin is a Personalist anti-​anthropocentric thinker. Wary of American individualism, French capitalism, and Soviet collectivism, Mounier advocates for a radically new political and spiritual philosophy. The latter should bypass bourgeois liberalism and communism. Instead of money as the measure of all things, Mounier’s society of the future will cherish basic human rights, including ordinary creativity as self-​expression outside any market value.13 According to Personalism, human rights must be not only individual but also broadly social and grounded in a universal acknowledgment of everybody’s human dignity, regardless of religious affiliations. Most likely, Bazin is aware that Mounier’s Personalism is a utopian, albeit indispensable, educational project. Yet he still hopes that the cinema, and especially the legacy of a few neorealist films from Italy, might inspire future generations away from revenge and toward reciprocity. Bazin’s use of the term “anthropocentrism” is always negative, not only for ethical but also for aesthetic reasons, due to its roots in the mercantile, humanist Renaissance. Furthermore, anthropocentrism runs up against the nonmanual ontology of photography. This nineteenth-​century medium challenges a physiological nexus. Thanks to the nervous system, the eye and the human hand cooperate in drawing, painting, and sculpting. Since this cooperation allows only for subjective perceptions and expressions, the plastic arts always depend on some degree of self-​projection. On the contrary, photographic automatism is an objectifying source of fresh perceptions: Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-​up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my

Introduction  9 eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love.14

Here Bazin celebrates photography’s equalizing approach. Whether they are artistic or accidental images, any photograph, even the most blurred snapshot, freezes the here and now of only a moment in such a way that its unique temporality displays itself; its place in time stands out. The visualizing of an instant is not a redemption of a “stubborn,”15 physical reality, hopelessly mired in decay, but an acknowledgment that frozen time can rejuvenate our perceptual habits. If photography is, by definition, a nonanthropocentric medium, Bazin considers German Caligarism to be the most negative example of anthropocentric cinemas. This is due to its heavily painted sets striving to elevate a low, popular medium to the prestige of traditional art forms.16 In Bazin’s discussion of photography, there is no embarrassment, no nostalgia, and no fear of modernity. Due to its nonmanual way of being otherwise, photography is so ontologically different from traditional plastic or mimetic arts that it becomes comparable to the natural gift of a flower or a snowflake. Each flower or snowflake is unique, because each moment in time is full of promise and is unrepeatable as well. Significantly in tune with its automatic and mechanical photographic origin, Bazin’s film theory is anti-​anthropocentric:  “Man himself is just one fact among others, to whom no pride of place should be given a priori.”17 As unique as each one of us is, none of us is special within a much larger process of birth and death. Consequently, Bazin’s film theory argues that cinema questions the status of the human element in relation to the animal, the plant, the object, and the machine. All of these nonhuman Others share one feature: they are not consciously aware of time and death, as living humans inevitably are.18 Time is intrinsic to human existence. By the same token, time is what sustains human creativity, while it opens up the promise of significant change, in contrast to the repetitive cycles of nature. Through time, the possibility of self-​reinvention is always alive.

Cinema’s Special Eye Comparable to, but different from human sight, the glass lens of the camera enjoys an equalizing perspective on everything it encounters. Through the French word objectif (lens), Bazin underlines the affinity between

10  André Bazin’s Film Theory the photographic camera’s nonanthropocentric eye, objectification, and objects on screen. Cinema’s objectifying process takes place at the level of recording, before a director’s style de-​emphasizes or underlines the mise-​ en-​scène with changes through cuts, focal lengths, angle, distance, duration, framing. Generally speaking, Bazin supports filmmaking where the camera’s nonanthropocentric, passive recording turns into a self-​consciously anti-​ anthropocentric (my own original term) or nonintrusive, attentive narrative stance. Only such an ethical orientation of mutual respect between Self and Other can challenge the utilitarian,19 profit-​oriented goals of contemporary life and the self-​centered anthropocentrism of the traditional arts. Bazin’s anti-​anthropocentric aspiration for the cinema accommodates and encourages an egalitarian anthropomorphism based on a respectful coexistence with Others. Rather than evidencing a bias for human superiority, in his work on Jean Painlevé (1863–​1933), Bazin considers anthropomorphism to be an automatic manifestation of an egalitarian dialectic between individual and world, which psychological investigation can neither explain nor refute: “Its domain extends from morality (the fables of La Fontaine) to the highest forms of religious symbolism, by way of every region of magic and poetry”20 In contrast to Painlevé’s scientific documentaries, with Walt Disney’s animations, however, anti-​anthropocentric anthropomorphism is not possible, because this kind of cinema is based on manual drawing, first, and mechanical photography, later, through the use of the multiplane camera. Although he is intrigued by Walt Disney’s nature documentary Perri (1957), with pseudo-​documentary sequences shot in the forest, the anthropocentric staging of three squirrels in the very same shot makes Bazin wonder whether nature itself is trying to imitate the designers of an anthropomorphic Disney animation!21 Since photographic imprinting involves direct contact with the material world, cinema’s vocation is a heuristic kind of realism sensitive to chance and epiphanies. Cinema’s storytelling, however, can be used in manipulative ways. The more cinema is used in an anti-​anthropocentric way—​open to change, discovery, risk, or improvisation—​the more this medium enables the visible world to tell its own stories, without or beyond human control. Granted that the human element—​in front of or behind the camera—​always participates in these anti-​anthropocentric narratives, it can do so without faking chance, as happens in Walt Disney’s Perri and in today’s digital cinema of special effects and CGI (computer-​generated imagery).

Introduction  11 Bazin’s enthusiasm for cinema’s anti-​anthropocentric potential has been erroneously associated with his alleged partisanship for the long take over montage. On the contrary, the long take’s duration does not require an a priori rejection of editing. Both techniques are important for Bazin, who believes in his viewers’ ability to freely engage with the narrative. Since reality is always dense, the long take does convey its elusive and voluminous quality; by contrast, editing does justice to the intellectual and abstract complexity that the cinema can achieve. As far as editing is concerned, film theorist Annette Michelson (1922–​ 2018) argues against Bazin’s reservations on Sergei Eisenstein’s so-​called Soviet montage. She feels that Bazin’s respect for the world’s spatial integrity is based on an intransigent religious belief in a primal unity.22 In Soviet film theory, nature is nonindifferent, hence plastic and transformable.23 Eisenstein’s montage assumes that the spectator needs a filmmaker who can reinvent the world anew through editing. Yet, this revolutionary director fragments and reconstructs the pro-​filmic event in agreement with an ideological thesis he has formulated in advance as an ideological abstraction. Similarly, in the causal and linear editing of Manichean Hollywood, the loose ends of daily life become preprocessed into an industrial formula adjustable to what we think we already know and what we are sure of. Sensitive to Bazin’s respect for a space-​time continuum that can become an autonomous narrative, film specialist Antoine de Baecque discusses the impromptu footage that Samuel Fuller shot near the Falkenau Nazi camp in 1945.24 To prove that the inhabitants of this small town lie when they decline any knowledge of the Holocaust, Fuller instinctively relies on the long take. Without superimposing disjunctive cuts, he allows the camera to demonstrate indisputably the geographic proximity of village and camp.25 This matching of real space and real time with filmic space and filmic time, respectively, functions as an undeniable proof of moral complicity in the genocide of the Jews. Bazin’s rejection of excessive editing is no a priori stance. It applies exclusively to those situations where a cut would efface a link that is materially or emotionally already present between two elements.26 However, in his essay “Montage Interdit” (1956), the critic does acknowledge that there are occasions, in children’s films and in documentaries with animals, when editing is absolutely necessary and sometimes even acceptably combined with trickery. The reason for Bazin’s attention to these minor genres is that the directors of these films routinely encounter situations in which the

12  André Bazin’s Film Theory manipulations of editing are unavoidable and therefore justified for the sake of storytelling. These films deal with restless children or uncontrollable animals, subjects whose performances are notoriously difficult to control and direct. Filmmakers may be obliged to actively edit sequences, in order to convey the interaction between two animals, or one child and one animal, in motion. Bazin mentions specifically White Mane (1953), by Albert Lamorisse, a fairy tale about a kid and a horse presented in a documentary fashion. Lamorisse frequently fools spectators by stitching together shots of different horses. Yet Bazin approves of the results, including the deception of Lamorisse using six similar white horses to play the protagonist of White Mane. Instead of criticizing this kind of editing, Bazin accepts it, because it is limited to optical trickery that does not distort reality, or to visual manipulation achieved through lenses inside the camera.

Lady in the Lake Keen on dialectical relations and wary of formalisms, Bazin argues for the necessity of cutting in one of his untranslated reviews of Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947),27 based on a detective story by Raymond Chandler (1888–​1959). For Bazin, this film is a failed, yet instructive experiment in which excessive camera movement results in an example of dead-​end anthropocentric and overly subjective cinema. Although this film includes scene shift cuts from one location to another, the story is predominantly told from the exclusive visual and auditory point of view of the detective, Philip Marlowe (Robert Montgomery). Marlowe effectively becomes the camera, and the spectator’s one and only source of identification. We see Marlowe himself only when his image is partially objectified by the reflections of mirrors, and on a few occasions when he directly addresses the camera (viewer) from his desk. A mystery tale of absent bodies, the plot of Lady in the Lake makes the point that nothing is what it seems, through its persistent lack of an objectifying point of view. To start with a brief example: on-​screen, Marlowe’s finger rings a doorbell, visually doing so as the extension of an arm cut off by the frame. His hand is not seen connected to a full body because we can see only the immediate area of the bell, a restriction necessitated by the limits of his optical point of view. Thus, the camera is unable to objectify Marlowe in full

Introduction  13 figure as he is performing this action. Bazin speaks of this moment as “amputation”28—​the body is missing. Needless to say, shot-​reverse-​shot editing is absent in all of the film’s conversations. What results is a narration lacking enough cuts. Lady in the Lake teems with people who react to Marlowe, but we only hear him because he is always the (invisible) camera in charge of looking at the other characters. The detective is simultaneously present and distractingly absent. Thus, Lady in the Lake becomes a filmic narrative difficult to follow and find credible. Furthermore, the coincidence of camera, protagonist, and spectator’s point of view results in situating the so-​called fourth wall in the very same place from shot to shot. According to the logic of Hollywood’s analytical editing, the spatial location of an implied fourth wall can change significantly from shot to shot: for example, in reverse angle framing or due to cuts from one character’s point of view to another’s, as long as the framing of shots respects the 180-​degree rule with the necessary eye-​line matches. In fact, as the fourth wall shifts from shot to shot in this fashion, a cumulative implied reality of 360-​degree space is created within the viewer’s mind. Bazin points out that Lady in the Lake fails to achieve any believable intersubjective realism because the absence of editing inadequately creates realism of space for the film’s fictional world. In the end, Bazin’s theorizing of the “primacy of the object”29 clarifies and emphasizes that realism requires Otherness, namely the unraveling of the physical world on both sides of the axis of action through editing, because the cut marks the shift from the subject of the gaze to the object of the gaze. Without a subject, the object does not exist, since nobody is looking at it. Likewise, without an object, the subject cannot come to terms with the subjectivity of its own perceptions.

Cinema as Mind-​Machine Before cinema’s invention and its dynamic engagement with the world, static media had always conveyed an author’s subjectivity, even when the painter or the writer was striving to describe an object realistically. Literature, theater, and painting posit a reader, a spectator, and a viewer addressed by a work and its author. Although they can fulfill an anthropocentric need, as material objects, the book, the stage, and the canvas are tools that cannot become

14  André Bazin’s Film Theory anthropomorphic; they cannot independently look at an object or hear a sound. Whereas the cinema, as a first and revolutionary example of audiovisual and kinetic perception distributed across a technological apparatus (projector, seats, screen), can be simultaneously an anthropomorphic and an anti-​anthropocentric mind-​machine. It can look and hear by showing to its audience the effects of sound and image on the characters on the screen. The projector in front of which we all sit together is a shared eye, comparable to Faraday’s magnet. To objectify oneself in an anti-​anthropocentric way so as to see and hear the world through another human being’s subjectivity is what characterizes the empathy or spirituality of humankind. At the cinema, we objectify ourselves, thanks to the eye of an invisible camera looking at the world by itself or aligning its point of view with a character on screen. Thanks to this displacement onto the Other’s point of view, we can never see the camera as a movable machine and ourselves as motionless viewers looking into the screen. Just like the hidden filmstrip running through the projector inside a booth, the camera and the sound recorder always combine into a material ghost whose effects are visible (and audible) for the audience as a community of believers. In arguing that time is cinema’s fundamental preoccupation, Bazin asserts that this photographic medium makes visible objectivity in time through editing and camera movement. By contrast, the literary and fine arts are based on the human hand and fall under the anthropocentric rubric of “subjectivity in space,”30 through which all artists seek eternity. Cinema contents itself with duration and simultaneity. Bazin understands that the cinema-​machine can produce the illusion of a parallel universe of beings and things. Yet cinema’s energizing charge is grounded in immanent traces from the actual material world. The evolution of cinema’s narrative spark requires the original vision put forth by a filmmaker working with a team. Within Bazin’s idea of the cinema, the emotional and intellectual electrification of the audience should derive from a mix of “freedom and necessity.”31 While a filmic narrative necessarily impacts viewers as a group, it should allow for freedom of interpretation. In experiencing a shared narrative, viewers interrogate themselves in relation to their own way of being, as they respond to the characters on screen. By projecting recorded traces of the world onto a brain-​like screen, and by stimulating the viewers’ minds, the cinema can generate imaginary alter egos, or states of receptivity capable of self-​interrogation and empathy

Introduction  15 toward Others. Significantly, Bazin states that, at its best, cinema is a form of anti-​anthropocentric love or community, in the sense of sharing a source of inspirational, quasi-​spiritual energy.32 On one hand, we need basic recording to preserve the appearances of the world. On the other, we rely on cinema’s editing and camera movement to make us expand outward in such a way that we encounter Otherness. We sit together in the cinema and look at the world projected on the screen, but we perceive it in individual ways. Precisely because it envisions a parallel world, Bazin’s film theory has cosmological implications. Through editing and camera movement, cinema explores our belonging to a vast universe that extends from the microbes of the microscope to the stars of the telescope. The microscope and the telescope are, of course, two precursors of the cinema because they enlarge the small and reach out toward the far away. Bazin’s cinema is a sensitive and exploratory medium. This is the magic and the soul of twentieth-​century photographic cinema, with its indispensable role in our lives on the earth.

2  Art In his essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” mostly written between 1943 and 1945,1 Bazin published only one illustration:  Giuseppe Enrie’s (1886–​1961) photograph of the Turin Shroud (1931).2 Once it is stretched out, this burial cloth offers a back and a front view of a tortured man from head to toe. Enrie’s image is a photograph raised to the power of two. In fact, the Shroud’s genesis is comparable to the photographic process of imprinting a trace. Although the Shroud proves empirically that someone’s body was there, only its legendary status as a religious relic claims that the man in the Shroud is Christ. Based on this case study, what especially interests Bazin is how any photograph of anything appeals to irrational belief the way a religious relic does.

A Christological Ontology Both the automatic record produced by Enrie and the irrational relic invite a leap of faith. Irrational belief is central in Bazin’s photographic ontology because this natural image is utterly unique as far as eliciting an attitude of trust. Yet, all by itself, irrational belief is not enough to explain the nature of photography. Film theorist Philip Rosen argues that photography offers Bazin a way out of the split between subjective and objective.3 Indeed, photography is the very first medium to have ever been invented with simultaneous implications in science and religion. Its origin belongs to physics and chemistry, while its address engages hallucination. Photography’s call for irrational belief, Bazin argues, stems from its “reality-​transfer,” namely a direct contact between an object and its image that occurs absolutely independently of the human hand (sine manu factu). This process is comparable to the archeiropoietic or parthenogenetic status that applies to self-​made religious images and incarnational births in cellular biology.4 To describe the automatic transfer from object to image, André Bazin’s Film Theory. Angela Dalle Vacche, Oxford University Press (2020) © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190067298.001.0001

Art  17 Bazin uses words such as empreinte digitale (fingerprint), and ressemblance (resemblance).5 To further explicate photography’s ontology, British theorist Peter Wollen appropriates the terms “index” and “icon” from the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–​1914). The latter maintains that the “indexical” status of an image involves verifiable direct contact between object and sign, and no resemblance. By contrast, the “iconic” aspect of a sign derives from its recognizable resemblance to its object without contact.6 Peirce’s indexical or physical link between object and image and his visual definition of icon as likeness are consistent with Bazin’s awareness that a photograph is an analogical sign based on a mix of fact and hallucination. Analogy, here, underlines the paradox of a copy that brings together nature and technology without a direct manual intervention. Bound to the moment, every photograph adds something new to the order of things. Yet a photographic image cannot become a full narrative, due to the absence of motion; time is at a standstill. A photograph can only make visible a moment in space by interrupting the flow of time. A frozen moment never tells a fully articulated story, the way any narrative does through change. Significantly, Bazin concludes the final version of his “Ontology” essay with a reminder that cinema, in comparison to photography, is a language-​like medium. By contrast, the static photograph is a nonlinguistic visual record of arrested flow or energy, a “fragment of the universe,”7 delivered automatically by a machine that harnesses light, time, physics, and chemistry. In this respect, Bazin’s photography enjoys a cosmological dimension, with nature taking over the role of artist.8 Unlike the painter who depends on the active cooperation of mind, eye, and hand to make images, the photographic machine passively receives on its sensitive plate the light-​based tracings reflected by an object. The latter’s position in space can be transformed into a unique and visible moment, once its negative imprint has been transferred to a new positive surface. A photograph can range from a blurry, quasi-​abstract trace to a figurative image (Figure 2.1). In any photograph, the iconic likeness of its image never tells the truth. Only through its indexical status, from the direct contact between object and image, does a photograph derive the authority of analogical record. As such, even when it is most accidental, a photograph proves only that a physiochemical automatic transfer has taken place. A photograph may lie, but it does always document the reality of a moment taken out of time. Thanks to this “reality transfer,” the object looks

18  André Bazin’s Film Theory

Figure 2.1  Henri Cartier-​Bresson, Paris. Place de l’Europe. Gare Saint Lazare. 1932. © Henri Cartier-​Bresson/​Magnum Photos.

like the image and the image looks like the object. This process, Bazin explains, is comparable to that of casting a mold (moulage) or to an automatic printing technique called décalcomanie (decal). According to Bazin, photography’s aesthetic power derives from how it halts the fleeting instant. Stillness in photography becomes embalming of time through space. Each negative feels like a one-​time only, virginal birth disrupting the routine of our perceptions: “The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities.”9 Each photograph makes us see time, no

Art  19 matter what it shows. Seeing time at a standstill equals how this medium can “lay bare the realities.” A photograph is an absent presence. One can sense, here, Bazin’s enthusiasm for the invention of photography. This new medium does not seek eternity, as portraiture in painting does. A photograph is an incarnational and exceptional image. Likewise, Christ is both a human and a divine being whose advent is unprecedented, revolutionary, and unrepeatable. Without a doubt, Bazin’s photographic ontology is disruptive and Christological. Although Bazin never explicitly refers to pagan idolatry and religious images, his incarnational definition of photography fits within Christianity’s long tradition of iconophilia. This attitude dates back to the Seventh and last Ecumenical Council of Nicea (787). At that point, all images are religious icons and all of them are considered incarnational, for they are all believed to be comparable to the concept (logos) of Christ’s becoming an image through his taking on of human flesh. Even the difference between two-​dimensional and three-​dimensional objects is not an issue during this period.10 In contrast to the iconoclasm of the Byzantine period, the Council of Nicea legislates that paintings and sculptures modeling the human figure do not foster idolatry. They can be kept in churches and become objects of veneration. For Bazin, photography’s invention looks back at this period of iconophilia, while this unprecedented kind of incarnational medium sets into relief the humble plastic arts in contrast to portraiture’s vanity with its precious oil pigments. In the wake of the Council of Nicea’s approval of the human figure and mimetic representation, photography’s invention makes the figurative realism of the other arts look less believable. Although capable of aesthetic abstraction, photography becomes synonymous with copying the world, thus paving the way for the development of different cinematic realisms. A dissident Catholic and a Darwinian at the very same time, Bazin upholds evolution in nature and in media. Since the origin of cinema is in photography, the moving image of mainstream, popular cinema settles into realism due to ontogenetic reasons. Realism in cinema can take on many different forms and genres. With their special degree of lifelike illusionism, the language-​like narratives of the cinema help us to experience vicariously and to project mentally. They move us to feel, think, and imagine. Whereas a photograph can happen by itself, thanks to an accidental click of the camera shutter, a narrative film always requires a creative team behind the camera.11 The monkey who uses the camera in Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928) cannot push a film beyond

20  André Bazin’s Film Theory the basic level of recording. Keaton’s film calls attention to the analogy between the camera and the human mind, and to the fact that a monkey has only a brain and no mind. Inasmuch as a photograph does not necessarily tell the truth, Bazin still declares that “every film is a social document.” This is due to how a film incorporates an individual point of view or a general worldview in its narrative. Instead of pointing toward an abstract ideal of universal truth, the word “social” next to “document” recognizes cinema’s inextricable grounding in a mental universe and social context that moving images articulate through a space-​time continuum.12 Bazin’s idea of realism is a double-​edged concept combining figurative and spiritual qualities. The external features of realism depend on historical standards of imitation and expression. Yet, this kind of external realism or quantitative naturalism of details is not enough for Bazin. He seeks an abstracting realism that makes visible the invisible, namely inner changes in the characters’ ways of thinking and behaving. To this end, Bazin discusses the contrast between the perfect, three-​ dimensional realism of perspective painting and the much more primitive realism of church sculptures in the early Middle Ages.13 In his view, this latter kind of religious art highlights spiritual struggles and ethical dilemmas. Within a roller coaster of emotions and forms, the medieval artist represents humans who become animals, plants, and objects. As soon as one moves from medieval allegories to the screen of cinema, the psychological transformation of human beings into objects or animals is a possible way to describe the horrors of all wars any time. In the wake of early medieval art, which is simultaneously abstract and realist, Bazin promotes a comparable “phenomenological” neorealism that gives priority to self-​displacement, human frailty, ambiguity, and receptivity. His preference for early medieval art embraces the emotional dimensions ruled out by the geometrical and logical foundations of one-​point perspective. For Bazin, the compositional grid of perspective charts the “original sin”14 of anthropocentrism. Furthermore, this kind of realist imitation turns into a form of psychological addiction. Rooted in the rise of individualism out of the Renaissance, the mathematical realism of perspective meets the full approval of Leonardo Da Vinci. Eager to celebrate the end of a theocentric, medieval worldview, the scientific Leonardo does not hesitate to stress the mathematical skills of painters in order to establish painting, sculpture, and architecture as the new and secular media of his own time.

Art  21 In opposition to Leonardo’s anthropocentric humanism, the twentieth-​ century thinker Bazin defends the light-​based, nonmanual automatism of the camera obscura as the true precursor of photographic recording. The peephole of this wooden box allows the natural light to enter and, all by itself, to “draw” the contours of nearby external objects. Thanks to an internal mirror, neighboring shapes reappear on top of the same box, like proto-​ photographic shadows in reverse.15 Yet to set up the camera obscura in opposition to Leonardo’s perspective is not enough of a commentary on Bazin’s stance. These two different ways of achieving realism—​the mathematical and the phenomenological—​warrant further examination. Keen as he is on the changing appearances of the visible world, Bazin implicitly structures his “Ontology” essay around two methods of painting. In the first method, thanks to the mathematical system of perspective, the artist can master the space of the canvas from the outside in, as if it were a concave and measurable surface. Light in this kind of painting is an idealized kind of lux, or ideal illumination. Exemplified by Charles Le Brun (1619–​1690), this first kind of spatial realism is limited to the modeling of the human figure and the celebration of eternal features. Eager to side with a second method of painting, Bazin mentions Jean-​Baptiste-​Siméon Chardin (1699–​1779), who often worked with still lifes of objects and animals. This shift from Le Brun to Chardin is due to how Bazin prefers artists who use the camera obscura to paint an elusive moment by studying shifts in natural light. Within this alternative tradition, light is called lumen, because it stands for real time passing. This phenomenological realism stems from the nature of beings and things, thus revealing their finitude. By working with natural light, these artists reject perspective’s timeless and spatial realism, while they prefer to focus on the convex and time-​bound space that surrounds and contains them. Thus, they become participant observers in a transitional world whose various phases and moments they paint, without trying to idealize them through fixed measurements. This temporal realism not only challenges human vanity but also can celebrate how one may wish to subordinate human artistry to the world’s phenomena of birth and decay. Eventually, through the use of concave and convex lenses producing a range of focal lengths, the two systems of Renaissance perspective and the camera obscura converge in the development of the film camera.16 Yet these two systems continue to imply two competing moral positions. On one hand,

22  André Bazin’s Film Theory the concave lens sustains the highly individualistic, anthropocentric, and formulaic narratives of classical Hollywood cinema. By contrast, the camera’s convex lens is a progenitor of the outward-​oriented wide angle and the anti-​ anthropocentric deep focus of Orson Welles’s cinematography, not to mention Jean Renoir’s panoramic, leveling, and introspective view of human imperfections. Thanks to the destabilizing power of motion, Bazin’s anti-​anthropocentric film theory implies that photography’s transformation into cinema brings about a centrifugal whirlwind that destroys forever the static and humanist ideal of the Renaissance. This out-​of-​date model is embodied in Leonardo’s drawing of Vitruvian Man (1487), an icon with perfect bodily proportions first proposed by Vitruvius, a Roman architect (Figure 2.2). Needless to say, cinema’s introduction of movement inside the frame of painting shatters this mathematically determined figure. Its arms and legs stretch out to claim as much space, property, control, and power as possible. The authority of the Vitruvian body resides in its functioning as a unit of measure for city planning during the Renaissance. All of a sudden, however, not only does the external world seem to move for any traveler on a train but also the Vitruvian statue crumbles and disintegrates into a million pieces by 1895. During the early years of the cinema the spectator’s eyes learn to move and think from one shot to the next, thanks to an increasingly more sophisticated system of cuts and camera work. Meanwhile, the values of anthropocentric humanism enter into a state of crisis. The possibility of a static center is forever lost. Change, point-​of-​view, simultaneity, duration, the orchestration of looking, identification, camera movement, editing, intersection, suspense and surprise, contingency, ambiguity, reversals, risk and discovery:  these are the new protagonists of a modern world filled with speeding trains, telegraphs, telephones, airplanes, luminous screens, and moving cars.

Impure Cinema Like a cultural anthropologist, Bazin pushes the arts of literature, theater, and painting well outside the library and the museum into the ever-​changing world of mundane activity. Thus, he can study these arts’ interaction with film within social milieus and living nature. From the very beginning, cinema’s origins are multiple and impure. This bastard child finds its footing

Art  23

Figure 2.2  Vitruvian Man. Leonardo Da Vinci, Artist, and Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich. Study of Proportions. 1949. Photograph. https://​www.loc.gov/​ item/​00650441/​.

in space through theater and painting. Photography is its embryo, but the baby achieves maturity through literature as the midwife of thought. In Bazin’s film theory, the temporality of the written page ranks over the world as a stage. The three-​dimensional space of theater, in turn, is more important than painting’s flat but sensual surface. One can say that Bazin aligns the word with time and the canvas with space, thus bringing to mind Lessing’s Laocoon (1766).17

24  André Bazin’s Film Theory In contrast to this German aesthetician, however, the French film theorist never advocates for the strict separation of the arts, since all sorts of different media dialogue with the cinema. Besides avoiding Lessing’s call for medium specificity,18 Bazin rejects Richard Wagner’s gesamtkunstwerk as an explanatory model. To fulfill his theory of the total work of art, Wagner gathers many media under a single dramaturgical impulse. Yet Bazin deeply dislikes Wagner’s celebration of a primal unity. The Wagnerian model is regressive and self-​imploding. In 1948, after seeing Disney’s Bambi (1942), Bazin dismisses this animation because of its gesamtkunstwerk approach, pointing out that the film’s mise-​en-​scène looks like “a pseudo-​Wagnerian forest theater.”19 The relationship between cinema and the other arts dominates so many of Bazin’s essays that the present discussion focuses on the relationships among the screen, the canvas, and the stage. Regarding the screen, Bazin rejects the explanatory dichotomy created by the metaphors of an empowering window and of a passive mirror as alternatives for handling the screen. By contrast, Leonardo uses this opposition to address the difference between the imaginary window of perspective and the mirror inside the box of the camera obscura. In clear opposition to this model from art theory, Bazin painstakingly conceptualizes the screen in a way that does justice to cinema’s two constitutive functions: the display of motion and the projection of recording. The window and the mirror are static objects that cannot accommodate cinema’s constant changes of angle, scale, and framing onto an invisible fixed surface. The key point, here, is that Bazin’s screen is penetrable and elastic, because it has to look as if the “real world” beyond the screen of cinema exists in a relationship of continuity with whatever the eye of the camera focuses on. Mobile framing demonstrates why the screen’s two sides are unlike the stable wings of the stage. Theatrical wings isolate the dramatic action on stage away from the rest of the world nearby, and keep the staged performance from bumping into the off-​stage nails and scaffolding behind the scene. Everything on a limited stage is, in principle, under control and contained within a centripetal space, whereas cinema’s screen centrifugally opens onto what is beyond itself. The unstable border between on-​screen and off-​screen contributes to cinema’s anti-​anthropocentric orientation, granted that the material contingencies of the real world can always compete with artistic planning. In contrast to the anthropocentric nature of theatrical space, the screen is an alien, inorganic being that, free of gravity, depends only on light. At the same time, its psychological impact comes from absolute size and internal

Art  25 use of scale. In contrast to cinema’s fluctuating boundaries, traditional theater needs footlights—​as small as they may be—​to mark a separation between the performers and the audience with whom they physically share the theater space. In the theater the audience attends to the primacy of the words spoken by the performers, in their assumed roles, here and now. However, in the movie theater the spectator’s body is totally absent from the place of performance and, therefore, implies a much more disconnected relationship to the shadowy traces of bodies imprinted on the film stock and projected on screen. Needless to say, the more camera movement becomes an independent force without any connection to a character’s point of view, the more a spectator can sense that its disembodied wanderings suggest a mental, spiritual, or ghostly presence.

Pure Cinema In his review of Georges Lacombe’s La nuit est mon royaume (1951), a film on blindness starring Jean Gabin, Bazin dwells on the indifferent objectivity of the camera eye. Bazin compares the eye of the camera to the gaze of blindness: Filmmakers have always been drawn to blind people, for both good and bad reasons. [ . . . ] The gaze without object of the blind person is more penetrating than ours which is obscured by the world we look at. This is the case because the blind person’s way of looking seems to be able to see well beyond appearances, through beings and things. It is comparable to our consciousness outside of ourselves.20

The obvious point here is that the blind person depends heavily on alternative sensorial cues to interact with the world. Despite the absence of sight, the blind gaze seems to know more. This nonvisual way of seeing is pure, because it is comparable to the objectifying impact of the camera’s recording function. In Bazin’s vocabulary, pure does not mean innocent or virginal, since these two words describe either lack of experience or the first time an encounter takes place. Rather, pure refers to different kinds of situations when indifferent recording seems to prevail. Purity can happen when a director’s

26  André Bazin’s Film Theory personal vision becomes invisible, or when the film seems to emerge out of sheer archival footage. An example is Paris 1900 (1948), a montage of fictional and nonfictional footage selected by Nicole Védrès (1911–​1965) from the archives of Pathé and Gaumont, and edited by Yannick Bellon, with Alain Resnais as an assistant. In commenting on this film, Bazin underlines that the director does not direct an original mise-​en-​scène. She has no unprecedented pro-​filmic event in front of her own camera to record for the very first time. Consequently, only the editing of footage found in archives takes place. Chunks of filmstrips tell their own stories, regardless of who was standing behind the camera at the time these events were taking place. Védrès’s approach is pure. Bazin observes that Védrès’s film “realizes the paradox of an objective past, of a memory outside of our consciousness.”21 The word “consciousness,” here, means subjective memories. Only 1 percent of the footage chosen by Védrès includes celebrities from the politics of the period and the intellectual circles of the Belle Epoque.22 This small degree of attention to elite segments of the population is telling. Such a strategy highlights how Paris 1900 privileges the slow-​moving events of the anonymous and dense everyday, rather than the fast-​changing historical record one may find easier to remember. In discussing Védrès’s compilation, Bazin also develops an opposition between cinema as objective, inclusive public memory and Marcel Proust’s exclusive and private stream of consciousness. Through a modernist approach based on freewheeling associations and involuntary memories, the writer focuses on his very private recollections. After underlining the writer’s use of the first person, Bazin writes: “Proust found his reward of time regained in the inexpressible joy of being engulfed by his memory. Here, on the contrary, the esthetic delight derives from something else, because these memories do not belong to us.”23 In contrast to Proust’s mental universe, the objective recording of Parisian street life in Paris 1900 is the public Other that the cinema preserves. Unlike Proust’s introspective recovery of subjective time through a madeleine, Paris 1900 is cinema’s objective time showing itself as anonymous duration. Its purity resides in the fact that this kind of public time belongs to everybody, rather than to one single creative consciousness. In What Is Cinema? there are additional references to “pure cinema,” all of them strikingly different, but all grounded in different uses or elements of the cinema, a medium with a composite technology of recording and editing with lenses, filmstrip, camera, and screen, to name a few components. In 1955, for example, Bazin aligns the Canadian Norman McLaren with pure

Art  27 cinema. This is the case because some of McLaren’s animations are handmade, in contrast to Disney’s industrial approach. So taken is Bazin with McLaren’s manual method, which points back to the beginnings of animation, that he encourages the filmmaker to go even further toward pictorial abstraction. McLaren’s purity stems from how fully the medium can convey an artist’s unique vision, while manual skills prevail over recording. Purity, here, becomes a matter of historical fidelity to the drawings used for early animation. As early as 1947, Bazin’s pure cinema category includes the quasi-​surrealist scientific films of Jean Painlevé. Painlevé’s cinema is pure because the eye of the camera, through micro-​cinematography, can penetrate the body of a seahorse and show us its skeleton (Figure 2.3). Here, purity stems from how “cinema reveals that which no other procedure of investigation, not even the [human] eye can perceive.”24 In another example, made possible by

Figure 2.3  Jean Painlevé, L’hippocampe femelle (Female Seahorse), 1931. © 2019 Archives Jean Painlevé/​LDC, Paris.

28  André Bazin’s Film Theory high-​speed projection, Painlevé discovers that “yeast did not reproduce exactly as we thought . . . the process is too slow for the eye . . . to be able to sum up its successive phases.”25 Generally speaking, for Bazin avant-​garde animation and distinctive scientific documentaries deserve the label of “pure cinema,” as long as there is no mixing of human and nonhuman eyes. The hand cannot get confused with the machine. With McLaren, pure cinema implies an artisanal filmmaking. With Painlevé, pure cinema highlights how the camera can see in a nonhuman way, and in so doing it penetrates the appearances that normal vision is restricted to, by accelerating, slowing down, or reversing temporal processes. Occasionally, Bazin forgets to claim purity. At the same time, his prose seems to invoke this concept whenever eye-​level shooting takes place in a steady manner. For example, in Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946), in dealing with the Po Valley episode: In the admirable final episode of the partisans surrounded in the marshlands, the muddy waters of the Po Delta, the reeds stretching away to the horizon, just sufficiently tall to hide the man crouching down in the little flat-​bottomed boat, the lapping of the waves against the wood, all occupy a place of equal importance with the men. This dramatic role played by the marsh is due in great measure to deliberately intended qualities in the photography. This is why the horizon is always at the same height. Maintaining the same proportions between water and sky in every shot brings out one of the basic characteristics of this landscape. It is the exact equivalent, under conditions imposed by the screen, of the inner feeling men experience who are living between the sky and the water and whose lives are at the mercy of an infinitesimal shift of angle in relation to the horizon. This shows how much subtlety of expression can be got on exteriors from a camera in the hands of the man who photographed Paisà.26

Here Bazin underlines how Rossellini uses the screen to give priority to landscape and posture over the dialogue among nonprofessional actors. In this Po Valley episode, Rossellini’s filmmaking sheds all stylistic aestheticisms to reinvent itself in the light of a photographic ontology of equalization. Another possible example of “pure cinema” emerges from Bazin’s essay “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage” (1951).27 There the film critic praises a sequence from Harry Watt’s Where No Vultures Fly (1951). In this

Art  29 case, a child and a lioness are shown together “in the same full shot,” after the child kidnaps the lion’s cub. Bazin does acknowledge that some trickery is involved. In fact, the lioness is not only tamed, but it has been living in close contact with the kidnapper’s family. Even if this English film is mediocre, the integrity of space deployed for the cub’s return to its mother “carries us at once to heights of cinematographic emotion” (p. 49). Once again, just as in the case of Rossellini’s filming in the Po Valley, Bazin does not explicitly use the word “pure,” but his enthusiasm seems to call for it. This brief survey of examples dealing with “pure” cinema makes clear one important conclusion: Bazin’s purity does not involve “cinematic specificity” in any way. To be sure, the concept of medium specificity belongs to the history of art, and precedes the invention of the moving image.

The Postwar Art Documentary Since the development of cinema has a destabilizing impact on the aestheticizing function of the pictorial frame, the postwar art documentary becomes one of Bazin’s most celebrated examples of cinematic impurity. One should not, therefore, be surprised that Alain Resnais’s Van Gogh (1948) earns the critic’s enthusiastic approval. In a way reminiscent of the distinction between photographic rupture and film’s language, this art documentary explores the difference between painting as static object and cinema as temporal event. At the same time, Resnais’s short film brilliantly articulates the affinity between the camera lens as object and the objects from still lifes in Van Gogh’s work. After the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, the healing impact of creativity stands out as an ethical imperative for reestablishing universal solidarity. The postwar process of democratizing the fine arts fuels the rebirth of the postwar documentary, while it also reinforces Bazin’s dream of film as art accessible to all. In 1951 André Bazin enthusiastically reports that the film on art has “snowballed since the war . . . becoming the most important development in the past twenty years in the history of documentary, maybe in the history of cinema itself.”28 Despite the critic’s enthusiastic declaration, among painters and art historians the same encounters of painting and film trigger a wave of hostility, due to the invasive nature of film technology. As the critic himself acknowledges, “in order to make use of painting, cinema betrays it in all regards. The dramatic unity and logic of the film sets up chronologies

30  André Bazin’s Film Theory or fictive links between works that are sometimes very distant in time and spirit.”29 How can the nonhuman lens of the camera have any respect for the touch of the painter’s hand? And how can the hand of the film editor be so presumptuous as to cut up and rearrange works of art that have an internal logic of their own? For the art world, film recording and the disruptions of editing during postproduction are two disrespectful procedures. The first is mechanical, too passive, while the second is manual, manipulative, and too invasive. Combined, these two filmic interventions can shatter an artist’s style. How to deal with the ontological differences of cinema and painting and how to find some symbiotic ground between these two media? These become Bazin’s theoretical challenges.30 Cinema can investigate the nature of artistic self-​expression through different genres of paintings, whether they are abstract or figurative. In the shift from frame to screen, the painter’s inspiration evolves into a source of life and movement in the film. The unstable boundaries of creative energy invite film viewers to shed their previous views on art and learn something new about how the moving image is born. But many postwar art documentaries fail to establish a dialectical and creative interaction between cinema and painting, one that is respectful of each medium’s way of being or ontology. In contrast to these failures or partial successes, Alain Resnais’s Van Gogh (1948) is one of the best examples in the genre.

Painting as Object, Cinema as Event Unlike painting, which tells us more about the painter and less about the world, cinema, for Bazin, is an anti-​ anthropocentric medium because it brings the world to the lens in ways much more unpredictable than the human eye can perceive by itself. By associating the art documentary with an avant-​garde sensibility, Bazin theorizes a relationship between cinema and painting, hopefully capable of encouraging a sensibility more open to the value of creativity as free will and as spirituality in daily life. Few pairings could be less compatible than these two media, because painting is a handmade object whereas cinema is based on events in process, subject to staging as well as contingency. The postwar art documentary looks like a paradoxical genre for its combining of these incompatible forms of creativity. In the case of the documentary film exploring the history of painting, art’s subjectivity

Art  31 meets the allegedly most “objective” of nonfictional genres. Art and subjectivity go together, because the value of art lies in its power to produce the most unique forms. Despite his Pascalian condemnation of classical academic painting as vanity in his “Ontology” essay, Bazin has great respect for the history of art in general and understands its value in education. Bazin sees the artist as a special kind of person who functions outside utilitarian, pragmatic concerns. In 1949, in the journal Esprit, Bazin takes issue with fellow critic Camille Bourniquel, who faults Resnais’s Van Gogh for its emphasis on the drama of the artist’s life and the “moroseness” of the black-​and-​white imagery: it’s obvious that the screen will always distort the balance of the composition, the relationship of values and that it is moreover unavoidably weak on colors. But rather than focusing on these weaknesses, why not marvel instead that, beginning with a material radically modified in its specific structure, the film nevertheless returns to us a work that undoubtedly exists with its logic and unity? Can you imagine smashing a clock into tiny pieces, then putting it back together in another way? If the film, however bad one thinks it, exists nevertheless, it’s because the work of art cannot be compared to a precision instrument and it will not cease to exist even when attacked in its elements and its structure.31

Although he is primarily trained in the sciences from 1934 to 1937, once Bazin enters the prestigious École Normale of Saint Cloud in Paris, he educates himself in art history and philosophy. In 1949, to celebrate the postwar flourishing of the art documentary, the critic devotes a whole essay to cinema and painting, originally published in La Revue du Cinéma as “Le cinéma et la peinture.”32 So interested is he in nature and in the sciences that he advocates for the “biology” of the art documentary. Concurrently Bazin is also a staunch admirer of the scientific film genre. Especially when he discusses Jean Painlevé’s creative work with marine biology, Bazin enthuses about natural living forms displaying an unexpected degree of so-​called accidental beauty. The scientific documentary can become a form of surreal poetry. For Bazin, nature is filled with wonder and mystery; art is based on human creativity, subjective perception, and the resilience of spirituality before the unknown. Next to art, science, too, is a necessary human endeavor; it is an unavoidable and all-​important search for knowledge based on logic,

32  André Bazin’s Film Theory measurement, recording, and experiment. Its importance lies in its heuristic power to produce new knowledge. In contrast to science, art can reinvent perception and fuel the imagination to such a degree that it can even point scientific research toward new ideas. Bazin’s fascination with nature helps explain why he relies on metaphors from and analogies to mineralogy, physics, and chemistry to discuss the encounter between film as biology or lifelike motion and painting as art in the art documentary. Precisely because the cinema—​as a photographic technology—​is suspended between art and science, the critic hopes that a much-​needed new kind of independent and experimental genre might be born through the art documentary. Concerned with the postwar atrophy of documentary after the great advances of Étienne-​Jules Marey, Robert Flaherty, Alberto Cavalcanti, Jean Vigo, Joris Ivens, and Luis Buñuel,33 Bazin regularly reviews or mentions screenings devoted to nonfiction films. These programs often mix films about the sciences and the arts. Disagreeing with other critics who dismiss the art documentary as derivative or subordinate, Bazin’s hope is that this new film genre might reposition human consciousness in relation to Otherness. By recasting the old humanist framework of classical painting onto the screen of a dynamic, yet shared, world could one’s own awareness of interdependence on the earth grow in terms of moral responsibility? Any director can succeed or fail with an art documentary, regardless of the style of painting championed and independently of the artist’s notoriety. A good art documentary should stand on its own, rather than depending on the greatness of its art and the artist’s subject matter. “One must not judge them solely in regard to the painting they use, but in regard to the anatomy and the biology of a new being—​one born out of the coupling of painting and cinema.”34 Bazin treats each new art documentary with a nurturing yet evaluative eye, the way a parent watches over a young child whose upbringing requires loving guidance. Dismissive of individual celebrity and art historical canons, Bazin is more interested in cross-​media adaptations that cause two ontologically different practices to become mutually fulfilled through each other: “The film of a painting is an aesthetic symbiosis of screen and painting, as is the lichen of the algae and mushroom.”35 Symbiosis, here, does not mean fusion. Rather it describes a dialectic of independent and creative reciprocities. Whether it deals with sculpture or architecture, Bazin views the art documentary as a new aesthetic symbiosis that helps the educational ecology of the world we live in. In the particular case of the art documentary about

Art  33 painting, cinema’s challenge is to bypass painting’s “objecthood,” the fact that a painting is a thing to be hung on a wall, or a canvas that sits on an easel. Although the filmic reel is also an object, one can say that cinema itself hides within it because its true ontology is based on recording, projection, and perception. The cinema is more than a thing; it is a series of events unfolding in time and space. Granted that galleries, museums, and collectors are involved, painting and sculpture perform their wonders by themselves as objects. The film reel, instead, requires a projectionist, acting as a midwife, for its coming to life. Bazin does not hesitate to either praise or condemn different art doc­ umentaries made by the very same director. He admires Resnais’s Van Gogh (1948). But he is quick to criticize Alain Resnais’s Guernica (1951), despite the beautiful text written by Paul Éluard and read in voice-​over by actress Maria Casarès. The problem is that Guernica mixes together different periods and media from the artist’s career. He notes a similar flaw in Pierre Kast’s film on Goya: Les désastres de la guerre (1951). In this case his negative assessment is due to the montage of Kast’s film, which introduces fragments from Goya’s Caprices, a series of works whose lighter subject matter is in conflict with Goya’s graphic depiction of the disasters of war. Likewise, Bazin considers Luciano Emmer’s Guerrieri (Warriors, 1942)  to be a failure because the director edits together details from battle scenes executed by different painters from completely unrelated historical periods. Acknowledging such occasions of incompetence as these, Bazin empathizes with the art historians’ fears about cinema’s treatment of their discipline. He knows all too well that in these cases the screen is destroying the integrity of pictorial space for the sake of a superficial visual potpourri.36 Bazin is interested in how the cinema can reorient art-​making in an anti-​ anthropocentric and popular direction. Whereas the mechanical recording of cinema becomes an event of “objectivity in time,”37 a painting’s frame forever locks the artist’s subjectivity in a static space. In addition, Bazin’s interest is fueled by one question: why does the postwar art documentary suggest an analogy between human artistry and natural creativity? Closer to an erratic lichen proliferating all over the place, or to a symbiosis between an ever-​floating alga and a firmly rooted mushroom, the art documentary’s paramount topic seems to be the endless energy of the world. Furthermore, whenever this documentary genre is most successful, it becomes lifelike. Its moving images shift from an art historical to a scientific look. Finally, in moving from consciousness to action, and from action to existence, the postwar art documentary can specialize in an exploration of mental

34  André Bazin’s Film Theory processes—​an anthropology of behavior—​or into an unexpected display of biological developments. In one example after another, the postwar art documentary demonstrates that it can reverse the Darwinian hierarchical arrangement of living species, according to which lichens are at the bottom and human beings on top. In contrast to this evolutionary trajectory organized on the basis of increasing complexity, Bazin’s perspective on this genre gives metaphors for human consciousness, animal behavior, and botanical existence an equal degree of importance. Accompanying this leveling approach, Bazin believes that cinema also thrives on reversals. It can negotiate the depths of the most undecipherable painting, turn it inside out, and deliver its secrets to the largest audience possible. From this encounter between two media, what can be learned on a broader level regarding the techniques of art-​making in general and the sources of creativity in particular? Bazin’s project on the art documentary is comparable to a chapter in a brand new, natural history of media, where painting and film exist within a diversified continuum of quasi-​beings. Painting can help cinema by stimulating the documentary genre, while the cinema can help painting by “chemically” preserving the painted image—​one as self-​evident and ponderous as a “mineral specimen.”38 This is indeed what happens during the filming of Luciano Emmer’s Picasso (1954), a section of which unfolds in the Romanesque chapel of Vallauris, in Provence. There, on the chapel walls, the artist improvises preparatory work for a fresco on war and peace. Accidentally erased later on, these images now survive only inside the Italian filmmaker’s footage. For Bazin, in the gray zone between culture and nature, mineralogy always wins because a photograph is comparable to a fossil. Fossilization, the remains of an animal or a plant preserved through a process of mineralization, is a way of documenting the history of life. Cinema provides a corresponding service for artistic expression. The mineral record is based primarily on how fossils have accumulated in sedimentary rock layers called strata. Since his childhood, Bazin has been familiar with various kinds of fossils, such as insects preserved in amber.39 Fossil, photography, biology, art: this is the red thread or metonymic chain of life-​in-​death and death-​in-​life that interests the naturalist Bazin.

Frame and Screen The Belgian film Rubens (1948), made by Henri Storck and Paul Haesaerts, is one of the first postwar art documentaries Bazin writes about. And it is

Art  35 one of the best examples of its time of the educational film. It achieves an unprecedented level of insightfulness through superimposed circular diagrams explaining the painter’s kinetic compositions. Bazin praises “a virtual movement, a space of rotation suspended in the immobility of the painting and which awaits the sensibility of the person contemplating the canvas, for an imaginary deliverance.”40 But in spite of these static graphic diagrams dealing with Rubens’s implicit motion, one major limitation remains: the eye of the camera does not reveal the innermost core of Rubens’s work. Everything at the surface of the work may have been explained, but nothing is shared in depth between the film spectator and the artwork. Depth is crucial for Bazin, because immanence and complexity are at the very heart of human creativity. Furthermore, the art documentary can be responsible for activating a feeling of spiritual energy connecting artist and filmmaker, and in so doing passing this very same energy from the film to a general audience. After 1945, in an atmosphere of lingering echoes, mistakes, and loose ends from the past, the hope and need for human community mandates a global effort to achieve good will, in order to avoid a world paralyzed by pessimism and endless revenge. In such circumstances, previous aesthetic models can also be abandoned. In the case of the art documentary, for example, in contrast to Walter Benjamin, Bazin sees no irrecoverable loss of aura.41 Furthermore, the dimension of kitsch theorized by Clement Greenberg42 in 1939 is not relevant to any art documentary that Bazin examines. Unlike Benjamin and Greenberg, Bazin does not formulate an overarching theory built on the tension between politics and aesthetics, popular culture and the elite. Well aware of social struggles, religious divisions, and cultural boundaries, he emphasizes cinema’s universal and egalitarian address. Bazin handles each film as an individual case, a new plant to be cultivated and protected. His hope is that the power of cinema can inspire audiences with anti-​anthropocentric values that might bring about a more tolerant, less consumerist, and self-​conscious mass culture. Bazin believes in the living and spiritually contagious energy of art. Thus, the achievement of depth and art in filmmaking is possible, albeit challenging. Relatedly, bridging the gap between mass culture and an avant-​ garde sensibility becomes the special vocation of the art documentary. The humanity of humankind is in question in the aftermath of the horrors of World War II. Only a broad sharing of artistic creativity seems to offer an effective antidote for recovering from recent evils. The fossilization

36  André Bazin’s Film Theory of Rubens’s energetic art through a graphic solution is not good enough. Although useful in illustrating the artist’s free will at the level of style, Storck and Haesaerts’s circular diagram is too explanatory, hence superficial. In line with photography’s specialization in likenesses and its blurring of differences between object and model, Bazin looks for an art documentary that would bring to the surface of the screen a mutual process of exchange, rather than a drawn superimposition. After Rubens, the question is: what can be the next step in the evolution of the art documentary? What can a filmmaker do in order to tap the depth of artistic inspiration, while also conveying the ways in which cinema exceeds the human sphere through its evocation of an autonomous world off-​screen? Bazin begins to find a viable answer thanks to a stylistic choice executed by the Italian Luciano Emmer. Emmer is the first to eliminate the frame around the canvas, making it disappear into the screen. In subatomic physics, it is an accepted principle that two objects (particles) cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Yet, in Emmer’s case, the canvas has lost its objecthood and melts into the screen as if a chemical transubstantiation were taking place. Emmer bypasses the solids of physics by turning to the fluids of chemistry. Bazin concludes that, in reaction to the cinema, the spatial structures of painting have become “soluble”43 into the duration form or the frequentative tense of “happening.” In this case, the film critic describes a metamorphosis, drawing on Henri Bergson’s philosophy of becoming, where becoming, flow, duration, and intuition are a kind of Otherness contrasting with being, meaning, and intellect. Bergson’s philosophy builds on Heraclitus’s ancient dictum that everything is in constant flux, a state of perpetual motion. According to Bazin, Emmer’s new chemical compound of canvas and screen gives birth to an independent entity “to the second degree,” or a third new being with its own frail life.44 Most importantly, Emmer’s successful symbiosis of canvas and screen involves cosmological implications; Bazin reminds his readers that “photography and, a fortiori, the cinema always show us a fragment of the universe.”45 With his use of the term “universe,” the film critic refers to the interrelated system in which the earth is subject to gravity and a broader astronomical framework in charge of tides and lunar phases. Due to his emphasis on immanence, Bazin’s cosmology is not a biblical creationist fantasy, but a scientific awareness that light is a circulating force writing itself into photographic traces. Thus the word “fragment” acknowledges that

Art  37 there is always a broader universe with metonymic as well as metaphorical implications beyond the immediate photographic record. Notwithstanding the amount of motion and contingency a painting may suggest on its surface, the canvas is a self-​contained, centripetal object in a relation of discontinuity with the ever-​changing and complex world that surrounds it. The barrier of the frame (cadre) prevents its merging into daily life and the natural world. In regard to the tension between frame and screen, and according to a late revision of his thoughts in “Painting and Cinema,” Bazin explains: The outer edges of the screen are not . . . the frame of the film image. They are the edges of a piece of masking that shows only a portion of reality. The picture frame polarizes space inwards. On the contrary, what the screen shows us seems to be part of something prolonged indefinitely into the universe. A frame is centripetal, the screen centrifugal. Whence it follows that if we reverse the pictorial process and place the screen within the picture frame, that is if we show a section of a painting on a screen, the space of the painting loses its orientation and its limits and is presented to the imagination as without any boundaries.46

With a frame around it, even an unfinished painting can claim to be complete as an object. So dependent on motion and time is the cinema that its unfolding is constantly relational and open-​ended. Even a Hollywood film with a happy ending never ends in exactly the same way, because viewers change over time and relate to the narrative in different ways. For Bazin, the cinema screen’s edges, instead of being a cadre, are a cache, a masking whose boundaries constantly alter according to editing and camera movement. Cinema’s requirement of realism is intertwined with Bazin’s conception of the screen. Bazin’s use of the term cache emphasizes that the world we see on screen is only an intersection. In order to be persuasively believable, and therefore “real” enough, this very same world continues to exist off-​screen. In the wake of Emmer’s elimination of the fixed pictorial frame, Bazin has even more to tell us about mobile framing. In fact, the screen becomes constantly Other in relation to itself. Whereas the canvas is characterized by plasticity, display, depth, and stasis, the screen can be boundaryless, secretive, and transformative, because it has to accommodate chance, choice, change, desire, attention, distraction, and illusion.

38  André Bazin’s Film Theory Bazin appropriates Jean Cocteau’s comparison of the screen to a rectangular keyhole from Le sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet, 1930). The shape of the film’s keyhole mirrors the shape of the standard screen for a public screening, without eliminating the basic desire to “see” associated with voyeurism. Cocteau’s poet is constantly on the move along the corridor of the Hôtel Folie Dramatique. He is comparable to a film spectator viewing bits and pieces of many different films, as Surrealist artists enjoyed doing during their ambulatory nights in Paris. Since different narratives are associated with the keyholes for each room along the corridor, Cocteau, the cinéphile, effectively calls attention to the short films of early cinema as separate performance acts. Deprived of a lit, rectangular keyhole harnessing attention, a painting’s surface only changes if viewers change their position in front of it. In the cinema, the viewer sits still. In the meantime, near and far spaces may shift screen positions, just like large and small, darkness and light can mingle into shadows or change in scale. Because the pictorial frame works like a barrier, nothing within it can move off-​screen. This threshold focuses the viewer’s attention, but it does not allow for the experiences of contingency, waiting, suspense, and surprise that filmic motion can create. As Jean Cocteau knew well, the viewers of a painting cannot radically transfigure the object of their attention into a shadow, nor can they observe it as if they were so detached that all pictorial details acquire exactly the same level of importance. By contrast, in the darkness of the movie theater, these two options—​the temporal and the egalitarian, separately or together—​characterize the dynamics of cinema spectatorship, thanks to the camera lens and the fixed duration of the screening. This is also the case because, in cinema, there is more than just human vision operating by itself, as happens with a viewer in front of a canvas. Inside the movie theater, the human eye can align itself with the camera lens or with a character’s point of view, so that the orchestration of looking, at the level of the single spectator, interacts with the changing ways in which the world shows itself on screen. Given this state of affairs, it is not surprising that Cocteau’s cinéphile poet moves from one keyhole to the next, while the film viewer turns simultaneously into a voyeur and a visionary being. He wants to see more and better, but what he sees is so irrational or unbelievable that he begins to wonder if he is watching a film, experiencing a personal hallucination, or witnessing a live performance. The moving images of Cocteau’s early cinema become kinetic extensions of ourselves, while they invoke the short acts of

Art  39 the circus. Eventually, these short acts, these attractions characterized by a multisensorial overload, will evolve into the language of cinema: close-​ups and aerial views, dissolves and superimpositions, freeze frames and long takes, montage and optical trickery. These technical resources morph into film style and a director’s personal vision. Film language can take us beyond gravity, into depths and heights, or show us the very small and the very large. We have magically become ubiquitous in the living world itself. The human point of view can exchange itself with that of a bird, an insect, an airplane, or a microbe, since the machine of cinema performs changes in scale, size, and angle by means of editing, camera movement, and focal lengths.

The Objects of Still Life and the  Camera Lens as Object After Emmer’s dissolution of the frame into the screen and Cocteau’s surrealist definition of the rectangular screen as a keyhole, Bazin resolves the conflict between painting’s static objecthood and cinema’s temporal becoming, thanks to the objects of still life. He does not spell out his intention, but, based on all the essays he writes on this topic, this seems to be the most plausible explanation. By eliminating altogether the human figure, still life is the humblest and the most anti-​anthropocentric of all genres in painting.47 It is only in the genre of the still life that the brush controlled by the painter’s hand and the lens of the camera can become compatible. This is the case because in this genre the brush and the camera both effect a decentering impact on what they see and depict. In Bazin’s argument, the still life of painting becomes the equivalent of the humble lichen in biology. The cinema makes the objects of still life as important as human events whose duration is filled with sharing and discovery, but also adventure and anxiety. The paintbrush behaves like an “animistic” magic tool.48 It can enter into the hidden life of objects, in the same way that the film camera may get inside a canvas and flip it inside out, like a “glove.”49 This turning inside out of the glove—​one of the most analogical and, therefore, photographic pieces of clothing—​amounts to the birth of a new creation: the art documentary—​out of an older origin, painting. What Bazin is after is not a respectful commentary by a young medium about an old one. He believes in the radical transformation that the cinema can stimulate inside painting, at its core. In the

40  André Bazin’s Film Theory wake of the still life, the art documentary can displace the human corporeal figure from the image’s center. Meanwhile, the objects represented still imply a human element behind their choice, arrangement, and function. Cinema presents the world in a new, egalitarian light, with an objectifying eye that transforms the canvas into a mise-​en-​scène of equally weighted and engaging interaction between bodies and things, objects and words, objects and events, in stark contrast to the centrality of the human figure in academic historical painting. The similarly transformative egalitarian accomplishments of still life, landscape, and humble genre scenes are especially evident in some of Van Gogh’s paintings, such as The Potato Eaters (1885) and Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles (1888), two works featured in Resnais’s Van Gogh (1948). In the genre scene of The Potato Eaters, five peasants and all the objects around them are presented so embedded in their daily life that one can almost hear their conversation about labor, the soil, and the food they produce year after year. In discussing Resnais’s editing, Dudley Andrew remarks that the director’s approach is deictic: “here look at this.”50 One could argue that the editing’s fragmentation of The Potato Eaters is overly didactic. But Resnais’s cuts accompany images that highlight sharing the same light, the same tray, and the same beverage. The director’s mobilization of looking in his film’s treatment of The Potato Eaters is an homage to the harmony cinema finds with painting in still life and genre scenes. Furthermore, like a memento mori or a vanitas, the aspects of still life isolated by Resnais’s editing within the genre scene of The Potato Eaters lend themselves effortlessly to the cinema’s qualities of eventfulness and contingency. In Van Gogh’s painting, a beverage flows out of a teapot. This moment could precede a spill in a fictional film, were Resnais to rely on live action instead of filming this canvas source for his documentary. Meanwhile, the canvas’s stillness allows the rear view of one peasant woman to set into relief the eye-​line matches between two pairs of characters positioned on each side of her. Despite the lack of live action in Resnais’s film, Van Gogh’s paintings mobilize the viewer’s eyes so easily that everything and everybody could change and move from one moment to the next. It is as if Van Gogh’s work had already absorbed a sense of photographic instantaneity. In Bedroom in Arles, objects such as clothing, two pillows, two chairs, and two framed portraits on the wall function verbally. They are replacing one of Vincent’s letters to his brother, Theo, in which he details his loneliness.

Art  41 Things disclose emotions and thoughts. The painter searches for a deeper relationship with another person, just as cinema looks for a deeper engagement with painting. In Resnais’s Van Gogh, the art documentary shifts from a pictorial and mute text into an introspective and live narrative unfolding in real time. The idea is that the art documentary participates in an evolution of film language, in ways comparable to how a new living species emerges and changes our scientific understanding of an evolutionary history—​in this case, of media. Thus, Resnais’s Van Gogh marks a clear step forward from previous art documentaries. Van Gogh’s works—​with details such as distant houses and little churches huddled under the starry sky, or the orchestration of looking in The Potato Eaters—​are quite ready to become cinematic sequences. These pictorial scenes are filled with whispered voices, spiraling motions, and transitional moments. The painter’s centrifugal yearnings run up against painting’s objecthood. Instead of being restricted to a (framed) center, his whole work wishes to extend itself into nature and the cosmos, free of boundaries between himself and the unknown. Despite the clear distinction Bazin identifies between the centripetal canvas and the centrifugal screen, the still unresolved problem for the art documentary is negotiating between the external recording of photography and the inner exploration of the human mind. Without a doubt, Resnais’s Van Gogh is the first truly mental and literary example of an art documentary. It is, perhaps, why the film is regularly punctuated by self-​portraits of Van Gogh and by paintings showing the artist with easel and brushes. The painter’s lonely figure reminds viewers that this art documentary is a journey with no clear destination ever to be found. Like Rembrandt, Van Gogh executed innumerable self-​portraits during his career and lifetime. But this constant self-​interrogation is not due to narcissism. Rather, it springs from the need to look at oneself from the outside. Film can accomplish this undertaking; external recording can move beyond the surface, make visible the invisible, and become the blueprint of an existential search. The detached objectification of the recording camera lens is comparable to Van Gogh’s ongoing, unflinching self-​portraits that chronicle but offer no relief to his chronic mental anguish. The difficulty of capturing temporal changes in nature using only a static set of swiveling marks, and the impossibility of reaching into one’s own depths, resonates from the painter’s still life of his own shoes. It is his most eloquent example of objectifying self-​ portraiture, based on his restlessness in space and gravity in time.

42  André Bazin’s Film Theory Rather than lamenting the destruction of painting’s pictorial space, Bazin praises its transformation by Resnais’s montage in Van Gogh: The effectiveness of the film derives from the fact that Resnais never shows us a complete painting, frame included. Thanks to the editing, to cinema’s mobile framing, to the subject of the painting, to the camera movements, and certain editing tricks that succeed in creating the perfect illusion of a third pictorial dimension by using two canvases that depict the same scene from two different points of view, the work of van Gogh ceases somewhat being a series of paintings to become a limitless universe, the result of the fusion of his entire oeuvre, and where the filmmaker leads us as freely as in reality.51

Although Resnais’s camera films drawings and paintings, the artificial and closed status of these objects does not compete or conflict with the documentary’s perceptual realism. The film’s montage becomes a stream of consciousness that, in turn, becomes a mobile way of seeing for the film viewer. Resnais’s montage is also so discreet that we believe that Van Gogh’s world could be our world were we to visit the same locations during the same seasons. We suspend our disbelief in spite of Van Gogh’s intense and singular style. Shown in close-​up, the painter’s markings are unmistakable: abstract, thick, swirling and whirling. Van Gogh is considered the founder of Expressionism, but during the first half of Resnais’s film, his work becomes quasi-​realist. Resnais relies on two principal camera movements:  horizontal traveling pans, and vertical tracking shots associated with psychological swings into depression. These camera movements signify, respectively, geographical wandering and an inner voyage, and an increasing sense of vertigo. Resnais’s film is an overview of Van Gogh’s life, filtered through a selected group of works that are not arranged in chronological order. During the second half of the documentary we see Van Gogh’s black shadow cast on the ground. This shift from earlier pictorial images of Van Gogh to only projected shadows corresponds with the painter’s descent into a loss of self. Resnais also intercuts religious imagery of Christ’s passion with the artist’s Wheat Fields with Reaper at Sunrise (1889), causing the reaper’s scythe, in close-​up, to anticipate the artist’s suicide. For his project Resnais avoids all period photographs dealing with Van Gogh’s social work in the slums of London. He transforms Van Gogh’s life

Art  43 and work into a mental landscape without using any autobiographical sources, with the one exception of a brief citation at the very beginning of the film, taken from one of the hundreds of letters from Vincent to his brother, Theo: “Il me semble toujours être un voyageur qui va quelque part et à une destination.” (I seem always to be a voyager who is going somewhere toward a destination.) The more Resnais avoids the traditional biographical approach, the more spectators can individually and collectively appropriate the film’s moving images, thus fulfilling the centrifugal power of the screen. We are encouraged to forget we are looking at art and, instead, to think about daily life and existential issues. It is as if Resnais had shot a documentary on location with an ethnographic impulse. By using a telescopic lens, Resnais pushes way back an array of trees filled with flowers from an extreme close-​up into a long shot. In true Pascalian fashion, Resnais’s cinema wants the world’s natural beauty to eclipse the act of painting itself. The documentary feeling of the film is also enhanced by the use of black-​and-​white cinematography. We situate spaces, bodies, and objects in relation to seasonal events, such as harvesting under the blazing sun, but we do so according to dazzling light or haunting darkness rather than color. Van Gogh is the first postwar introspective art documentary because it leaves out Van Gogh’s most famous color: yellow. Resnais’s counterintuitive choice is understandable. It responds to the interface of two fraught existential situations whose complexities defy all external descriptions: the painter and a world of deprivation in the countryside, and the painter and a world of overstimulation in the city. The elimination of yellow, in particular, and of color, in general, rescues Resnais’s film from the pitfalls of symbolism, while it heightens the internal and interrelated pulses of bodies and landscapes. The relational use of black-​and-​white becomes their site of encounter. During the documentary, the lighting on screen never changes and, despite the absence of color, we imagine it just the same, as if Resnais’s images were x-​rays of chromatic sensations becoming inner states of mind. At the same time, black and white are systematized expressively. More white suggests the summer, more gray the winter, and more black signifies death—​ until the screen is filled by it at the film’s end. Bazin points out that the elimination of yellow brings to the film’s surface a much more discernible anatomical charting of the painter’s nervous system, with its waves of energy, brushstroke after brushstroke, becoming a thick blackness which even the camera lens cannot fully penetrate. We are looking at the eye of the hurricane

44  André Bazin’s Film Theory inside a human mind that cannot explain how so much anguish and suffering can generate so much creativity and sharing. Color in painting is geological and centripetal, hence quite at odds with the centrifugal nature of film and its screen. This is so because the internal relations among colors inside a pictorial frame contribute to their respective individual tones in that specific painting. Had Resnais shot Van Gogh in color, fidelity to the original paintings by the artist would be impossible. In 1945, in his essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin observes that “photography will long remain the inferior of painting in the reproduction of color.”52 For this reason replacing the colors of daily life with the colors of famous paintings can make a film look less believable.53 The rise of the postwar documentary coincides with the introduction of CinemaScope and Technicolor as resources for the cinema’s competition with the new medium of television. Thus, Bazin’s approval of Resnais’s decision to work in black-​and-​white, foregoing some commercial advantage, acquires a special significance. Traditionally associated with painting, femininity, excess, artificiality, and madness, color would inevitably weaken the introspective and literary qualities of Van Gogh. After all, this documentary depicts an existential journey through ordinary objects and nameless locations rather than historical characters or biographical detail. Above all, Resnais wants the conceptual framework of his Van Gogh to prevail over the painter’s melodrama of self-​mutilation. Unfortunately, this latter and much more traditional perspective dominates Vincente Minnelli’s biographical imagination. In his Lust for Life (1956), an MGM superproduction shot in CinemaScope and Metrocolor, Vincente Minnelli relies too much on color as madness and anecdote as a basis for psychologizing Van Gogh. Educated in art history at the Chicago Art Institute, Minnelli owns a significant art collection, and is a regular museumgoer and supporter of the arts in New York and Hollywood. Thanks to his background in theater, he establishes his expertise in producing colorful musicals and comedies as well as intense melodramas, such as his biopic on Van Gogh. In Lust for Life, the indoor sequences are crowded with actual paintings by Van Gogh that the Hollywood director manages to borrow from museums and private collections. All these institutions are duly credited at the very beginning of the film, an unusual practice for a mainstream film, and one that suggests that this Hollywood biopic is about to morph into a museum catalogue. Minnelli’s studio sets resemble storage rooms in comparison to Resnais’s transformation of Van Gogh’s output into a subjective landscape.

Art  45 Drawn out and stagy instead of poetic and accessible, Minnelli’s dialogue is based on Irving Stone’s novel, Lust for Life (1956). Kirk Douglas’s passionate performance and physical resemblance to Van Gogh enjoyed great acclaim at the time. Yet Bazin writes that he prefers the more elliptical acting of Anthony Quinn in the role of Gauguin. In contrast to Minnelli, Resnais keeps to a minimum all references to Van Gogh’s contemporaries, such as Matisse and Toulouse-​Lautrec. The Hollywood director, however, details the breakup between Van Gogh and Gauguin to further heighten the tempestuous atmosphere of his biopic. Resnais’s film is concentrated on the painter’s works. The voice-​over narration, written by art historians Gaston Diehl and Robert Hessens and read by the actor Claude Dauphin, makes no mention of the painter’s religious training and family background, apart from including a still life in close-​up of Van Gogh’s father’s open Bible. While we see portraits of some neighbors and friends, no anecdotal information accompanies them. In fact, Resnais never discusses the artist’s relations with women, his visits to a brothel, his rejection by his cousin Kee, and his indulgence in absinthe. All information about financial hardship, art dealers, and sales, is omitted. In stark contrast, Minnelli’s Lust for Life wallows in all this background detail, even seeking to animate each famous painting through a correspondingly accurate filmic sequence. The worst resultant mistake—​which Bazin curiously fails to comment on!—​occurs when Minnelli’s camera enters a rustic kitchen and finds Van Gogh’s potato eaters engaged in their meager meal. Perhaps because Bazin saw the film only once, the critic fails to note that a couple of the peasants even smile in the direction of the camera. The quasi-​sacred concentration and severe atmosphere of this memorable painting is entirely lost and, along with them, the somberness of Van Gogh’s palette of dark and smoky browns for skin tones, clothing, and potatoes. The strength of Resnais’s film rests in its geography of anonymous public roads, fields, and streets. Within this landscape Van Gogh’s farmers and weavers acquire an anthropological valence; in connection with each painting, the voice-​over commentary discusses how the work is done, how much effort it requires, which tools or technologies are used. Resnais’s emphasis on thresholds such as windows and doors turns the screen into a thinking mind. In effect, the ambition of Resnais’s film is not to show the artist’s works as self-​contained objects, but rather to articulate them as thoughts or actions or events unfolding in time. For example, Resnais’s camera follows an old woman entering a house, beginning by showing her

46  André Bazin’s Film Theory back to us in medium shot and then revealing her face in a close-​up frontal shot. Bazin is quick to remind his readers that this reverse angle framing is impossible in painting, but it works beautifully in film. To prepare for his film, Minnelli travels to the actual locations of Van Gogh’s life in Northern Europe and Southern France. Back at MGM, however, the theatrical blocking and screen directions of actors make the reconstructions of these locales appear stagy rather than authentic. While the film follows the vicissitudes of Van Gogh’s tormented life in Provence, the French villagers around him are hardly believable. Their daily lives unfold between the two extremes of picnicking in the shade or quarreling over rent. Again Bazin generously pays no attention to the poor acting quality of these minor figures. In Resnais’s documentary, with another example of subtle montage, two separate paintings are intercut in four shots to produce an intensity of place that rivals shooting on location. About Resnais’s use of the little-​known Interior of a Restaurant (1887), Bazin explains: It is one of Alain Resnais’s best travelling shots in Van Gogh. The camera moves precisely into the painter’s universe. In the first image, we see the whole painting. In the second, we again approach the door. Then, in the same movement, without transition, we enter into the interior of the café: third image, which is from another painting. The camera continues its advance and stops before a table (fourth image).54

Resnais does not choose drawings and paintings because of their fame or art-​ historical importance. In Interior of a Restaurant, Van Gogh imitates Seurat’s pointillist technique, showing that he is familiar with Impressionism and wants to move beyond it. In Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life, this very same painting appears in Theo’s apartment. It leans against the bottom of an easel while Vincent is working on something else at the top. This canvas, however, has no significant purpose in the narrative beyond its minor role as a mute witness to one more argument between the two brothers. Resnais uses the least known of Van Gogh’s canvases about leisure time to show what it feels like to wander in Paris. This quality of lived experience is achieved subtly when Resnais’s camera pans from Van Gogh’s Moulin de la Galette (1886) to a few Parisians shivering in winter on the Terrace in the Luxembourg Gardens (1886). The cut here is so lightly handled that the viewer has the impression of running into some acquaintances by accident.

Art  47 This effect of pseudo-​contingency, of course, speaks to the tension between frame and screen. For Resnais, View of Paris from Vincent’s Room in the Rue Lepic (1887), where Vincent lives with Theo, acquires the flavor of a documentary photograph. Working like a biologist who does not interfere with the present tense of his living art, Resnais does not worry about the historical accuracy of Van Gogh’s details. Since they all belong to the paintings, he accepts them a priori. Resnais has no need to transpose these details into a posteriori theatrical reconstructions, as Minnelli does. The latter situation inevitably leads to competition with their pictorial origin. Resnais’s deductive approach, progressing from the work to the artist’s inner life, stands against Minnelli’s inductive search that moves from the biography to the paintings. On these two antithetical ways of working Bazin remarks: It’s not a question of explaining why van Gogh was “crazy” and what was the relation necessarily between that insanity and his predilection for yellow, for example, but of making us approach closer to that point of spiritual incandescence where we will sense the transmutation by its radiance.55

Paradoxically, cinema’s external recording of the surfaces painted by Van Gogh can convey the artist’s internal “incandescence.” Like irradiation, incandescence comes from physics—​the history of light and electromagnetism. More specifically, incandescence refers to the white light of a filament inside a light bulb, or to a metal glowing brighter and brighter as its temperature increases. Significantly, this metaphor describes a process of becoming or an event, rather than an object caught in one single unchanging state. Even if Bazin prefers Resnais’s modest, black-​and-​white short film, in the pages of Éducation Nationale he does not hesitate to praise Minnelli for some of his sequences: “In particular I’m thinking of the scenes of Dutch interiors, corresponding to the series of the potato eaters, or the décor of the café in Arles that inspired the haunting nocturnal painting.”56 Once again, the critic is eager to nurture cinema’s evolution and promote this medium’s development in the future. Bazin even praises Minnelli, the son of Sicilian immigrants, for his sensitivity toward the lower classes: Moreover, the film almost succeeds in its first part, which relates . . . the extraordinary spiritual and human experience of the young suffragan [sic] pastor in the mines of the Borinage. Vincente Minnelli knew how to evoke

48  André Bazin’s Film Theory the horrifying poverty of the miners, with a realism that sometimes calls to mind the lesson of early Soviet cinema.57

Despite Bazin’s critical generosity toward Minnelli, the fundamental and unresolved issue in his film remains the objecthood of painting in contrast to cinema’s dynamic flow punctuated by cuts. Minnelli removes Van Gogh’s figures from their pictorial settings and transplants them to an artificial environment that no longer belongs either to the paintings or to an actual existential geography; it is solely a product of Minnelli’s research department. The consequences of this dislocation of historical detail from canvas to screen become especially apparent in regard to the imaginary hat Van Gogh creates for his portrait of père Tanguy, the well-​known owner of an art shop in Paris. Bazin explains: Thus, for example, père Tanguy is shown wearing his comical little round hat, as if that headgear was habitual, whereas it is more likely that Van Gogh invented that amusing accessory. Likewise père Roulin and his son take a walk in the streets as if they had descended from the paintings. It’s making nature resemble art, in the words of [Oscar] Wilde, which is only true a posteriori. Van Gogh transformed our vision of sunflowers, but before he painted them, the sunflowers were not yet “Van Goghs.”58

Vincente Minnelli is so anxious to achieve Art with a capital “A” that he sacrifices the living nature of his art-​historical sources and underuses his personal discoveries out of the real locations for the film. Despite the sexual metaphor and promise of the title, in Lust for Life biography becomes frigid. The director flattens his characters into cartoonish beings who wear supposedly accurate hats. But these imaginary accessories can only pretend to have a link with their original context. Likewise, the actors’ performances are not based on a personal engagement with the topic, but on masquerading inside a tableau vivant that is neither painting nor cinema. This is why the costumes of père Roulin and his son make them look like they have descended to street level from van Gogh’s paintings and the museums to which these canvases belong. As a result, the studio reconstruction of this very same street fails to activate our suspension of disbelief. Thus, when these very same figures—​père Tanguy and père Roulin—​sell Japanese prints in Paris or walk around in Arles, they do not look alive but resemble

Art  49 animated drawings. Instead of symbiosis between frame and screen, here we have the case of a filmmaker mimicking a painter. To be fair, there are also some moments of undeniable miscalculation in Resnais’s documentary. Bazin himself acknowledges that some failures are inevitable as soon as nature turns too much and too soon into art. This happens with the (perhaps excessive) number of close-​up shots of torn sunflowers in Resnais’s film. The image is a stereotypical Van Gogh icon that lingers dangerously on the precipice of the well-​known trope of genius as madness. In Resnais’s film, these sunflowers become either kitsch or baroque, as they twist themselves into evil omens of mental anguish. Here, Resnais seemingly cannot resist indulging in the established cliché of the yellow sunflower evoking the painter’s madness. A Van Gogh without yellows is an experimental gesture, but, unfortunately, a Van Gogh with his sunflowers is simply a postage stamp.

From Painting to Biology Apart from documentaries on painting, Bazin does give thought to other nonfiction films that deal with sculpture. He regularly mentions many of them in his film reviews. Yet, between 1948 and 1956, Bazin writes most frequently about art documentaries based on painting. He chooses this particular medium because it is the most elitist and oppositional to photography and the cinema. Without a doubt, the art documentary most beloved by Bazin is Henri-​Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (1956). This film is the most philosophical of the postwar art documentaries, and the one that uses the lifelike moving images of the cinema to align the history of art most clearly with a natural history of media. In Bazin’s own words, Clouzot’s Mystery of Picasso is a “Bergsonian film.”59 In it, painting does not become theater, but reinvents itself into biology, thus raising the question of where art as talent and nature as creativity respectively begin and end. Moving from mineralogy to biology and anatomy, Bazin’s scientific metaphors suggest that a film can become a moving system of pictorial canvases opening themselves up to the contingencies of a lifelike world of human beings, landscapes, and objects. A technology based on projection and a lit screen surrounded by darkness, cinema, through the art documentary, can also make visible the invisible nuances of human interiority and in so doing interrogate its creative energy. Creativity, however, not only

50  André Bazin’s Film Theory concerns art but also accounts for the inaccessible origin of life on earth and in the universe at large. In his 1952 essay “Le journal d’un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” Bazin compares the aesthetics of filmic literary adaptations to the accomplishments of the postwar art documentary in Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1961), a groundbreaking film based on Georges Bernanos’s eponymous novel (1936). He even ponders whether or not the art documentary fully fits the category of nonfiction, since its object of recording is not the phenomenal world in motion, but a static human artifact.60 So taken is Bazin with the creative depth of Bresson’s encounter with Bernanos’s novel that he rethinks Resnais’s application of cinema to Van Gogh’s work. In 1952, the critic has not yet evaluated Henri-​Georges Clouzot’s art documentary The Mystery of Picasso (1956), but after Diary, he realizes that literary adaptations involve a temporal and introspective dimension whose aesthetics exceed painting’s commitment to space and the senses. The level of thought and abstraction that Bernanos’s novel offers to the cinema pushes cinema’s evolution much further into an exploration of consciousness, spirituality, and death. As a result, Bazin tones down his former enthusiasm for the postwar art documentaries made until then: films of paintings . . . are confined from the outset to the realm of minor aesthetic works. They add something to the paintings, they prolong their existence, they release them from the confines of their frames but they can never pretend to be the paintings themselves.61

Resnais’s art documentary remains a minor masterpiece that cannot change Van Gogh into cinema. The challenge of adaptation has nothing to do with high and low registers of culture, since the pulp fiction of minor books can lead to great films. The true issue is how the space-​time continuum of cinema can turn the painting’s subjectivity in space into a temporal objectification that looks lifelike. Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life demonstrates that this result is very difficult to achieve, because as soon as The Potato Eaters come to life on the screen, their painted textural density loses its poignancy and falls into ephemeral banality. In their encounter with each other, cinema and literature have to address the absence of simultaneity and duration on the written page. By contrast, painting’s ontological alignment with stillness and exteriority does amount to a “congenital limitation.” No wonder Bresson’s approach

Art  51 to Bernanos is neither a faithful translation nor a duplicate based on free inspiration. Bresson’s achievement bypasses all comparison with Bernanos’s novel because it replaces adaptation’s anxiety regarding fidelity with a dialogical, yet original, creation of equal aesthetic value. In defiance of any mathematical logic based on pluses and minuses, suggesting either inferiority or superiority, Bresson’s film is the novel “multiplied by the cinema.” Bazin’s invocation of multiplication is most insightful because it acknowledges the multisensorial status of the cinematic image with sound, music, spoken word, space, and time—​all opening it up toward thought, emotion, and change. Yet, besides appreciating that cinema’s acoustic dimension clashes with painting’s mute eloquence, Bazin also calls attention to how cinematic projection is incompatible with the objecthood of the canvas: “paintings are circumscribed in space and exist outside time.”62 Bazin’s ontological comparison of painting with literature speaks to his understanding of cinema as a narrative medium of space and time. For Bazin, the novel and the cinema are primarily temporal arts that deal with an unfolding world unencumbered by any protective frame. Furthermore, in contrast to painting, where the textural density of objects overwhelms the absent presence of cinematic frames, the projected image of film can be as abstract as the mental image triggered by the word. In his essay on Bresson and Bernanos, written four years before seeing Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso, Bazin begins to think through the paradox of aesthetic biology, a paradox that would negotiate the gap between art and life, painting and science. Significantly, after the release of Clouzot’s film, Bazin decides to add a footnote to his essay on Diary: “At least up to the time of Le Mystère Picasso which, as we shall see, may invalidate this criticism.”63 In this act, he acknowledges a new phase in the evolution of the postwar art documentary. Yet this footnote does not invalidate his overall argument that literature is closer to the cinema than painting is. The mere idea of anyone undertaking an art documentary on a sacred monster like Pablo Picasso is breathtakingly daring. Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso receives a Jury Special Prize award at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. Bazin appreciatively observes that this film approximates the length of a feature film and deserves even more recognition for challenging the traditionally shorter duration of the standard art documentary. Furthermore, Clouzot’s is the best film ever made on the trope of the artist at work in his studio.

52  André Bazin’s Film Theory Clouzot’s shrewd concealing of the artist behind his canvas clashes with Paul Haesaerts’s Visite à Picasso (1950). In Haesaerts’s much less innovative and more anthropocentric film, the painter’s standing figure and his hand at work are fully visible behind the traces of his motions while painting on a glass surface. Haesaerts’s Visite is a film focused exclusively on the artist’s hand; it does not seek to create or reveal anything involving the intersection or aesthetic symbiosis between two distinct media. In contrast to Clouzot’s living symbiosis, Haesaerts simply performs a respectful bow in front of a famous artist, showing Picasso with very little accompanying creativity in his own use of the cinematic medium. Ironically, the glass behind which Picasso is working doubles the lens of the camera. This doubling of glass elements invites the idea that Picasso has become a God-​like creature provided with a double enshrinement. Clouzot’s art documentary unfolds in a suspenseful way, outside any logical cause and effect pattern. A  well-​known director of thrillers, Clouzot injects spectacle and suspense into The Mystery of Picasso. The latter reorients the pictorial canvas from space and surface toward time and depth. Picasso is ideally suited to such transformation because he loves risk, chance, and surprise. Employing a static camera, no voice-​over narration, and a musical score by Georges Auric, Clouzot records the metamorphosis of one sketch into another. A scene of seduction between a man and a woman becomes a bullfight. A Trojan horse precedes a beachscape with the elongated shape of a Cinemascope frame. The playfulness of appearances and disappearances depends on stop-​motion animation technique, which neither impacts the size of the canvas nor alters Picasso’s rhythm of execution. Since the film is shot in black-​and-​white, shapes stand out even more forcefully. Meanwhile the introduction of color sequences signifies that “painting” is, on one hand, a self-​contained object housing a personal creative vision—​hence, an artistic fantasy—​while cinematic frame and pictorial canvas coincide to the fullest on the screen of cinema. In fact, the off-​screen reality of the studio should have color, in principle, but during the shooting it becomes a dark space we can ignore. Without windows, Clouzot’s film studio resembles a camera obscura missing its pinhole opening for contact with the outside world. This dark boxlike room is inaccessible to any distracting or contingent natural light that might produce too many shadows competing with Picasso’s creative activity. Clouzot’s film explains nothing, nor does its director even attempt to do so. The logic of a detective’s investigation never applies to Clouzot’s observation

Art  53 of Picasso’s creative process, whose deepest inspiration remains a mystery. After mobilizing Picasso’s canvases into pictorial duration, Clouzot avoids the structure of the palimpsest. There, different layers accumulate on top of each other without sharing the same origin. Here, Picasso’s work is, instead, a continuous and self-​propelling stream of changing surfaces. It appears as if science can replace art. Scientific films usually rely on time-​lapse cinematography that artificially accelerates or slows down change. Flowers slowly bloom petal by petal, while embryos accelerate their birth process. The effect of this human tampering with time is clearly anti-​illusionistic. But Clouzot avoids all the standard techniques of the scientific film genre. Without altering the spatial integrity of Picasso’s evolving surfaces, Clouzot’s accelerated montage limits itself to the elimination of the interruptions between the end of one of Picasso’s iconographic series and the beginning of the next. This approach faithfully preserves Picasso’s real time of drawing, erasing, transforming, and coloring, while stressing the uncanny self-​confidence of his strokes. The screen blocking our view of Picasso’s hand and absorbing Picasso’s inks recalls the opaque plate of an x-​ ray device in a scientific documentary, in this case representing the artist’s mental life as a series of patterns altering themselves. Each successive canvas stops being a self-​contained object and turns into a complementary stage, preparing the way for the next stage that in turn will retain its own integrity despite its symbiotic or dialectic relationship with its originating stage. Picasso’s painting mutates into a temporal event whose beginnings and endings are equally surprising. As soon as art encounters movement, it begins to look like life or biology. Why is Clouzot’s art documentary a Bergsonian film? For Bergson, creativity is an intuitive and irrational expression that springs from the deepest recesses of the human mind. In The Mystery of Picasso, the painter’s ever-​shifting flow of visual forms stems from his memories, while his imagination becomes freewheeling. By the end of the film, Clouzot appears on screen with Picasso. Thanks to a second camera operated by assistant director Claude Renoir, the filmmaker and the painter become equal participants in this documentary. They decide to compare their respective media’s temporalities and their rhythms of creativity. Picasso will generate one last series of sketches coinciding in duration with the length of the filmstrip left inside Clouzot’s camera. Picasso’s time, the internal time of creativity, becomes visible in competition with a measurable

54  André Bazin’s Film Theory and small quantity of celluloid. Thanks to this arrangement, Clouzot steps back into the days of early cinema when the minutes of shooting have to match the quantity of film in meters. The viewer quickly realizes that Picasso’s manual rhythm in real time easily matches the length of Clouzot’s film, rolling inside his own black box and echoing the studio’s lack of windows. So instead of a competitive suspenseful race antithetical to the idea of aesthetic symbiosis, this experimental dialectic between the painter’s hand and the filmmaker’s machine becomes an egalitarian encounter based on mutual respect. Together Clouzot and Picasso show that something automatic exists inside human creativity, and something sensitive or receptive characterizes the celluloid strip filming away. The collaboration of these two genuine friends is the antithesis of celebrity narcissism and self-​promotion. Picasso and Clouzot live as neighbors in Southern France. In 1955 the painter is based at his villa, La Californie, near Cannes, and Clouzot assembles his team at the Studios de la Victorine in Nice. Their geographical proximity facilitates their cooperating comfortably and compatibly during this ambitious project on painting and cinema. They interrogate their respective ontologies or manners of being and discover a shared ground through a transparent screen-​like canvas. This device makes artistic temporality visible, but hides the human hand. The external temporality of filming matches the internal rhythm of Picasso’s creativity. It is no wonder that Bazin loves Clouzot’s film, since the original purpose of the art documentary is to rehumanize an epoch marked by the Cold War’s divisions. Needless to say, such a rehumanization is in the plural and it underlines cooperation without the loss of an individual personhood. It is indeed rare that the intersection of human self-​expression and film technology’s recording power stimulates such creative energy, and that the participants manage their achievement with such generosity of spirit. While human ingenuity and technological application too frequently spawn dreams of egotistical omnipotence or collective regimentation for the sake of war, destruction, and economic profit, The Mystery of Picasso promotes art and dialogue.

3  Science Bazin’s film theory is filled with scientific metaphors based on his secular education between 1934 and 1937 at the École Normale d’Instituteurs, in La Rochelle (Figure 3.1). There he studied biology, physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Bazin’s biological references stand out for their objective detachment. Biology’s leveling approach is comparable to the indifferent look of the camera lens.1 The point here is to invoke nature’s egalitarian natural selection to preserve a widespread level of vitality.2 Well aware that cinema’s material ghost summons a lifelike appearance, Bazin repeatedly engages the topics of birth, growth, and decay. In responding to its own creative evolution, the cinema, too, goes through bursts of energy and physical fatigue—​as if it were a mortal being.3 Always seeking a balance between logic and the irrational, the anthropomorphic and the mechanical, Bazin loves modern mathematics because it accommodates contingency, and its principles are compatible with motion and change.4 Wary of static shapes in Euclidean geometry, Bazin criticizes André Cayatte’s courtroom dramas for their rigid use of the law. Cayatte’s inflexible definitions of good and evil reduce human beings to robots without any free will.5 By contrast, biology’s creativity and resilience along with modern mathematics’ interest in the infinite and the invisible speak much more eloquently to the critic’s double-​sided fascination with natural creativity and abstract thought.

Darwin and Bergson Darwin’s secular approach combined with Bergson’s self-​healing creativity shape Bazin’s handling of science in his film theory. Bazin’s Darwinism is holistic because nature handles the struggle for survival from zoology to botany, outside the human realm of evil intentions. By contrast, Herbert Spencer’s (1820–​1903) “survival of the fittest”6 is a utilitarian metaphor that applies to human competition and to the box office of the cinema. Bazin cherishes André Bazin’s Film Theory. Angela Dalle Vacche, Oxford University Press (2020) © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190067298.001.0001

56  André Bazin’s Film Theory

Figure 3.1  École Normale d’Instituteurs de La Rochelle. Courtesy Angela Dalle Vacche.

biology as if this discipline alone could lift him out of his chronically poor health. As the name of the discipline itself proclaims, biology studies everything that is alive, from humans to insects to leaves, through its various specializations ranging from physiology to entomology to botany. In contrast to Darwin’s hierarchical and mechanical approach, Bergson’s Creative Evolution pushes Bazin to consider divergent directions, competing possibilities, and complementary processes. Eager to avoid linear accounts with preestablished goals, Bazin’s essay “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” (1951) discloses how a multiplicity of causes is responsible for the medium’s development. For example, technological innovations of all kinds override the allegedly dominant transition from silent to sound film. Rather than simple and singular, Darwinian evolution is complex and plural, in nature as well as in the cinema. Bazin’s list includes panchromatic film stock, development of better microphones, arrival of the crane, disappearance of soft focus and superimpositions, not to mention the elimination of too many close-​ups in favor of shooting characters from

Science  57 the knee up. Oddly enough, in this famous essay, he does not pay attention to the establishment of rear projection. Most of all, Bazin is eager to outline an overarching framework behind all these changes. Taken all together, these innovations strive to reduce the artificiality of the filmic image and pave the way for various kinds of realisms. During the shift from silent to sound, the most important tension is between cinema shaking off its pictorial and theatrical ancestries and embracing, instead, a more photographic kind of illusionism. As a result, the screen begins to acquire an unprecedented introspective and philosophical sensibility. In the first part of “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” Bazin situates a “cinema of the image” in Weimar Germany, Soviet Russia, and in the Hollywood industry of the thirties. Traditionally associated with the silent screen, this cinema of the image overflows into the sound period. It thrives on artificial lighting, elaborate mises-​en-​scène, and special effects. The “cinema of the image” begins to disintegrate, however, thanks to three notable directors who challenge the limitations of studio shooting:  Erich Von Stroheim (1885–​1957), F. W. Murnau (1888–​1931), and Robert Flaherty (1884–​1951). Although they started their careers in the silent period, first in Europe or Canada, and later continued in Hollywood, these directors are the first to deploy lenses sensitive to sun and rain; they know how to work with wind and sand, animals and nonprofessional actors. They develop a cinema that celebrates the dramatic integrity of space and pays attention to the unfolding of events in real time. Instead of accepting the studio’s artificiality, they anticipate a “cinema of reality,” by making fiction and nonfiction works which, to this day, remain baffling for their avant-​garde experimentalism and creative defiance. Bazin’s narrative concerning the tension between a “cinema of the image” and a “cinema of reality” does not end here. The more Bazin’s examples become increasingly distant from the silent period, the more the critic reminds his readers that sound operates in a referential manner by invoking that which is off-​screen. The second part of Bazin’s essay is based on a new approach to the image, which is now more and more temporal with an increasingly mobile framing. This is the age of Jean Renoir’s use of depth of field and Orson Welles’s deep focus. In the wake of Von Stroheim, Flaherty, and Murnau, Renoir and Welles challenge again the distinction between a “cinema of the image” and a “cinema of reality.” Yet they do so by interrogating the relationship between spectator and screen. Equally fascinated with theatrical space and literary introspection, but not interested in the

58  André Bazin’s Film Theory persuasive bent of Soviet montage and analytical Hollywood editing, Renoir and Welles experiment with reframing and with deep focus. By relying on mobile frames and by charging their mises-​en-​scène with intentionally still cameras, they invite spectators to reflect on the irrational and the ambiguities in human relations. Eventually, Bazin’s cinema of reality prevails over a cinema of image, thanks to the postwar phenomenon of Italian neorealism. At this point, Bazin’s essay calls attention to how the choice of an urgently topical subject for a new film may single-​handedly replace a traditional script. With neorealism, the craftsmanship of writing a good scenario is replaced by the ability to live in the present and to turn the physical landscape or a social situation into an eloquent character. Thus, the choice of subject matter acquires a new level of importance, and, in order to tell stories in the present tense, both professional and nonprofessional performers are cast. Cinema’s evolution is not only due to a changing technological and historical context but also is based on realist aesthetic principles ontogenetically linked to photography. Relevant to science, besides Darwinism, there is also an anti-​Platonic Bazin to be considered. Darwin’s discoveries, discussed in his On the Origin of Species (1859), refute numerous Platonic typologies based on invariance. Most importantly, a static Euclidean geometry cannot fit into Darwin’s, Bergson’s, or Bazin’s systems. To begin with, according to Euclid, all triangles have the same features. By contrast, Darwin rejects this kind of typological thinking based on uniform elements. Such a modular approach is not compatible with groups of diverse living organisms, including the human species. In fact, humans and animals belong to the same genus of mammals, as far as biological reproduction is concerned. Within each genus, different groups become species. Each one of these species, in turn, consists of uniquely different individuals sharing a basic set of defining features, while holding on to their unrepeatable individuality. Bazin’s dislike of Euclidean geometry is evident in his “Ontology” essay, where he associates perspective with a timeless geometric ordering. On the contrary, Darwin’s axiom of uniqueness for anything alive resonates in Bazin’s film theory. Each moment is different from every other moment within the flow of time, and at the level of the single photographic negative. Even if they are born in the same place and at the same time, no two instances within the same species can ever be absolutely identical to one another, the way two lifeless equilateral triangles are within a Platonic worldview.

Science  59 Although Bazin associates classical Hollywood cinema with Platonic Idealism due to its industrial and formulaic approach, he never says that all kinds of cinematic representations are always and only Platonic. The illusionism of the cinema is not always idealistic. To be sure, in “The Myth of Total Cinema” (1946)—​an essay on the origins of this medium and a statement against technological determinism—​the critic situates only cinema’s early inventors in the so-​called platonic heavens7 of their fixed obsessions. The key issue behind Bazin’s negative metaphor of “platonic heavens” is that he refuses to glorify technology for itself. Even though many pioneers in optics came up with crazy experiments, the cinema was always a human dream before it became a machine. At the turn of the twentieth century, a proliferation of dead-​end inventions attests to an ageless myth of total cinema. This myth boils down to the archetypal dream of representing life in motion, with sound and color. Yet what is the relationship between “The Myth of Total Cinema” (1946) and “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” (1951)? The first essay proposes a circular model, where the dream of cinema purifies itself into an illusionist transparency, or a neorealism so fluid and spontaneous that it escalates into “the end” of cinema. This gradual shedding of artificial details and conventions, however, implies that the medium has already evolved through the various technological ameliorations discussed in the second essay, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.” To be sure, the term “evolution” does not tell the whole story, since cinema’s evolutionary history depends on some degree of ontogenetic circularity as well. In Bazin’s 1950s, for example, the medium’s latest development is 3-​D, or cinema in relief. However, 3-​D points back to a much earlier phase marked by stereoscopy. At the very beginning, the cinematograph’s moving image was based on “attractions,”8 or one-​shot films exploiting not only motion but also aggression, namely the breaking of the fourth wall. Intertwined with cinema’s evolutionary trajectory, Bazin’s circular model of technological history comes to fruition, when 3-​D in the fifties swings in two opposite directions: on one hand, the increased details of an image in depth are supposed to be a technological amelioration and an advance in realism; on the other, the hurling out of objects and gestures against the spectators returns the medium to its earliest days, when stereoscopy was popular. In “The Myth of Total Cinema,” however, the effacement of cinematic technology into “the end” of cinema, or “pure” cinema, is more important than the accumulation of special effects or technological change. Even though he

60  André Bazin’s Film Theory pays close attention to technical innovations, for Bazin the person behind the camera and the world in front of it count much more than mechanical virtuosity displaying itself for its own sake. Bazin gives priority to the filmmaker’s moral stance in approaching the visible world, while recognizing that the visible world is unstable and often illegible, except for some epiphanies made possible by the medium’s objectifying power. The more the cinema refrains from being invasive, the more it can tell stories by allowing what is already there in the world and in front of the camera to speak autonomously as much as possible. Darwin argues that the Bible’s narrative of divine creation is a mythological fiction in conflict with his new science of evolutionary biology linking man to animal. As a dissident Catholic, Bazin fully embraces Darwin’s secularism by replacing the concept of the “human soul” with cinema’s intellectual and emotional potential to generate a symbiotic spark, to electrify relations between Self and Other. In contrast to static binaries, Self and Other exist in a constant state of flux. Darwin’s emergent and empirical gradualism accepts the universality of contingency as much as Bazin’s film theory does, through his notion of grace or providence. To be sure, Bazin felt that contingency was intrinsic to the cinema due to this medium’s unavoidable dependency on the physical world that it records. In fact, in comparison to the other arts, filmmaking is the most difficult and ephemeral of media, as far as delivering aesthetic results: “the result [is] a thousand times more risky in cinema than in painting or literature.”9 In contrast to Darwin’s teleological approach, Bergson argued that there was never any goal-​oriented plan in nature, leading to man’s superior development. Élan vital is a blind, secular, and erratic energy that ignores linearity, intention, design, and anthropocentrism. Thus, humankind is only one of many possible outcomes produced by an accumulation of vitality inside multiple and competing systems. Although the impact of filmic movement on the audience can be comparable to the energizing effect of élan vital, Bergson disliked early cinema, whose moving images he associated with the compartmentalizing logic of intellectual operations. During the early stages of Bergson’s career, cinema is still so primitive that he cannot foresee its accelerated evolution during the twentieth century. A scientific medium limited to motion studies, early cinema thrives on the illusory motion harnessed out of separate and still frames. Later on, when cinema becomes an art form with poetic qualities, Bergson’s “stream of consciousness” finds in this medium one of its best allies. Through camera

Science  61 movement and editing, cinema can represent the overlap of feelings and thoughts. Bergson, the philosopher of intuition and vitality, rails against the excesses of mechanization. Considering the intersection of the history of philosophy with the history of vision retrospectively, Bergson’s death in 1941 takes place exactly when Italian neorealism emerges at the end of World War II, introducing a new kind of intuitive and introspective sensibility. Bazin makes much of Bergson’s placement of free will in the realms of temporality, introspection, and ethics. Without free will and agency, the self-​ consciousness of adulthood cannot grow. By the same token, free will can enable as well as impede moral decisions. Most importantly, Bazin argues that humans carry inside themselves a visceral memory of their own evolution. In discussing The Silent World (Le monde du silence), a 1956 marine documentary by Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle, Bazin observes that the earliest “aquatic supermen” or underwater pioneers might have sensed within themselves “a secret, profound, age-​old collusion” with the sea creatures floating around.10 Inasmuch as the myth of Icarus immortalized man’s dream to fly, for Bazin, the airplane is a utilitarian accomplishment. Thus, this machine is not so interesting due to its arrogance in making humans believe they are birdlike. Bazin does not celebrate the human association with the sky; this is too close to the “platonic heavens”11 of supernatural transcendence and egotistical inventors. For him, the ultimate moving image of “total” cinema does not belong to the stratosphere, but to 3-​D immersion in the water. It is as if this transition from air to water could enable cinema to shift from total to pure. Icarus floats better under water, where gravity does not weigh one down, while no massive combustion is necessary.

Evocative Affinities Famous among his friends and colleagues for his love of animals, Bazin is sensitive to how we unknowingly preserve ancient traces in the trails of our own species’ development. These quasi-​mythical or involuntary memories are comparable to the imaginative bonds that the critic describes in his review of The Silent World.12 After commenting on the ocean’s creativity, Bazin observes, “the beauty of these images draws on a magnetism that polarizes our consciousness as a whole.” In comparison to this living framework, “we are only a grain of sand left behind with a few others on the ocean’s beach.”13

62  André Bazin’s Film Theory This comparison between human life and a “grain of sand” indicates that Bazin takes all stages of biology and geology most seriously, even when they are as infinitesimal and ephemeral as mineral dust. Instead of relying on affinities between humans and marine creatures as Bazin does, Bergson’s antiteleological sensibility stems from a little-​known evolutionary stage shared by humans and insects. At first, these two species do not yet exist separately as such, and there are only arthropods living on the earth. This temporary overlap of humans and insects into the eventually extinct arthropods resurfaces in Bazin’s essay “Entomology of the Pin-​Up Girl” (1946): “Physically, this American Venus is a tall, vigorous girl whose long, streamlined body splendidly represents a tall race.”14 Bazin’s entomological title does recall Bergson’s merging of the insect world and the human population through the uncanny arthropods. By moving beyond this temporary overlap of the human with the insect, one may even wonder what these two living species continue to share today. The answer is that insects and humans are still the two most diversified “populations” on the surface of the earth. Without a doubt, this quantitative fact is most humbling. It suggests that, at some basic level, we too muddle through life in a fashion comparable to an ant’s blind determination. Whereas we humans are at least capable of free will, and of self-​destruction, only pattern and labor are allowed in an ant colony. There, each little insect carries out the same mundane tasks over and over again, mindlessly, in view of its colony’s collective survival. The arthropod species is characterized by a sign language and a social life, as we are in our human society. As a result of evolution, the arthropod branch did split into two different directions, with the vertebrate side developing a much more sophisticated nervous system.15 By activating a major leap beyond the insect level, this nervous system leads from the arthropod phase to human development later on. Thus, the whimsical idea behind Bazin’s “Entomology of the Pin-​Up Girl” is that, besides the lineage from ape to man, there is something insect-​like that still makes itself felt in the narrow waist, generous breasts, and long legs of this American icon. From the titles of some of his essays, such as “The New American Style: Is the Cinema an Adult?” (1946),16 one can infer that developments in film language require an anthropomorphic vocabulary. In clear contrast with self-​absorbed anthropocentric attitudes, anthropomorphism is the only empathetic way we have to relate to animals, plants, objects, and machines. While anti-​anthropocentrism cultivates connections with what is outside our control, anthropomorphism summons the magic of a long-​lost relationship with

Science  63 Otherness. Under the magnifying lens of the microscope—​one of cinema’s technological ancestors together with the telescope—​minuscule microbes, for example, steal the show. In reviewing a medical film, Bazin notes with amusement that microbes behave like vedettes, or female starlets parading themselves at the Cannes Film Festival.17 By the same token, in his review of The Silent World, Bazin chooses the ocean’s naturally weightless underwater life over the artificially gravity-​free space of aviation. Thanks to postwar innovations in scuba diving, not only can a human being swim like a fish but also this sport offers to its practitioners an added bonus. The underwater explorer can find more freedom and independence at the bottom of the ocean in comparison to a passenger inside a noisy airplane: Both the fish and the bird symbolize a liberation from terrestrial chains, but traditionally . . . man’s dream of freedom has expressed itself through the dry, sun-​filled sky. . . . In the end, science, stronger than our human imagination, has revealed to humankind its affinities with fish, because the ancient myth of flying has been fulfilled by scuba-​diving. . . . By moving well beyond the dangers of diving, man has become Neptune, the master and inhabitant of water where he is capable of flying with his arms alone.18

Bazin’s idea of man and fish interconnecting within a magnetic field seems to be preferable to the ancient dream of flying like a bird. Together, man and fish demonstrate how, before becoming birdlike with the airplane, “man was a marine animal, who still carries the inner memory of the sea.”19 One way of explaining Bazin’s preference for the depths of the sea over the “dry sun-​filled sky,” might have something to do with his anti-​Platonism, since the sun’s blinding light plays such a major role in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Whereas an airplane is a sort of flying car for humans only, the screen transports us into a parallel universe, but it does so by including a multitude of other travelers. It sets the human species next to animals, plants, minerals, objects, and landscapes. As such, the gravity-​free screen resembles much more easily a weightless universe understood in marine terms. Furthermore, through his entomological affinities between human beings and insects, Bazin’s egalitarian outreach never degenerates into a sensualist pantheism or into an animist spiritualism. Bazin’s anthropomorphic connections, however, fully recognize the price paid for our evolutionary journey from brute matter to reflective

64  André Bazin’s Film Theory consciousness. Our own self-​consciousness and capacity for moral judgment, in fact, require a certain kind of loneliness in comparison to animals, who can rely only on instinct and space; they do not know time, and are not self-​aware. Much more easily than the fine arts, cinema helps us with our modern predicament of being alone in a crowd, by becoming the mass medium of community and anonymity. In oscillating among the physics and chemistry of nature, the sociology of art, the anthropology of culture, and the automatisms of technology, the cinema, too, recapitulates an evolutionary cycle of its own. Through its lifelike illusions, it goes from machine to organism to mind to parallel world. In contrast to scientists, for whom precision is more important than life, Bazin always celebrates the living sciences over the abstract ones. As such, biology wins out over geometry.

Bergson, Einstein, Heisenberg Due to his passion for biology, Bazin has little use for the static tendencies of ancient mathematics based on Euclidean geometry in a timeless space. Bazin upholds a Bergsonian preference for the motion-​filled temporality of modern mathematics, open to contingency and sensitive to energy. In Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson writes: We believe that if biology could ever get as close to its object as mathematics does to its own, it would become, to the physics and chemistry of organized bodies, what the mathematics of the moderns have proved to be in relation to ancient geometry. The wholly superficial displacement of masses and molecules studied in physics and chemistry would become, in relation to that inner vital movement (which is transformation and not translation), what the position of the moving object is to the movement of that object in space.20

Most importantly, Bergson compares biology’s openness to contingencies with calculus’s handling of average motion in relation to competing trajectories and shifts in point of view. Bazin extends Bergson’s bridging of the gap between biology and calculus to cinema as a spatiotemporal continuum. Bergson’s turn-​ of-​ the-​ century work precedes the popularization of quantum physics in the twenties and thirties, about which this film theorist

Science  65 is deeply aware due to his scientific training in La Rochelle. Philosopher of science Andrew C. Papanicolaou points out that Bergson’s matter should be viewed as comprised of “modifications, perturbations, changes of tension or of energy, and nothing else.” In such a world . . . energies are pulsational (quantized), entries cease to be simply located (and gain wave characteristics) and indetermination becomes a fundamental feature of micro-​events. (Bergson in fact urged physical scientists to look for measurable indetermination in physical nature.) It is thus, as physicist Louis de Broglie pointed out, no exaggeration to hold that in Bergson we find Heisenberg before Heisenberg, Bohr before Bohr.21

Bazin’s interest in quantum physics avoids the limitations of measuring and controlling. According to Werner Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy, mathematics becomes fuzzy because, at the subatomic level, randomness and flux—​namely the perpetual motion of élan vital—​prevail over exact measurements. Heisenberg states that certain kinds of knowledge—​for example, a particle’s position and its velocity—​cannot be calculated simultaneously. The more precisely one property is measured, the blurrier and more uncertain the other becomes. Wave and particle do coexist, yet, despite their consubstantial status, they are not mutually exclusive. This theme of indeterminacy reappears in Bazin’s argument that reality is opaque, intricate, and amorphous. Heisenberg belongs to the so-​called Danish School of Quantum Physics, whose most serious opponent is Albert Einstein. An advocate of mathematical time, Einstein deeply disagrees with Bergson’s defense of psychological time in Duration and Simultaneity (1922). The mathematical arguments of the philosopher of élan vital do not persuade the brilliant physicist. Einstein repeatedly points out how weird quantum physics really is. The problem he sees is not just with the duality of wave and particle but also with the paradox of their unpredictable locations in space being simultaneous with their inevitable entanglements. Einstein concludes that no reasonable definition of reality can permit such a messy situation. More work needs to be done in science to bypass this odd effect of consubstantiality because, he declares, “God does not play with dice.”22 Einstein believes that the Danish School’s upholding of randomness is only transitional. There must be, he proposes, a deeper theory that looks beyond the ambiguous appearances of the “quantum veil.” Reality, he argues,

66  André Bazin’s Film Theory is subject to precise mathematical measurements because the space-​time continuum has its own degree of determinacy and independence, in contrast to phenomenological events. The dispute between Bergson and Einstein applies also to Bazin, to the extent that, just like Bergson, Bazin is more interested in human subjectivity, chance, and the small earth than in the objective and mathematical laws of the galaxy at large.23 Keen on astronomy, Einstein strives to articulate all his research into a unified field theory that is still relevant today. Within an overall metaphorical use of mathematics to elucidate the relationship between movement and reality in life and in the cinema, Bazin’s prose displays a self-​consciously negative view of pluses and minuses in arithmetic. By contrast, he cherishes multiplication, which he uses to praise Robert Bresson’s literary adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951): “In no sense is the film ‘comparable’ to the novel or ‘worthy’ of it. It is a new aesthetic creation, the novel so to speak multiplied by the cinema.”24 One can only wonder whether Bazin’s enthusiasm for multiplication derives from its capacity to amplify and distribute resources, in contrast to selfish accumulation lurking behind the use of pluses and minuses. One can begin to see here how Bazin’s enthusiasm for multiplication radically challenges the reformist liberal tradition within which he is erroneously situated by those who consider him to be a social democrat at best. His ethos is peacefully revolutionary. After all, the logic of liberal capitalism is intertwined with the assembly line of Taylorism, which Bergson condemns repeatedly throughout his works. Such a compartmentalization of time reduces humans to unfeeling machines without any free will. The clocklike efficiency of industrial labor is, of course, a negative trope in Bergson’s philosophy.25 In Time and Free Will (1889), Bergson promotes an introspective temporality in opposition to measurable time. For Bazin, the spiritual “reality” that counts is always temporal and subjective because it derives from the dialectic of Self and Otherness. Besides his references to arithmetic, Bazin frequently brings up algebra in his essays. Generally speaking, algebra’s ambition is to operate outside human subjectivity, the slippages of language, and the dilemmas of ethics in order to turn equations into self-​contained, quantifiable arrangements. The danger of this approach is the total rationalization of life to such an extreme that life’s most lyrical insights become reduced to a streamlined formula. The numerical values accompanying algebra’s alphabetical symbols can change,

Science  67 but the abstract truth of their spatial arrangement must remain quantitative, invariable, and Platonic.

Geometry and the Snowflake The goal of Euclidean mathematics is a pure objectivity of stable results, which corresponds to the Platonic solids of geometry. Without a doubt, cinema can be used in an idealist manner, as happens in many escapist Hollywood films. There, realism thrives on precise calculation of detail, as if storytelling were a theorem carried through climax, denouement, and resolution, according to an unflappable formula that clicks away like a Swiss clock. Yet before dealing any further with Hollywood cinema’s capacity for idealization, something must be said about the relationship between Plato and ancient mathematics. Fascinated with convex polyhedrons with four, six, eight, twelve, and twenty faces,26 Plato felt that these three-​dimensional forms embody the mystical qualities of the golden section, or Phi. As an advocate of Euclidean geometry, Plato argued that these interchangeable solids can unlock the secrets of the whole cosmos. The golden section is an irrational, finite number that is occasionally found in the morphology of animals, flowers, and the nautilus shell. All of these are rare cases of automatic, natural creativity. Outside any contingency, Plato’s five Euclidean solids do rely on the golden section. Thus, he considers them to be the best intermediaries between the perceivable and finite objects of the material world and his ideal forms. Bazin’s anti-​Platonic rejection of Euclidean geometry is evidenced in the critic’s discussion of the courtroom films of André Cayatte: People and their behavior are the product of a quadrilateral of forces whose longer side is the time period, the society, and the environment, plus the historical circumstances, and whose shorter side is the kind of family upbringing they have had. [ . . . ] reality becomes an intelligible organization without mystery, set in motion by the spring of logic and given a regular rhythm by the pendulum swinging back and forth between the pros and the cons of the argument in question.27

Thus described, Cayatte’s method is an extreme version of Cartesian rationalism. But Bazin’s outreach toward Otherness is more important than the

68  André Bazin’s Film Theory cold logic of geometry. The basis for this symbiotic choice is, once again, Bergson’s élan vital, namely a current of living energy in the world. Without the unknown and the irrational, there can be no poetry, and without poetry, imagination, and trust, there cannot be any love among human beings. Bazin writes: What distinguishes reality from abstraction, the believable character from a shallow psychological equation, is the portion of mystery . . . that resists any attempt at analysis. Abstraction is legitimate in films only in the narrative modes that designate it as such. . . . André Cayatte gives us a judicial universe that is mechanical and peopled with automatons. We now await the revolt of the robots.28

In contrast to Cayatte’s geometrical theorems, Bazin’s anti-​anthropocentrism views the human experience as only one element within a much larger biological history. Within this centrifugal framework Bazin’s passion for meteorology emerges from his comparison of a snowflake to photography’s natural “miracle.”29 Individual snowflakes amount to unique geometric patterns. They are meteorological wonders, for each one articulates a different version of the golden section. By contrast, Plato’s five geometric solids are logically interrelated, and each one of them manifests the same ratio of Phi. Thus, their three-​dimensional cross sections are interchangeable from one solid to another. On the contrary, by freezing into one moment in time, every single snowflake is unique, born as it is out of an uncontrollable process of crystallization. The snowflake’s form derives from how the wind makes each crystal congeal differently. Given that each moment in time is different from every other moment, Bazin uses the analogy of the snowflake to call attention to the fact that every photographic negative, before its positive serialization, is different from every other. Architectural theorist Stanford Kwinter explains the connection between the physics of the event and the infinite morphology of snowflakes: Each [snowflake] is different because the crystal maintains its sensitivity both to time and its complex milieu. Its morphogenetic principle is active and always incomplete  .  .  . the snowflake interacts with other processes across both space and time: [in contrast to an ice-​cube, a system operating in an unreal time], [the snowflake] belongs to a dynamical fluvial world.30

Science  69 Nothing in nature can be more ephemeral than a snowflake. It belongs to a natural history of little things, through which Bazin acknowledges the humble yet cosmological origin of the cinema at the level of photography.

Mathematics and the Policier In his essay “Du réalisme dans les films policiers” (1955) Bazin points out that mathematical logic and human weaknesses rarely coincide.31 The French term policier applies to films dealing with crime, with or without police investigation. This genre specializes in the dangers of the modern city and the power of logic: thinking well is crucial in detection. While thought differentiates a human from an animal, logic can degenerate into sheer abstraction. The more realistic and unpredictable is the mise-​en-​scène, the less mechanical becomes the policier. Whenever the policier reduces itself to a formula solving an investigation, this approach will downplay the dilemmas of life and death. The latter involve multiple explanations in comparison to the univocal solution of a criminal intrigue. This means that great policiers must rise above a puzzle of perfectly interlocking pieces. This genre must tap into something beyond logic by leaving some open question. Only if it does so, can the policier show that the elusive appearances of daily life and human behavior are way more contradictory than just any enigma waiting for resolution. Uninterested in stable or equivalent structures, Bazin celebrates policier films with destabilizing events and changing perceptions. According to Bazin, the very best policiers venture out into the domain of contingencies and epiphanies. This emphasis on realism benefits from a quasi-​documentary mise-​en-​scène with location shooting and the casting of lesser-​known actors or nonprofessional performers. Bazin argues that spectators believe in fictional characters when the genre’s mathematical logic bends itself toward imperfections and surprises. In Bazin’s own words, the Manichean Hollywood crime story falls way too often into the limitations of Platonic, Euclidean geometry: “For a long time now American cinema has been producing the same narratives over and over again, out of its Platonic matrix.”32 The matrix of Hollywood cinema is based on an abstract idea of verisimilitude without enough loose ends. Hollywood’s suspense works on an artificial clock removed from a kind of urban realism featuring dead ends and empty time. Hollywood’s Platonic

70  André Bazin’s Film Theory bent is not only based on too much logic and not enough realism, but also on a mechanical use of psychoanalysis to get rid of any existential nuances. In discussing a Hollywood remake of Fritz Lang’s M, directed by Joseph Losey, Bazin writes: “They haven’t spared us the inevitable introduction of the Oedipus complex. Hollywood decidedly fears the mysterious. There is no poetry without mystery.”33 In his review of The Big Clock (1948), Bazin praises John Farrow’s technical perfectionism. The director, however, fails to deliver an engaging policier. Despite the accuracy of its New York corporate setting, in black and white with ample neighborhood detail, the subject matter never achieves enough depth to make viewers believe that the hero and heroine can overcome American stereotypes. George Stroud (Ray Milland), is not only a victim of corporate life but also a one-​dimensional puppet. In fact, Stroud’s behavior is predicated on the whims of his evil boss, the media guru Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton). Stroud’s troubles start when he decides to spend time in the countryside with his wife (Maureen O’Sullivan). Doomed to work around the clock, Stroud drinks too much and nearly falls for Janoth’s mistress, Pauline York (Rita Johnson). Thus, he misses his appointment with his wife. Upset with himself, the absent-​minded husband drinks even more. Meanwhile Pauline tries to persuade him to blackmail Janoth. After an evening of alcohol and talk, but no adultery, Stroud leaves Pauline’s apartment. The drunk but faithful husband is unaware that, at the moment of his departure, a spying Janoth manages to see only a shadow emerging. Without having recognized Stroud, Janoth marches into Pauline’s apartment; she insults him, and he murders her. After confiding to his lawyer that he is the murderer, Janoth maneuvers to neutralize the police. To this end, the evil boss places his exploited employee, Stroud, in charge of this criminal investigation. By pretending to perform with clockwork efficiency, Stroud must seem to be working as hard as he can to identify the “real” murderer. At the same time, this married man cannot reveal that he was in Pauline’s apartment. Thanks to his wife’s detection of crucial clues, Stroud concludes that Janoth’s lawyer is the murderer of Pauline. This wrongful charge, however, pushes the lawyer to denounce his own boss. This indictment precipitates a crisis that makes Janoth fall down an empty elevator shaft, right below his big and all-​seeing clock. Bazin observes that not one single image or detail goes to waste in The Big Clock. Yet the film does not take its characters seriously enough. Consequently this story does not explore moral questions that are sufficiently interesting to

Science  71 compel the viewer to ponder issues and take the characters more seriously. This example of a classical American policier proves that a director’s technical competence alone is not sufficient to elicit a thoughtful involvement from the audience. Despite the talent of the actors, the characters are too thin to emerge as credible human beings in an otherwise well-​crafted narrative. When asked by his lawyer why he committed a murder, Janoth himself says he does not even know. Bazin compares Hollywood to a perfect clock in order to call attention to this film’s robotic superficiality: “A mechanism well put together, but . . . this invisible and silent clockwork mechanism that implacably moves the story forward becomes meaningful only to the extent that it demonstrates what one can do better in this genre.”34 In short, the critic admires the film’s perfect design, evident in the clever logic of the criminal intrigue. With its stereotypical characters, however, the actual unwinding of the detection plot becomes too predictable. By telling stories with ordinary weaknesses, the French policier, however, differentiates itself from the stereotypical characters of the American detective film. In “The Style Is the Genre” (1954), Bazin situates Clouzot’s Les diaboliques in the classical policier genre. Les diaboliques is classical because “the major interest is the police investigation.” This French director, however, does not stop at the logical solution. In fact he adds an irrational, yet powerless twist at the very end of Les diaboliques. Without a doubt, this film exemplifies one of the most innovative uses of a classical formula. Bazin underlines, “it is as if another film grows out of this one’s resolution.”35 Bazin remarks that Clouzot’s narrative follows a well-​known Aristotelian plot. Les diaboliques must be logical, cruel, and under control in such a way that the genre never becomes immoral or dangerous. Once catharsis happens—​namely the passage from the visceral to the cerebral—​no matter how evil the crimes, Clouzot’s film boils down to a mathematical scheme. The opening title card of Les diaboliques warns the viewer not to give away the mystery’s solution, as if there were an authentic closure at the end. Obligingly, Bazin avoids any plot summary that could compromise the impact of Clouzot’s last-​minute unexpected twist, after its pseudo ending. Bazin does credit the film’s first apparent closure with the cathartic impact of an Aristotelian tragedy, even though its characters are nothing more than “pieces on a chessboard.”36 The narrative’s moral purpose is safe as long as the cruelty of Les diaboliques remains a self-​contained, cold intellectual exercise.

72  André Bazin’s Film Theory Based on a crime story, She Who Is No More, by Pierre Boileau (1906–​ 1989) and Thomas Narcejac (Pierre Ayraud) (1908–​1998),37 the action of Les diaboliques is set in a boarding school on the outskirts of Paris. The school’s director, the sadistic and adulterous Michel (Paul Meurisse), persecutes his own wife, the very prudish Christine (Vera Clouzot), and schemes with his pragmatic mistress, Nicole (Simone Signoret). In secret agreement with Michel, Nicole pretends to befriend Christine. On the surface, the two women bond and eventually decide to kill the abusive Michel. With Christine’s help, Nicole dumps a heavy chest containing Michel’s body at the bottom of the school’s swimming pool. Yet the evil husband is alive and well. Being a great swimmer and an accomplished tennis player, Michel is able to hold his breath under water in the tub where he presumably dies. Furthermore, his physical stamina also enables him to escape the chest, slip out of the school’s swimming pool, and get away in the darkness of the night. Clouzot’s editing and use of objects do persuade the spectators that Nicole and Christine have succeeded in their intent. Eventually, it is Christine who dies, of a heart attack, when she discovers that her husband has only pretended to be dead. In secret collusion with his mistress, Nicole, Michel plays tricks on his wife’s gullible imagination by planting clues of his physical presence in a hotel and in front of a typewriter. This plot development effectively doubles the film’s generic identities. The policier becomes a horror film, exploiting first Michel’s alleged resurrection and, later, Christine’s potential return to life in the guise of a house ghost or a child’s hallucination. In a gesture of recognition to the rationalist infrastructure built into the classical policier, Bazin’s essay ends with exponential mathematics tucked inside an algebraic equation. The critic’s summary of Les diaboliques derives from the police investigation. In discussing the acting style of Charles Vanel, the French actor who plays the film’s Maigret-​like detective38 in an endearing way, Bazin writes: “Maigret [squared] multiplied by -​1 equals the solution to the film’s puzzle.”39 According to Bazin’s impeccable algebra, the intuitive investigative style of Georges Simenon’s down-​to-​earth inspector is raised to the square and set next to Charles Vanel’s Inspector Fichet. The latter’s approach is preceded by a minus sign. This mathematical notation pays tribute to how Clouzot’s film is not only a classical, but also an intensified policier. What does the minus sign mean in this particular case? The detective’s intuition of Christine’s (and the spectator’s) perceptual naïveté is the one and only recognition of shortsightedness in the whole film. The equivalent of a

Science  73 minus sign—​a cognitive impairment, if not a metaphorical blindness—​ propels Clouzot’s generative intrigue from persecution to friendship to betrayal and, finally, to inheritance. The adulterous couple’s foresight, which is the narrative’s driving principle, proves diabolical in its long-​term vision and sadistic stamina. In fact, Michel and Nicole engineer the perfect crime through a fake one. The fake crime fulfills their expectations by provoking the “natural” death of Michel’s wealthy wife. Even the last narrative twist cannot destabilize Bazin’s algebraic equation to describe Clouzot’s classical sense of proportions. According to a young student, with possibly too much imagination, Christine’s ghost haunts the boarding school. The film shifts from a policier to horror. Meanwhile the minus sign also indicates that even though Fichet’s intuition may be visionary, it still does not extend so far as to explain a dead woman’s reappearance. Only one of her beloved students can summon her ghost. After all, Christine is a nurturing teacher of English who trains her class with patient repetitions. By contrast, Nicole is harsh and specializes in mathematics. The problem, here, is that the student’s hallucination has no agency, and his emotional attachment is not enough to prevent cruelty. By privileging contingency and realism, in contrast to Clouzot’s stress on mathematical logic and action, Michelangelo Antonioni’s first important fiction film, Story of a Love Affair (1950) impresses Bazin. This film is an anticlassical, modernist policier that challenges the strong sense of logical, reflective selfhood required by the genre. The director’s creative agenda is to weaken the formula through a heightening of realism. The latter draws its sensorial overload from the stylish worlds of fashion and design. A controlling and wealthy husband asks a detective to investigate the past of his beautiful young wife, Paola (Lucia Bosé). A photograph, ripped in half, shows the young woman next to a man, Guido (Massimo Girotti), who cannot be identified. The two of them have been involved in a secret love triangle and in a passive kind of murder-​at-​distance. Unknowingly, the interference of Paola’s husband brings the former lovers back together. In the guise of a lazy femme fatale used to servants, Paola suggests murder to Guido, who hesitates. Eventually contingency takes over their criminal plan. At the wheel of his race car, driving recklessly during a rainy night, the husband dies by accident on an industrial road. The elegance of Antonioni’s urban setting, the female protagonist’s inaction, and the male lead’s disappearance into the night—​all this suggests that desire, illusion, and absence are what cinema needs to channel irrational

74  André Bazin’s Film Theory belief into a narrative of suspicion, scheming, and waiting. Struck by the originality of this policier-​in-​reverse, Bazin praises the laissez-​faire tone of Antonioni’s approach. Featuring Milan’s sleepy periphery and the quasi-​ metaphysical streets of Giorgio De Chirico’s Ferrara, Story of a Love Affair develops a “stylized realism,”40 of sleek contours and shiny black-​and-​white surfaces without any real substance of their own. Inside a cavernous planetarium, reminiscent of a movie theater, the stars and the planets are nothing but Paola’s and Guido’s mental projections for a parallel universe, an alternative life that will never come into being. Maladroit with both romance and murder, Paola’s and Guido’s affair thrives on her search for everlasting love and on his economic impotence in the aftermath of the war. Their shared crime scene speaks to a failure of will and a triumph of denial. As the spectators of a second murder, which they do not commit, they become the dreamers of an imaginary life they cannot have. Interestingly enough, the very powerful realism that subtends three-​ dimensional sculptures may become a reason for serial killing—​an issue central to André De Toth’s House of Wax (1953), the first 3-​D film released by Warner Brothers in Technicolor. Here the criminal is an artist who runs a wax museum. His beloved objects are life-​size, handmade wax statues representing major historical figures, such as Marie Antoinette and Joan of Arc. So entranced is Jarrod (Vincent Price) with his likeness of Marie Antoinette that he claims an erotic relationship with the very eyes of his French Queen. His profane lust threatens to disrupt his museum’s quasi-​ sacred space of fetishes and relics. Needless to say, Jarrod’s three-​dimensional effigies fit Bazin’s Catholic iconophilia of mummies and death masks for his film theory. In Hollywood cinema, love and art are always in conflict with money and commerce. In keeping with this principle, Jarrod’s authentic wax museum does not yield enough profit. Thus Jarrod’s partner burns it down to collect the insurance. Jarrod survives, disfigured by the flames, but his creative hands are damaged forever. He takes on the false identity of a handicapped art collector moving around in a wheelchair, an equivalent of camera movement. Jarrod’s lethal editing, instead, happens at night when he wears a mask and slashes women with a knife. Secretly, he switches from practicing sculptor to serial killer. Thus, he can open his second and murderous wax museum with real corpses covered in wax. Bazin was no special fan of 3-​D, because he argued that spectators would eventually get tired of wearing the special glasses.41 Yet De Toth’s agenda is to

Science  75 juxtapose the limitations of traditional photography against the advantages of 3-​D. In fact, the incriminating detail can become visible only through 3-​D innovation. Furthermore, House of Wax aligns art with crime and religious faith. This metonymic chain stands in antithesis to logic, intuition, and asking questions. After associating male creativity with quasi-​divine overtones, De Toth allows House of Wax to swing in the direction of female emancipation. The female protagonist, Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk), notices something odd shared by her recently murdered friend Cathy and Jarrod’s second Joan of Arc: a pierced ear. Due to its technologically self-​reflexive agenda, De Toth’s thriller downplays who committed the crime and why. The suspense comes from how the tiniest feature, perceptible only through 3-​D, is enough to unmask the murderer way ahead of a full police investigation. Although the serial killer does admit that he used a posthumous photograph from a newspaper, and the police inspector does state that Jarrod came to his office to look at the photographs of recently murdered women. Well aware of the illusionistic nature of all kinds of realism, Bazin would be the very first to agree that neither 3-​D films nor forensic photographs tell the truth. Even when it is intentionally staged, a photographic trace is the hic et nunc, or the “here and now,” of representation. Through its indexical qualities, it attests that someone or something was there at a certain moment in time. De Toth’s agenda is to celebrate a new technology capable of competing with photography. On the strength of its Platonic Idealism, Hollywood must solve a criminal intrigue according to a narrative logic that intertwines the real with the truth. In competition with any police investigation, an enhanced kind of realism, or cinema in 3-​D, delivers the solution of an enigma that is both artistic and criminal. Cathy’s pierced ear speaks volumes: the actual hole in her pierced ear reveals the whole truth. Les diaboliques deals with the allure of money, Story of a Love Affair explores the longing for erotic fulfillment. Bazin’s tension between logic and documentary-​like realism in the French policier comes up again in his review of Jules Dassin’s Du rififi chez les hommes (1955). Based on a policier by Auguste le Breton, Dassin’s title retains an argot expression from its literary source—​faire le rififi (to start trouble). Dassin’s film is concerned with the ironfisted logic of the criminal world’s closed structure. Instead of raising the policier’s cold logic to ultimate perfection, Rififi explores the mediocre weaknesses of criminals. Nobody is a monster. Rififi is remarkable for its three quasi-​documentary sequences. The first

76  André Bazin’s Film Theory two underline the criminals’ ethnographic research in the neighborhood, and their team work in synch with the rhythms of the street. The third deals with their leader’s moral consciousness. In response to Dassin’s policier, with its elimination of intrigue and investigation, Bazin celebrates the film’s realism: “The documentary-​like precision of the film attenuates the mythology, it increases the genre’s credibility and sustains the useful confusion between reality and its realist substitution.”42 Rififi’s betrayal takes place among accomplices as a result of male vanity with women. To be sure, these criminals become weak with desire, revenge, domesticity, and jealousy. The film’s plot is straightforward. After spending years in jail, Tony le Stéphanois (Jean Servais), an older gangster, puts together a group of professionals for his new project. They neutralize an alarm system and drill a hole into a big safe filled with jewels. While they wait for the jewels to be smuggled abroad, César (Jules Dassin himself, in the role of Perlo Vita) makes the classic mistake of talking too much with a woman. This leak of information triggers a war based on unsettled accounts inside the criminal world. The rivalry explodes between the young owner of a nightclub and the elderly but tough Tony. The young nightclub owner revenges himself by kidnapping the child of one of Stéphanois’s colleagues. Instead of slipping into horror, this policier risks sliding into a melodrama because an innocent child is involved. Bazin, however, latches on to how the documentary edge of Rififi keeps sentimentality at bay. The first quasi-​ documentary sequence seems to emerge from the silent genre of the city film, especially with its detailing of a wealthy neighborhood. In preparation for their heist, the criminals study every shopkeeper’s schedule. The second example of quasi-​documentary filmmaking unfolds without music or dialogue for thirty minutes, during the heist. Bazin observes that this sequence allows Dassin’s policier to flirt with the scientific film. After tampering with the alarm system, the burglars drill a hole in the floor above the room with the safe and its riches. This whole operation achieves “an enormous feeling of truthfulness which explains why the breakthrough burglary sequence looks like a surgical film.”43 Marked only by ambient sound, Bazin concludes, this thirty-​minute sequence is an example of “pure” cinema based on how the original decoupage in the screenplay matches the editing without any last-​minute revisions.44 Dassin’s film strikes some viewers as a useful source for learning how to steal. Always on top of controversies, Bazin remarks “this reenactment of a

Science  77 crime is . . . dated. The technique that was employed had been previously used.”45 Because of its low-​tech, improvisational nature, the loosely filmed ending of Rififi unravels causality into Tony’s stream of consciousness. Why so much enthusiasm from Bazin? Within Stéphanois’s old-​fashioned criminal code, an emotional and ethical dimension gains priority over any logical resolution of the plot. The old criminal goes out of his way to save a kidnapped child. During this process he looks more and more like an old, wounded man barely able to steer his car. In his review, Bazin appreciates Dassin’s film for achieving an exception within its genre: At the end of the film, I love the return of Jean Servais agonizing at the wheel of his car, after so many useless killings, worried only about returning to its mother a live child who unconsciously plays cowboy with a revolver. This sequence could have been conventional and melodramatic, but simplicity of technical means and the sincerity of the feeling make it unsettling.46

Worth mentioning beyond Bazin’s film review, Rififi contains one more hypnotic sequence marked by Alexander Trauner’s simple, but introspective set-​ design. In a nightclub setting, Magali Noël sings Rififi’s theme song. During her performance, the camera frames a white, fully lit screen that looks like the support for a Chinese shadow play, an obvious ancestor of the cinema. Behind this screen, the two black silhouettes of a gangster and his girl slowly move in a dancelike fashion. Thanks to the cartoonlike modesty of Trauner’s background, their moving reliefs become poetic and erotic at the same time.

Miraculous Mathematics Perhaps because of its utopian plot, compatible with Mounier’s Personalist thought, Bazin champions Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan (1951). Well aware of the stylistic influences of René Clair and Charlie Chaplin on De Sica’s ironic handling of social class and the film’s reliance on gags, Bazin finds Miracle in Milan to be courageous and free-​spirited. De Sica’s film exposes human selfishness, as well as capitalist accumulation, without ever falling into the simplistic moralizing dichotomies of rich and poor, typical of much Marxist analysis of the class struggle. The film tells the story of Totò, a young boy who transfigures the geography of the slum in which he lives, by renaming all of the street signs that

78  André Bazin’s Film Theory typically glorify Italian antiquity. To debunk residues of Fascist nationalism in his urban milieu, he playfully appropriates the multiplication tables that children learn in school. In describing Totò’s revitalizing use of multiplication, Bazin writes: “Like an urban planner, Totò names streets and squares 4 × 4 = 16, 9 × 9 = 81, because these cold mathematical symbols for him are more beautiful than mythological names.”47 This is a remarkable example of how arithmetical logic can become the flipside of fantasy. Like De Sica’s Totò, Bazin, too, wants to enliven mathematics and the machine of cinema with a touch of universal poetry, artistic intuition, and neighborly love. Bazin’s enthusiasm for Miracle in Milan suggests that his fascination with childhood stems in large part from how the all-​inclusive, undiscriminating, open perception of children like Totò replicates cinema’s equalizing, nonhuman lens. Miracle in Milan is coauthored by De Sica and Cesare Zavattini, based on Zavattini’s 1943 novel Totò il buono.48 The novel grows out of a three-​ page treatment written in 1940 by the left-​wing Zavattini and the legendary Neapolitan comedian Antonio De Curtis, known as the “Prince of Laughter,” whose stage name is Totò. The date 1940 is significant because the project precedes World War II and antedates neorealism’s official birthdate in 1943, with Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione. The original idea also blooms long before the antagonism between Italian Communists and Catholics during the political elections of 1948. Miracle in Milan’s left-​wing orientation is justifiable. In 1940, despite Fascist censorship, Stalinist Russia is exercising its full influence among artists, university students, intellectuals, and in Italian film circles, through Socialist Realist cinema. The use of fantasy, magic, and special effects in Miracle in Milan is especially suspect from Marxist, populist, and neorealist perspectives alike. Bazin stands out as the critic uniquely capable of appreciating this highly original and courageous film on human imperfections.49 The early title of De Sica’s screenplay refers to an orphan found under a cabbage by an old lady, Lolotta, in a fiction that begins with the intertitle “Once upon a time.” After the death of Lolotta, Totò grows up in an orphanage. As soon as he leaves this institution, Totò surrenders his suitcase to a poor man who, after stealing from him, offers the homeless Totò a place to sleep in his own disheveled shelter. Conceived in opposition to the reliance on studio sets in traditional Hollywood films, the shooting locations of De Sica’s film are actual places near the railway station of Lambrate, in the

Science  79 industrial outskirts of Milan. There, homeless people manage to share a few rays of sunshine during a freezing winter. To be sure, children take their fairy tales very seriously. At a very young age, their cognitive abilities are still developing. Thus they cannot tell the difference between the real and the contrived, or the violent and the comic. Miracle in Milan is a neorealist fairy tale for adults. As such, it aspires toward the genre of the moral fable with a social consciousness. For a while, the working title of the film is The Poor Are in the Way (I Poveri Disturbano). De Sica’s and Zavattini’s primary project is to expose the painfully divisive side of capitalism, but they also show that rich and poor alike can be selfish and unreliable. The allegorical mode cannot prevail because Miracle’s characters all make mistakes, including Totò. Likewise, a dishonest man, among the poor characters, maintains his clumsy humanity without ever turning into an evil monster. Nobody becomes a mythical or superhuman figure. Miracle in Milan is three times more expensive than De Sica’s much more famous and also costly Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di Biciclette, 1948). In addition, fantasy challenges a documentary-​like esthetic. Early on, Lolotta provides a basis for the fantastic tone of the film’s narrative. She places a few miniature trees and houses on milk that has spilled on the floor. Then she tells Totò, who looks down from above, “This is the earth.” This moment explicitly links the fantastic inspiration of the fairy tale with Totò’s visionary trust in the human heart, regardless of social class or individual psychology. Since Lolotta shows the boy the earth from the point of view of the moon, Toto’s rejuvenating perception is lunar or extraterrestrial. During this episode, it coincides with the camera’s eye. This alignment of perspectives emphasizes, once again, the analogy between childhood inexperience and the indifferent, equalizing lens of the camera. At first, the capitalist Mobbi does not care if the homeless occupy a slum area, living out of cardboard boxes and inside empty cement pipes. He and Totò agree that rich and poor are all human because, mathematically speaking, everybody has one nose and five fingers on each hand. However, as soon as oil is discovered in the slum, the greedy and fat Mobbi persuades the police to chase the homeless out of their miserable dwellings. A bloody clash between rich and poor seems to be inevitable. But Totò instructs his friends to “breathe” against the police who are about to assault them with guns and batons. What could be more powerful than a whole crowd breathing out

80  André Bazin’s Film Theory their spiritual energy against adversities? In comparison to a healthy person’s automatic heartbeat, exhaling is a more willful response. This struggle between classes, however, is about to be won by Mobbi and the police. Thanks to a series of special effects, engineered by Hollywood’s Ned Mann, more screen magic prevents this outcome. Totò receives a special dove from Lolotta, who comes from heaven to rescue her child. Full of good intentions, Totò uses this supernatural gift not only to push back the police but also to give his poor friends all the things that they desire: a vacuum cleaner, a regal outfit, a dresser, and a pair of shoes. Some of the homeless, however, take advantage of their new possessions to exploit their fellow neighbors, violating Totò’s ethos of sharing. By looking like transparent ghosts in superimposition,50 two angelic creatures come down from heaven and take Lolotta’s magic dove away from Totò. He lacks sufficient control over the consequences of his magic gifts. The ending of Miracle in Milan is utopian and in line with Catholic social mythology. The homeless are convoyed in locked police vans through the square of Milan’s Duomo, the famous gothic cathedral. Miraculously, all the locked police vans break down. On his magic broomstick, Totò leads the group into the sky of an imaginary afterlife, as the homeless imitate their leader, flying one after another behind Totò. In the screenplay, Zavattini’s original conclusion, however, is different from the film. After traveling around the sky for a while, the poor seek a landing area where they would not disturb anyone. This search proves impossible. As they look down on the earth, all they see are signs stating in big letters “private property.” Here, one can see how Mounier’s dislike of capitalism carries over into Bazin’s approval of this film. Although De Sica’s film receives the Grand Prize at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival, the critical reception is mixed and mostly negative. This critical reaction in the middle of the Cold War is understandable. Despite the director’s visual rhyming of the capitalist Mobbi with the wealthy moguls in Eisenstein’s Strike (1924), Miracle in Milan is banned in the atheist Soviet Union. In the West, left-​wing critics find the film too evangelical, while right-​ wing critics claim that it is a subversive Communist work. Except for the left-​ wing Catholic dissident Bazin, nobody is happy with De Sica’s and Zavattini’s tightrope-​walking act. In Miracle in Milan, the Christian ethos based on universal human fellowship is more important than allegiance to social class or to a political party.

Science  81 Instead of allegorizing economic injustices and proposing a binary model of the class struggle through one-​dimensional characters, the neorealism of Miracle in Milan embraces an irrational belief in a parallel, utopian reality, or Catholic “Paradise.” There people live in a world free of death, social injustices, and class divisions. This happy ending moves the fairy tale beyond moral fable, into the realm of the marvelous. In this little understood film, the realm of the fantastic—​with its oscillation between the impossible and the believable, the explicit fairy tale and the potential social allegory—​ escalates into something hopeful. The imaginary heaven at the end of Miracle, however, strikes a note of contrast with the “platonic heavens” of ambitious inventors in “The Myth of Total Cinema.” One must acknowledge that, whenever he can, Bazin practices a certain critical generosity. In contrast to the theorist and the historian who can fall back on previous models, the film reviewer is a lonely pioneer with only the stars for compass. De Sica’s imaginative interface between the mathematics of capitalism and the fantastic in neorealism is useful for explaining why Bazin constantly pits surprises from the life sciences against the logic of the exact sciences. Keen on equilibrium between reason and faith, he engages the policier to demonstrate the sadistic extremes of rationality. Most remarkable, however, is the connection between phenomenology and calculus that Bazin proposes through neorealism. As the mathematics of modernity, calculus applies to a world intersected by different speeds. In this context, the static logic of Euclidean models must surrender itself to displacement and epiphanies. Applied to cinema, calculus fits changes in line with optical perception and moral consciousness. Likewise, phenomenology, the philosophy of subjective encounters and emerging insights, exchanges exteriority with interiority. By so doing, it opposes stable as well as binary ideological readings.

Neorealism and Calculus Neither a style, nor a genre, nor a formula, the “Italian School of the Liberation”—​or neorealist cinema—​is a “revolutionary humanism,”51 thanks to its anti-​anthropocentric ethos. Possibly, Bazin calls it a “school” to underline the power of its legacy into the future and the ways in which this approach impacts the cinemas of Latin America, Asia, and Africa by enabling the representation of marginal or oppressed people.

82  André Bazin’s Film Theory For clarity’s sake, Bazin explains that Italian neorealism is not more realistic than other realisms. On one hand, for this cinematic sensibility, the quantity of reality is never the determining factor. On the other, any realism, including neorealism, requires a loss of reality and engagement of artifice. Given that neorealism is not bound by rules, the choice of subject does matter a great deal. Topic functions qualitatively, since it requires a sincere stance of honest attentiveness. In response to a particular topic, the director needs to care and embrace an intuitive creativity that can function in unstructured situations. This is not to say that topic is everything and that the figure of the director becomes less and less important in neorealist films. On the contrary, such a creative role grows in significance the more it accepts a subordinate position in the face of spontaneous events. The challenge is to proceed as if traditional cinema—​with lights, set design, microphones, and costumes—​no longer matters that much. Temperamentally, Rossellini is a master at seizing small and large opportunities capable of displacing his actors and his spectators. Rossellini believes in using what is there, around him, ranging from people to locations, to ways of living. His talent consists in relating to narrative as a live being gifted with biological rhythms of its own. He is able to engage an objective reality of facts and endow it with the visceral intensity of life and death. Over the years, one of Rossellini’s most controversial statements has been: “Things are, why change them?”52 For the critics of the 1980s, keen as they were on ideological criticism, such a phrase sounded like a reactionary admission of passivity in front of the status quo. Looking retrospectively at this erroneous interpretation, one can now begin to understand that whatever Rossellini finds in his real locations, ranging from local inhabitants to geographical atmospheres, inspires him to take in a whole “aesthetic geology”53 at face value. Neorealist filmmaking depends on a new kind of postwar receptivity. In the wake of this moral climate based on renewal, but also overwhelmed by the war, neorealist characters struggle and search. They are more reactive and exploratory than goal-​oriented and self-​confident. They wish for change, but as victims of traumas and injustices, their ability to act has undergone a breakdown. This rupture, however, is most productive in that it leads to a renewal of perception, social orientation, and moral growth, rather than to habit, paralysis, or resignation. Neorealism’s fluidity strikes a note of contrast with the positivist determinism of nineteenth-​century naturalism based on

Science  83 melodramatic coincidences, accumulation of realistic details, and a fatalistic thesis. Neorealism is tragic, but always centrifugal, so that a call for social justice becomes morally imperative rather than didactic or preachy. As the closest fulfillment of his entire film theory, Bazin associates Italian neorealism with immanence, phenomenology, and ontology: 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. [ . . . ] Thus neorealism is more an ontological position than an aesthetic one.54

Ontological means a way of being otherwise. Deduction, here, underlines the ways in which neorealist cinema asks its audiences to reflect on human delusions. Flashes of illumination and occasions for self-​criticism and altruistic compassion are the true protagonists of neorealism. Italian politicians, like Giulio Andreotti, opposed these films for they denounced chronic social evils. By the same token, dogmatic Marxist critics like Guido Aristarco spoke against Federico Fellini’s introspective turn or against Luchino Visconti’s operatic approach. Had it not been for Bazin’s international advocacy, this phase of Italian cinema would have been discouraged from pursuing its avant-​garde edge. Even during its best years and through its best examples, neorealism is, by definition, unstable and characterized by a delicate chemistry of direct experience and interpretation. To this day, neorealism transports the spectators inside an ontology in search of itself, which asks over and over again what a human is. Furthermore, Bazin’s notion of immanence applies to a cinema that blurs the differences between the fictional and the nonfictional, the exterior and the interior. During such a chaotic historical phase, abstract binaries are always a temptation. The unstable syntheses that neorealist directors choose to observe, through the messy fabric of daily life, oppose an either-​or mentality. Since neorealism escapes all systematic definitions, Bazin admits that he can only deduce examples of different kinds of neorealisms from different directors, depending on what they have done in each film. No repeatable neorealist recipe exists, so much so that even Rossellini and De Sica are, at first, neorealist directors, even though, later on, they stop being so. And Bazin is the first critic to be highly aware that this kind of cinema is so deeply rooted in a particular historical experience that it is

84  André Bazin’s Film Theory constitutionally doomed to be very short-​lived; it carries the seeds of its own decay inside its historical premise. Bazin never associated the realism of neorealism with a transcendent truth. To be sure, his film theory always privileged subjective perception over objective knowledge in fictional and nonfictional cinema. The prefix neo, in neorealism, implies a historical departure from the clear cause-​and-​ effect relationships of many previous “realisms” (Hollywood realism, Soviet sociorealism, French naturalist melodramas). Neorealism is a new realism where the inner transformation of someone’s way of seeing and feeling is much more important than a self-​contained class consciousness or cultural origin. In neorealism, constant becoming discards stable being, multifaceted ambiguities win over clarity, while the intuitive grasp of lifelike situations prevails over logical analysis. Despite neorealism’s tragic mode, open endings prevent a dogmatic mode. Bazin’s critical acuity thrives on the anti-​anthropocentric bent of neorealism whose quickly sketched narratives sustain themselves by turning the moment into “history in the present tense.” In 1945, it seems that everything is possible. After decades of living with Fascist propaganda and, during the war years, with fear and violence, some areas of Italian society feel they can give birth to a better world. This widespread feeling of self-​willed reinvention temporarily resonates in the streets and in the film studios alike. For a while, filmmakers respond to the here and now of the war through a quasi-​ documentary approach. Even though Bazin writes essays on Giuseppe De Santis, Pietro Germi, Renato Castellani, and Alberto Lattuada, to mention only a few names from that whole generation, the critic’s foremost neorealist directors are Rossellini, with his War Trilogy, and De Sica, with Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D (1952). Precisely because neorealism involves an anti-​anthropocentric attitude, one is free to develop it in different ways. Bazin differentiates between these two directors’ ways of working: Rossellini’s love for his characters envelops them in a desperate awareness of man’s inability to communicate; De Sica’s love, on the contrary, radiates from the people themselves. They are what they are, but lit from within by the tenderness he feels for them. It follows that Rossellini’s direction comes between his material and us, not as an artificial obstacle set up between the two, but as an unbridgeable, ontological distance, a congenital weakness of the human being which expresses itself aesthetically in terms of space,

Science  85 in forms, in the structure of his mise-​en-​scène. [ . . . ] By contrast, De Sica is one of those directors whose sole purpose seems to be to interpret their scenarios faithfully, [ . . . ]. The mise-​en-​scène seems to take shape after the fashion of a natural form in living matter.55

As far as Bazin’s use of scientific metaphors in relation to Rossellini’s War Trilogy, the critic relates the six fragmented stories that make up Paisà to a parallelepiped (a six-​sided polyhedron).56 Paisà’s parallelepiped is stuck onto the surface of the screen. It is as if ready-​made chunks of imaged reality had been intercepted by the camera and traveled through the screen. True, the screen is nothing but a fixed surface with an absolute scale. Yet, with the term “parallelepiped,” the critic underlines the multidimensional density of Rossellini’s “image facts.”57 Instead of perfectly designed, the image is rough. It looks as if the physicality of matter and flesh, the neorealist proliferation of sensorial detail, with sweat and blood, could linger inside the flat play of shadow and light flickering on the screen. The latter, in turn, becomes more and more absorbing. One may think of tortured bodies in Rome: Open City (1945); or one may reflect on the harsh natural light around the buildings razed by bombs in Germany Year Zero (1948). Keen on reaching out, neorealism turns Rossellini’s camera into a quasi-​tactile antenna, dipping into chaos and struggle. Thus, like a ready-​made container, the neorealist image emerges out of crowd scenes and scattered ruins covered in dust and debris. Whereas Rossellini’s films take audiences by surprise with their sketchy narratives, De Sica made a name for himself thanks to his transparent, yet subtly pictorial approach. In regard to this director, who worked closely for several years with the writer Cesare Zavattini (1902–​1989), Bazin argues that the more planning and improvisation converge on each other, the more the “myth” of “total” cinema, with more technology, looks dated and weakens itself in front of its alternative possibility: the “end of cinema.” In the wake of black-​and-​white photojournalism spurred by the social consciousness of the thirties in America and in France, cinematic artifice must hide itself in seemingly spontaneous events. In regard to Bicycle Thieves, Bazin explains: “No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema.”58 In other words, by becoming the exact opposite of “total” cinema with cinemascope and 3-​D in its future, neorealism accomplishes the “end of cinema,” with its unobtrusive present tense.

86  André Bazin’s Film Theory Always predicated on the sincerity of its own directors, neorealist cinema’s “extraordinary feeling of truth”59 takes cinema back full circle to an imaginary denial of its invention. Significantly, this phase of pseudo self-​effacement makes clear why Bazin argues that the technological teleology of “total” cinema was nothing but a “myth.” In fact, neorealism proves that “pure” cinema and artsy expressionism are incompatible. The dream of cinema belongs to the human impulse to record life, and keep it in motion, fully alive with its heart beating inside a static photographic image. By the same token, technological illusionism, focal lengths, cheap film stock, natural lighting, sound done in postproduction, and real locations transform the recorded footage into a lifelike event. Neorealism demonstrates that less is more. Rossellini’s low-​quality film stock captures not only the look of a whole period ravaged by destruction, but also its inner and most hidden pulsations. Life itself is the miracle that his cinema wishes to imitate, even with a minimum of technology due to the scarcity of equipment imposed by the war. Neorealism challenges the mythical status of “total” cinema as a cinema of money and technological power. Neorealism demonstrates that more and more technology by itself does not always lead to a transparent and perfect illusion of reality. A case in point is how Rossellini’s intentionally antidramatic, elliptical filmmaking welcomes lacunae. The key point, here, is that it becomes impossible to tell the difference between reticent images and the loose ends that life itself refuses to bring together. Such serendipitous examples of neorealism approaching reality can take place only when the camera behaves like a participant observer inside a narrative it can only witness, but can never control. Granted that neorealism rarely exists in a pure state and it can combine itself with other aesthetic tendencies,60 Bazin argues that De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves brings about “an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time.”61 Gifted with Neapolitan warmth, De Sica’s “pure” cinema is different from Rossellini’s, which is more concerned with individual loneliness. Rossellini’s cinema thrives on the centrifugal62 spin of its lonely images, asking viewers to come up with their own narrative route of interpretation. Reality does exist and is made of facts. How the director and the spectator link these facts is subjective. The issue is not the truth, but a sincerity of approach that is intellectual as well as emotional. By manipulating scale and framing, Rossellini’s eye-​level shooting technique turns the screen into a

Science  87 factual world of isolation: a half-​naked child cries in the twilight. We guess his parents were peasants and they have been killed by the Germans. As if it were a candle in the darkness, Rossellini’s camera intersects with the child, without adding anything more. Due to their brevity, Rossellini’s quick shots have a tragic, devastating impact. There is no time for explanations or compositions. The crying child hits us with the uniqueness of a one-​time disclosure that will never become an encounter. He is alone and we, too, are alone in front of him. There is no solution. Equally supportive of a different kind of neorealism, Bazin admires De Sica, who continually thrives on movement, thus opening up possibilities of mutual exchange. De Sica’s stories underline the constant horizontal and vertical crossing of spaces: running, walking, moving through a flea market, chasing a thief, climbing a ladder set against a wall, coming down the stairs with a bucket for water. Whereas Rossellini’s crowds are overwhelming and dangerous, in De Sica’s cinema there is a sustained exploration of group situations that range from indifference to support, from help to aggression. De Sica turns quotidian desperation into a perceptual adventure whose tragic outcome is tempered with the possibility of human solidarity, or by the bond between a destitute man and his dog in Umberto D. There is none of this in Rossellini’s Paisà: the Sicilian girl, Carmela, dies alone on the rocks. She has been equally abandoned or misunderstood by her own people, and by the American and the German soldiers. Interestingly, there is no room for tears with either Rossellini or De Sica. Bazin never used the word “ideological” to describe Rossellini’s or De Sica’s documentation of struggle and poverty. Thanks to these two directors’ deep understanding of how every social tragedy is an existential condition, their films avoid piety and sentimentality. This is why their stories remain forever modern and antagonistic to the status quo. Even if the protagonist is a partisan or an unemployed worker, personal and class dilemmas never become melodramas, thanks to these directors’ allegiance to an objectifying point of view. All of their characters are deeply entrenched in the urban environment or in the natural landscape that surrounds them. Yet they never lose their complexity and they never become picturesque figments. Regardless of staged or unstaged contingency, neorealist films are occasions of becoming on the part of ephemeral life forms, energized by a moment in history and vivified by nonprofessional actors working next to trained performers. Such a required “amalgam,” Bazin’s word, from all walks of life is a constant strategy for Rossellini and De Sica alike. Their “osmosis”63

88  André Bazin’s Film Theory of different levels of experience and self-​consciousness sets into relief how fictional roles do not always match physical appearance, while gesture and posture by themselves are often more eloquent than dialogue. By pointing out that the use of nonprofessional actors is not a law of neorealism, Bazin compares the film set to life-​in-​progress or to a traveling bus. Everybody shares the same journey—​which is nothing but the making of a film. This elbow-​to-​elbow situation dictated by public transportation, or by making a film, is precisely what interests Rossellini and De Sica. Bazin captures the secret complementarity of these two directors’ different intuitive methods: De Sica finds his way of seeing through emotions, whereas Rossellini relies on his special ability to seize the moment. As far as the overlap between filmmaking and traveling, Bazin observes: That is why the Italian film makers alone know how to shoot successful scenes in buses, trucks, or trains, namely because these scenes combine to create a special density within the framework of which they know how to portray an action without separating it from its material context and without loss of that uniquely human quality of which it is an integral part. The subtlety and suppleness of movement within these cluttered spaces, the naturalness of the behavior of everyone in the shooting area, make of these scenes supreme bravura moments of the Italian cinema.64

Whenever a group of people participates in the making of a film or the unfolding of a journey, a network of potential relationships inevitably emerges, thus transforming artificial spaces and natural landscapes into a narrative and temporal mise-​en-​scène. In regard to Bicycle Thieves, Bazin observes that “De Sica’s film took a long time to prepare, and everything was as minutely planned as for a studio super-​production, which as a matter of fact, allows for last-​minute improvisations.”65 Briefly, the narrative of Bicycle Thieves:  De Sica’s adult protagonist, Antonio Ricci, played by nonprofessional actor Lamberto Maggiorani, goes through a crisis of knowledge. This inner process is triggered by the theft of his bicycle, which he desperately needs in order to work as a poster hanger all over the streets of Rome. The editing of the film underlines the protagonist’s perceptual limitations in space, and even the repeated misperception of his own son, Bruno (played by the nonprofessional Enzo Stajola). For example, after an argument with his child, the father erroneously thinks that Bruno has drowned in the Tiber.

Science  89 A few shots underline Antonio’s state of panic and spatial disorientation. The father’s agitation looks even more hysterical as soon as the camera shifts from him to pay attention, instead, to the body of a different boy. This method of anti-​anthropocentric disempowerment spells out the character’s impasse—​ and our own—​in front of an unknowable objective reality. In a neorealist film, everything must occur as if it were happening for the very first time, outside of any expectations, including the director’s. Or so it seems, because the opposite is indeed the case. De Sica relies heavily on miming for his direction of actors and is very strict with his nonprofessionals. Admittedly, he chooses nonprofessional performers whose daily lives are similar to his fictional characters’ roles. In this way, De Sica can strike a chord of authenticity. As precise as his miming is, it never becomes dictatorial, but he is always caring with adults as well as children. De Sica predicates his casting on an aspect of physical appearance that seems to disclose something introspective or immanent. The more spontaneous the children’s miming becomes, the more their facial expressions guide the film. In Bicycle Thieves, for example, little Enzo Stajola, with the dark shadows under his naïve eyes, is the perfect choice to tell the story of a child who behaves like an adult. By contrast, Lamberto Maggiorani’s lengthy stride conveys all the impatience of an adult who, from time to time, acts like a child. After all, De Sica becomes famous for his uncanny ability to find the character in the body of a nonprofessional, without ever falling into any simpleminded typecasting based on physiognomy alone. In neorealism, as Bazin sees it, a narrative unfolds in an apparently erratic way, according to one single point of view struggling inside an unreadable world. Without a logical trail of clues to rely on, a neorealist film is usually characterized by a proliferation of sensuous details. Regardless of any relationship to local color, this quasi-​ethnographic turbulence underpins a multifaceted reality that yields no logical answers. In De Sica’s neorealism, the perceptual novelty of formless events becomes so overwhelming that rational cognition gives way to a dreamlike, surreal state. For example, before Antonio decides to steal someone else’s bicycle, he is mentally haunted by a flurry of bicycle riders during a competitive race that passes before his eyes. In this sequence, the difference between subjective perception and visionary hallucination becomes unclear. At such moments, the self oscillates between displacement and receptivity. Neorealism reveals the imperfections, ambiguities, anger, frailty, and duplicity of all human beings, be they thieves or policemen, political activists or unemployed citizens. It

90  André Bazin’s Film Theory shows how their behaviors resist or exceed simpleminded categories such as good and evil, rich or poor. De Sica’s characters are “persons,” namely human beings that no definition, summary, or explanation can fully capture. In Bicycle Thieves, the victim of a theft nearly becomes a thief himself. What is worse, Antonio Ricci happens to do so in front of his own son, who worships his father as an ideal, superhuman creature. While Zavattini and De Sica avoid any institutional or class-​based scapegoat, the end of the film with a crowd of unemployed men walking sadly down the street suggests a life of precariousness and squalor. Yet, by the conclusion of this film, father and son connect through the mutual acceptance of each other’s imperfections. Such a conclusion is not based only on social class, but also on the ability to love and the power to forgive. Most of all, Bazin admires the mix of precision and freewheeling form in De Sica’s film. Let us, for example, examine the critic’s use of the term “integral,” from calculus, so that we might evaluate the relevance of this mathematical metaphor to Bicycle Thieves. In contrast to Platonic algebra, calculus accommodates contingency. To be sure, calculus stands for the modern mathematics of movement, changing values, and displacement. As such, calculus acknowledges a kind of reality that is subjective and in constant flux. This fluctuating world in search of new moral values is quite different from Hollywood’s Manichean oppositions. The predictable struggle of good and evil in American cinema summons the static world to which Zeno’s famous paradox belongs.66 Within this latter framework, the arrow can never reach its target. In contrast to Zeno’s arrow, Bergson and Bazin differentiate themselves by embracing a new and more introspective sensibility based on flow, exchange, surprise, and flux rather than on measurable lines and identical points. As a method of computation open to macroscopic as well as to microscopic changes, calculus offers Bazin the most accurate terminology for commenting on a protagonist in constant motion and blinded by his own anxieties. Although each real location used in the film was carefully chosen, the narrative is intentionally episodic and loosely organized. Bazin writes: 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 Biclette, however, does not depend on the mathematical elements of drama, the action does not exist beforehand as if it were an “essence.” It follows from the preexistence of

Science  91 the narrative, it is the “integral” of reality. De Sica’s supreme achievement, which others have so far only approached with a varying degree of success or failure, is to have succeeded in discovering the cinematographic dialectic capable of transcending the contradiction between the action of a “spectacle” and of an event. For this reason, Ladri di Biclette is one of the first examples of pure cinema. . . . in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema.67

The integral of calculus deals with variations of speed. It integrates them into an average of alleged contingencies based on two human beings moving in space: the father runs in front and the son struggles to keep up. The absence of causal links among the various episodes of Bicycle Thieves is so crucial that their ordering can be rearranged without any loss of narrative intelligibility. And the very absence of any distinction between spectacle and event is precisely why Bicycle Thieves is a rare example of “pure cinema,” the “perfect aesthetic illusion of reality,” or “the ‘integral’ of reality.” The term “integral” confirms that the “real” of neorealism is simultaneously a subjective hallucinatory experience and an objective fact based on two people walking at two difference speeds. Eventually, in his long essay on De Sica as a metteur-​en-​scène, Bazin drops calculus and the integral. Nevertheless, he remains consistent, because he turns to another mathematical metaphor that allows for contingency. He refers to an asymptote, from analytic geometry, to discuss a subsequent film by De Sica and Zavattini, Umberto D (1952). To begin with, the asymptote, just like the integral of calculus, stands for changing trajectories and perceptions.68 Especially worth discussing is how the famous “kitchen sequence” of Umberto D is literally based on waking up and coming slowly to terms with the world around oneself. Indeed, the true subject of this sequence is how someone’s perceptual alertness comes into being tentatively and painfully. Through a repeated use of medium and long shots, together with a proliferation of tight frames dealing with touch, sight, and hearing, the emphasis is all on the young maid Maria’s automatized and indifferent demeanor at the very beginning of her morning routine. The ringing of a doorbell interrupts her casual gestures: grinding coffee, slouching on her chair to kick the door with the tip of her foot. She sits in a dirty, disheveled kitchen, with one window overlooking a gray winter day, in a working-​class neighborhood. Throughout this sequence, there is an intentional avoidance of close-​ups, even though it would have been so easy

92  André Bazin’s Film Theory to focus on Maria’s belly, her hands holding an object, her eyes staring into the void. If any of these close-​ups had taken place, the whole sequence would have sunk into condescension. Played by a nonprofessional actress, Maria Pia Casilio, the maid Maria experiences a sudden vertigo of anxiety. Her sleepwalking manner interrupts itself as soon as her hand touches her stomach. Such a small gesture proves that she knows all too clearly that she is pregnant. Absolutely nothing else overtly dramatic happens. Well aware that Bicycle Thieves’ fluid temporality has been replaced by Umberto D’s routine motions, Bazin writes: Have I already said that it is Zavattini’s dream to make a whole film out of ninety minutes in the life of a man to whom nothing happens? That is precisely what “neorealism” means for him. Two or three sequences in Umberto D give us more than a glimpse of what such a film might be like; they are fragments of it that have already been shot. But let us make no mistake about the meaning and the value realism has here. De Sica and Zavattini are concerned to make cinema the asymptote of reality—​but in order that it should ultimately be life itself that becomes spectacle, in order that life might in this perfect mirror be visible poetry, be the self into which film finally changes it.69

Neither visionary nor voyeuristic, the camera concentrates on the “microphysics,”70 or unpredictable and quasi-​subatomic particles, of Maria’s morning routine. A  world of objects takes over our attention:  the coffee grinder, the door ajar, the leaking faucet, the insects over the sink, the matches scratched on the wall, and the window framing a lonely cat. All of a sudden, this barely developed, marginal, and apparently passive character, Maria, opens herself up to our scrutiny. Her superficial tasks give way to the depth of a young woman lingering between sleep and anxiety, pregnancy and loneliness. Without idealizing their topic or stereotyping their character, De Sica and Zavattini make timeless poetry out of a kitchen. The latter becomes most familiar and credible as soon as, through Maria’s point of view, we gradually come to know every nook and cranny, each worn-​out tile and every single wet surface. In regard to Umberto D’s poetry of daily life, the final sentence of Bazin’s essay (“be the self into which film finally changes it”) paraphrases a line by Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–​1898),71 a symbolist poet for whom grand

Science  93 abstractions and mundane reality were always incompatible. Mallarmé’s avant-​garde poetics sought extreme, total solutions such as: the ground zero of language, the blankness of the white page, an instant eternally suspended. Well aware that the elitist Mallarmé purifies his language to denounce the banalities of ordinary life, Bazin willfully chooses to ignore the gap between high-​culture modernism and the miserable environments of neorealism. In order to prove that there is no room for melodrama with De Sica, and eager to comment on Umberto D’s deepening of neorealism, the critic turns to Mallarme’s hermetic sonnet on the death of Edgar Allan Poe. By paraphrasing Mallarmé, Bazin argues that neorealism, in its pursuit of “pure” cinema or “the end of cinema,” is an avant-​garde phase in the history of cinema. The point is that Umberto D explores a virgin territory based on the deepest and most infinitesimal levels of existence. Whether one calls it the “end” of cinema or “pure” cinema, the bypassing of conventional drama in the kitchen sequence is as sophisticated as Mallarmé’s linguistic experimentations striving for poetry’s purified eternity above ordinary language.72 Why does Bazin replace the “integral” of Bicycle Thieves with the “asymptote” of Umberto D? Because in an asymptote, the distance between the line and the curve approximates zero. Thus it relates to Bazin’s claim of the “end of cinema.” Zavattini’s plan was to make a ninety-​ minute film “where nothing happens,” because every moment is different from every other and is equally important. By taking the neorealism of Bicycle Thieves one step forward, so to speak, De Sica and Zavattini turn inside out overlooked pockets of time filled with physical sensations. Thus they convey Maria’s mental state through external surfaces. This approach is comparable to Mallarmé’s attempt to reinvent language. In the kitchen sequence, De Sica’s sparse editing and slow camera work make “visible and timeless poetry,” out of daily life seized in its passing. Through the cinema, the biology of human experience becomes objectivity in time.

Michael Faraday In the language of calculus, the mathematics of live relationships, De Sica’s reversals are as important as his parallels because these two methods inform what Bazin calls a sommation (summation) of episodes, thus invoking a Riemann sum. Of interest here is the effortless way in which the episodes of

94  André Bazin’s Film Theory Bicycle Thieves fall into place organically, without eliciting confusion. Not too different from the word “integral,” the term “summation” means that all the episodes enhance each other, while each one maintains its own purpose. In calculus, “summation” describes the coexistence of multiple trajectories in a state of simultaneous transformation. Bazin’s choice of the term “summation” is important for a further reason. It proves that his mathematical references do correlate. Due to its compatibility with an egalitarian yet individualized arrangement, summation speaks to an experiment in electromagnetism developed by the nineteenth-​century British scientist Michael Faraday (1791–​1867). This experiment involves iron filings and a magnet (Figure 3.2). It provides an analogy for Bazin’s model of cinematic spectatorship where independence of interpretation goes hand in hand with community of experience. Worth noting is that Bazin’s passion for Faraday points back to his direct knowledge of Henri Bergson’s work, one of the very few philosophers that the film critic mentions in his writings. Just like Bazin, Bergson, too, is a fan of Faraday. In a series of essays, published between 1903 and 1923, Henri Bergson writes: As scattered particles of iron filings are attracted toward the poles by force of the magnetic bar and compose themselves in harmonious curves, so, at

Figure 3.2  Magnetic field of bar magnets attracting. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Science  95 the call of a genius it loves, the virtualities slumbering here and there in a soul awaken, join and work together with a common action in view.73

Whereas Bergson uses Faraday’s famous experiment to describe the birth of a consciousness through the “concentration of all the powers of mind and heart on a single point,” Bazin turns to Faraday to argue that acknowledging differences enhances society as a whole, instead of pulling it apart. In “De Sica:  Metteur-​en-​scène,” Bazin, for example, redeploys the term “summation”: But it is precisely from the dialectical synthesis of contrary values, namely artistic order and the amorphous disorder of reality, that [the film] derives its originality. There is not one image that is not charged with meaning, that does not drive home into the mind the sharp end of an unforgettable moral truth, and not one that to this end is false to the ontological ambiguity of reality. Not one gesture, not one incident, not a single object in the film is given a prior significance derived from the ideology of the director. If they are set in order with an undeniable clarity on the spectrum of social tragedy, it is after the manner of the particles of iron filings on the spectrum of a magnet—​that is to say, individually; but the result of this art in which nothing is necessary, where nothing has lost the fortuitous character of chance, is in effect to be doubly convincing and conclusive.74

This itinerary from Bergson’s calculus to Faraday’s electromagnetism supports Bazin’s understanding of cinema as an electrifying, inspirational medium. Like a magnet attracting many little pieces of iron, the movie theater brings people together, while each viewer relates to the same film with different thoughts and emotions. Considering that Bazin is keen on the biological sciences, the critic’s little-​ known reliance on calculus and on Faraday’s experiment might explain why his film theory and neorealist phenomenology have not yet been fully understood. However, one can still admire how Bazin’s use of scientific metaphors is consistent. He celebrates over and over again an unobtrusive, yet selective filmmaking style that approximates the duration defining physical movements in real locations. Meanwhile, the editing cuts capture the rhythm of the characters’ thought processes without depending on much dialogue. At the same time, this unveiling of a narrative world pulsing away depends on a director’s uncanny ability to show instead of describing, to witness instead

96  André Bazin’s Film Theory of commenting, to choose to let go until the film finds itself in the disorderly, yet productive reality surrounding the actors. In addition to grounding Bazin’s praise of Bicycle Thieves in the wonders of science, Michael Faraday’s experiment is so crucial and representative of Bazin’s theory of spectatorship that it comes up again in his discussion of Rossellini’s Paisà and of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951). Concerning Rossellini’s rejection of a tight plot for the sake of a loosely knit fabric of events, Bazin writes that the director “polarizes the filings of the facts without changing their chemical composition.”75 Such a metaphorical use of Faraday may be surprising, considering that he is a scientist, but Bazin manages to draw all sorts of parallels between filmmaking and electromagnetism as he moves among different directors. For example, Faraday’s filings come up again where they refer to Bresson’s method of literary adaptation. In the latter case, Faraday’s experiment illuminates how the film’s avant-​garde mixture of narrative freedom and necessary rigor moves the evolution of cinematic language onto a new stage of unprecedented emotional and intellectual intensity: “Each moment in the film, each set-​up, has its own due measure, alike, of freedom and of necessity. They all move in the same direction, but separately like iron filings drawn to the overall surface of a magnet.”76 Science casts Bazin’s film theory in the realm of universality, without erasing contingency, materiality, hallucination, and fantasy. Bazin’s fascination with Faraday is due to how this experiment suggests invisible forces below the surface of phenomenal reality. This is not to say that Bazin is a spiritualist who believes in the hand of God shaping human destiny. On the contrary, his view of religion is anthropological, rather than fatalistic or mystical. Likewise, his love of science springs from a profound respect for life, rather than from a wish to reinvent nature. More specifically, Bazin appreciates science’s equalizing way of looking at beings and things. Science tells the story of life and death, which applies to all mortal beings and perishable things. Science strives for objectivity through typologies, classifications, simulations, and proofs. Situated in dialogue with art and religion, the logic of science is indispensable, but not dominant in Bazin’s film theory. Capable of protecting humankind against illness and prejudice, science can also become egotistical and destructive. Within Bazin’s discussion of the cinema, especially through the physics and chemistry of photography, science anchors this medium in the factual existence of the world we

Science  97 live in. Significantly, photography starts in science, and only later is it used artistically. For Bazin, reality corresponds to the destructive passage of time, which we cannot stop. The only exception to this state of affairs is the medium of photography. As a rupturing force against the temporal flow, a photograph preserves and isolates the moment—​without telling a full story around it. On the contrary, fictional and nonfictional mainstream cinema thrives on storytelling to such an extent that it can hide time’s corrosive impact through a lifelike illusion. By eliminating the painter’s touch on the canvas, cinema preserves photography’s connection to the physical world and offers an alternative to the anthropocentrism of human creativity. By setting the photographic record in motion, cinema becomes a lingua franca universally understood in ways comparable to how biology studies the human species as an object independent of linguistic and cultural differences. In Bazin’s film theory, science by itself cannot fully explain what a human is. Science needs art and religion to grasp the complexity of the human experience and to chart its trajectory from the physical to the spiritual and vice versa. As long as science reckons with the limitations of human knowledge, it is indispensable. Science can keep art away from vanity, while it can teach religion that the excesses of mysticism are different from the insights of spirituality.

4  Religion Cinema and religion foster suspension of disbelief, while they appeal to the masses. The etymology of the word “religion” comes from the Latin religare, that is, bringing people peacefully together.1 As systems of thought, religions can become misguided and turn into corrupt practices over time. In keeping with his Darwinian views, Bazin argues that nature exists outside of God’s sphere of influence. Immanence shapes Bazin’s film theory from beginning to end. Due to its paradoxical ontology of absent presence, photography echoes an incarnational and Christological model. Such a definition is useful to underline that photography puts forth a natural model of creativity based on time, light, and matter. Time is what we need to change ourselves, but it is also the dimension we cannot control in front of death. In comparison to space, which we can control and share with animals, time is a much more elusive dimension. It is both intrinsic and beyond us. Time holds inside itself questions of origins we cannot fully answer, even when the scientist and the theologian talk to each other. Because we do not quite know where we come from, humankind wonders whether its placement in the universe is a unique event. Just as the cinema probes reality’s darkness, we seem to move across the centuries toward an unknown destination as a species. By harnessing energy, cinema’s electric light may produce experiences of insight into Otherness. Cinema is the material ghost that mediates between the realm of time and the reality of death. Bazin was a Catholic dissident and a Personalist, open to all religious denominations, and his film theory concerns human spirituality rather than rigid dogmas or abusive power. In principle, religion through theology and cinema through philosophy interrogate the nature of being. On an everyday basis, these two mass rituals are repositories of moral codes that need constant verification and updating. Religion is usually a public domain, while spirituality is a private matter. They both offer guidance at the level of everyday behavior and they alleviate the fear that death evacuates all meaning. André Bazin’s Film Theory. Angela Dalle Vacche, Oxford University Press (2020) © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190067298.001.0001

Religion  99 To be sure, Bazin believes in the necessity of a belief in God. Belief in God functions as a placeholder to make sense of inexplicable realities. For the critic, instead of being a transcendent entity or a personal being, God is a dimension that, just like time, only human beings can conceptualize. A Christological definition of photography enables an anti-​anthropocentric framework of ethical self-​questioning. Belief in God, or an attitude of faith toward the Other, is a necessary concept to define what a human is. Along with art and science, creativity and logic, only time enables us to become self-​conscious of how we are different from animals, plants, machines, and objects. Thus, God is an indispensable term of reference for articulating the paradox of man’s frail, yet morally responsible position on the earth and in the universe. God needs to exist to set into relief the human limitations of scientific enterprises and fallible institutions. As far as science is concerned, whenever it becomes arrogant, through excessive insistence on rationality, it may attempt to replace God. In the case of the legal system, we have the right and the duty to use the law for the sake of civil society, but we can never presume to be our neighbor’s ultimate and only judge. In his review of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), for example, Bazin writes: C’est une affaire qui se règle entre Dieu et Welles et dont les hommes sont mauvais juges. (It is a matter that needs to be settled between God and Welles wherein human beings are likely to be bad judges.)2

Likewise, Bazin positions himself in disavowal of the empty office at the end of Kafka’s The Castle (1926): one does not have to believe in a cruel God to feel the guilt of which Joseph K. is culpable. On the contrary, the drama lies in this: God does not exist, the last office in the castle is empty. Perhaps we have here the particular tragedy of today’s world, the raising of a self-​deifying social reality to a transcendental state.3

In contrast to Kafka’s pessimism, Bazin insists that only a theological grounding based on hope and compassion allows humankind to learn from its worst misperceptions. Like his mentor Emmanuel Mounier, Bazin practices the paradox of a “tragic optimism.”4 By the same token, Bazin is the first to agree with Kafka that when bureaucracy becomes a “self-​deifying”

100  André Bazin’s Film Theory end in itself, it gives the whole system permission to reject any criticism of its artificial methods. Kafka’s horrific view of a totalitarian state is not that different from Bazin’s descriptions of the nightmarish reality surrounding Alfred Radok’s The Long Journey (1949). In this film, episodes of religious tolerance among Catholics and Jews are worthy of admiration. Yet this mutual respect quickly becomes impossible: first, because of Nazi collaboration in Prague, and second, due to the spreading of the Cold War after the release of The Long Journey. Radok’s film stands out as an exception to its times. As soon as Prague falls into the Stalinist orbit, films such as The Long Journey are no longer possible because the Soviet censors automatically question all projects with a religious component. All religions are sociologies of human behavior. More specifically, Christianity sets a boundary between the sacred and the profane, so that humankind may remind itself that every human life is sacred and incommensurable, that is, outside all rational or quantitative categories. Theology focuses on the stories we tell ourselves about our nature as humans in the light of the “sacred,” which is what sustains and limits legitimate rule over our collective lives. In defining the sacred, Bazin focuses on human behavior: Naturally by sacred I here mean, first of all, the various social aspects of the religious life. [ . . . ] However, there are other rituals besides the religious. Society approves a thousand forms of acceptable behavior which are a sort of permanent liturgy that it performs in its own honor. This is particularly true of table manners. . . . Religious or not, the sacred is everywhere present in the life of society and not only in the magistrate, the policeman, the priest, but in the ritual associated with eating, with professional relations, and public transportation. It is the way society retains its cohesion as if within a magnetic field. Unknowingly, every minute of our time we adjust to this framework.5

In Bazin’s writings, the relationship between cinema and religion is very rich because, on one hand, he introduces religious topics into his responses to secular films, while, on the other, he develops sociological arguments out of religious films. Thus, films do not have to depend on religious subject matter to become spiritual works of art. Although art is slightly less important for Bazin than religion, he still considers it the irreplaceable expression of a profound human need. While the artist is not God, creativity nevertheless defines what a human is in comparison to an animal.

Religion  101 Irrational belief and the human awareness of death occupy the pinnacle of Bazin’s film theory. He even seems to suggest that cinema is the “new” secular religion or spiritual lingua franca of our times. Religion and cinema, not to mention spiritual depth and the creativity of art, constantly overlap in Bazin’s writings. The kinship of religion and cinema is such that Bazin handles Federico Fellini’s films La Strada (1954) and Il Bidone (The Swindle, 1956) as if they were religious films. La Strada explores how an individual’s encounter with the Other might lead to introspection. Il Bidone, by contrast, tells the story of a wretched gangster who, in the last minutes of his life, finds the courage to look at himself objectively, from the outside, and thereby to understand how he has wasted his time on this earth. Bazin stretches the label of the “religious film” beyond obvious choices, such as Maurice Cloche’s Monsieur Vincent (1947), on Saint Vincent De Paul. The critic approves of how this film celebrates the power of radical social reform; Cloche makes it clear that Saint Vincent never performs any miracles, but instead works himself to the limit in his attempt to realize his dream of rescuing the poor. Thus he attains sainthood after his own death. Bazin’s awareness of the Vatican’s old-​ fashioned ways emerges from his anticonformist definition of sainthood in Augusto Genina’s Cielo sulla Palude (Heaven over the Marshes, 1949). Bazin makes mistakes in his criticism, and for this reason the complex filmmaking style of Jewish director Max Ophuls amounts to a “Jesuitical Baroque” steeped in Austrian Catholicism. Worth discussing also are Bazin’s insights on Protestantism in Jean Delannoy’s La symphonie pastorale (1946) and Dieu a besoin des hommes (1950). Next, considering that the tension between science and religion, the mechanical and the hallucinatory, applies to the cinema as a whole, Bazin focuses on the scientific and religious procedures for validating miracles described by Georges Rouquier’s Lourdes et ses miracles (1955). Finally, this chapter on religion contextualizes the references to Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Valéry in Bazin’s essay “The Stylistics of Robert Bresson” (1952), which analyzes Diary of a Country Priest (1951).6

Immanence and the Supernatural Bazin’s dialectical perspective on Self and Otherness informs his understanding of the relationship between the Lumière Brothers (Auguste and

102  André Bazin’s Film Theory Louis), and the magician-​filmmaker, Georges Méliès. Trained as engineers and factory owners, the Lumière Brothers and their cameramen focus on actualités; they travel the world and pan with their cameras. While Méliès—​ working on a magician’s stage, cutting and splicing pieces of film together—​ invents editing and gives impulse to fantasy. However, the intertwining of the documentary and the fantastic is a major subtext running throughout Bazin’s film theory.7 Bazin applies this double-​sided argument to the newsreels that Frank Capra re-​edits for the Why We Fight series (1942–​1944). He observes that “the cinema rarely moves the historical sciences toward more objectivity.” This is the case because a newsreel can be used to give history “the additional power of illusionism, by its very realism.”8 Whether or not they engage in fiction or nonfiction, all realisms in the cinema depend on audience perception, cognition, and hallucination. Furthermore, Bazin denies the separation of reality and fantasy, even though he sides with immanence over the supernatural: The opposition that some like to see between a cinema inclined toward the almost documentary representation of reality and a cinema inclined, through reliance on technique, toward escape from reality into fantasy and the world of dreams, is essentially forced. [ . . . ]. The one is inconceivable without the other. [ . . . ] The fantastic in cinema is possible only because of the irresistible realism of the photographic image. [ . . . ] What in fact appeals to the audience about the fantastic in the cinema is its realism—​I mean the contradiction between the irrefutable objectivity of the photographic image and the unbelievable nature of events it depicts.9

By immanence, Bazin means that the possibility of miracles—​that is, of exceptional and inexplicable events—​inhabits the ordinary. Bazin believes such possibility is ever-​present in the guise of contingency or providence. A filmmaker has only to imply this potential; there is no need to overstate it. Less is always more. Thus, in the context of postwar cinema, the repeated use of superimpositions and dissolves to highlight the supernatural becomes an outdated and redundant stylistic solution, pointing back to the silent film era when the medium was anxious to display its technical resources. Bazin’s dislike for obvious supernatural effects is also due to his assertion that the photographic basis of cinema is already tied to irrational belief. It follows for him, therefore, that two versions of irrational belief clash on

Religion  103 screen: the photographic film images themselves and a depicted supernatural ghost, for example. These two elements are in competition with each other. After all, cinema is already a material ghost. Bazin is not surprised or upset if a rain of roses pours down onscreen, or a sudden spring of water gushes out of the arid sands.10 The equivalence between the supernatural and the miraculous is typical of the Hollywood religious film. Contrary to this facile assumption, the scientific Bazin does not believe in superstitions and realizes that often miracles are only legends. Yet the religious Bazin never rules out the possibility of exceptional occurrences that might emerge from the convergence of religious faith and contingency. Two apparent impasses would seem to challenge cinema’s approach to religion. On one hand, cinematic recording is unable to represent the mental structures of irrational belief. On the other, neither photography nor cinema can show a medical miracle’s inner workings. These media can only record an external image suggesting an internal change. However, showing less can trigger belief. Miracles do not match expectations and can happen without a logical reason. Even a moment of grace or insight is a sort of miracle that can happen to the most wretched of beings. “These beings are what they are, and, if they are moreover the signs of grace, grace does not impress itself on the filmstrip. These signs impact the spirit only of those who have eyes to recognize them.”11 Even if grace is unpredictable, in the end faith in God facilitates its appearance and makes miracles possible. Eager to underline the limits of human knowledge in front of the inexplicable, and to celebrate science’s explanatory power against superstitions, Bazin reviews Georges Rouquier’s Lourdes et ses miracles (1955),12 an investigation of the thin borderline between propaganda and documentation, spirituality and scientific accuracy. Rouquier’s film begins under the financial and conceptual auspices of Père Raymond Pichard (1913–​1992), a pioneering and very biased figure in religious television. His name appears in Rouquier’s credits as “religious consultant.” Pichard’s financial backing envisions a short film of only thirty minutes. Yet Rouquier takes his topic so seriously that he extends it beyond a brief exercise in religious propaganda. He decides to turn an ethnography of popular faith into a scientific investigation. Digressing from Pichard’s conception, he delivers a ninety-​eight-​minute essay film divided into three parts: Witnesses, Pilgrimage, The Unforeseen. First, Rouquier interviews individuals who have witnessed or experienced in person a medical miracle associated with Lourdes; second, he describes

104  André Bazin’s Film Theory the procedures of the medical and Catholic committees charged with evaluating these miracles. During this section, statistics are provided to underline the degree of divergence and overlap between these two committees’ findings. Interestingly, both sides appear to be very skeptical. It emerges that, out of all the cases that aspire to inclusion in the category of “miracle,” only an extremely minute percentage achieves approval by both the Church and the medical establishment. Third, Rouquier’s ethnographic approach emphasizes how patients are anxious when they go through an immersion in Lourdes’ freezing water. Finally, without any reservations, Rouquier acknowledges and surveys the most sordid aspects of Lourdes, where all sorts of kitsch religious souvenirs attract tourists. The director himself then appears on the screen and invites viewers to evaluate his own method of filmmaking. He wants his audience to reflect on how thin is the borderline between science and religion. Neither mystically in favor of transcendence nor skeptically dismissive of the illogical, Rouquier’s documentary is a balanced anthropology of spirituality in daily life. Bazin, too, agrees that religion is fair game for anthropology. Likewise anthropology presupposes some kind of theological grounding. Once again, the point is to understand that humans are irrational beings and rational animals at the very same time. Here, anthropology calls attention to how Rouquier’s flat interviews, conducted in the homes of his witnesses, always include him sitting near his interlocutors, thereby normalizing the interactions. Furthermore, Rouquier’s anti-​illusionist direct address to the viewer in medium shot, with his use of long shots and long takes, prevents anecdotal distraction. Aerial views, long shots, long takes of faceless crowds holding candles, rows of nameless patients lying in their cots, a multitude of nurses and relatives, all foreground the importance of a general situation of faith in the nocturnal and chanting landscape of Lourdes. Rouquier’s even handling of religion and science is remarkably antimelodramatic and antirhetorical. Bazin approves of Rouquier’s film, possibly because the director manages to be respectful of his clerical producer. At the same time, he remains mindful of his secular spectators as well.

Catholics and Communists Without historical contextualization, Bazin’s views on religious mythology, ethical codes, and spirituality are difficult to grasp. In discussing

Religion  105 the immediate postwar period in France, British art historian Sarah Wilson underlines social struggles between rich and poor, between Catholics and Protestants, and between proponents of scientific secularism and anti-​ modernist religiosity: With both Communists and Catholics . . . a dialectic was established between the notions of a liberated, materialist enlightenment and spiritual degeneracy. Thus, the communists defined the phases Renaissance, Reformation, French Revolution and democracy.  .  .  . Right-​wing clerics and opponents of modernism evoked this evolution in precisely the opposite sense, as the chart of the spiritual downfall of modern man. [ . . . ] The Communist Party policy coincided of course with Comintern-​backed Peace movement initiatives and the attempt to court the new female vote [1945] (women traditionally being more religious and conservative than their husbands).13

In those days, the expression la main-​tendue (the outstretched hand, or reach-​ out approach) refers to an alliance between Communists and Catholics. The leader of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez, pursues this ideological goal from 1947 onward. Such a plan is officially approved in 1949 with the following statement produced during the party’s general congress in Montreal:  “To apply without hesitation an outreach-​approach towards Catholic workers without abandoning our commitment towards a secular society that respects different religious beliefs.”14 Wilson notes that, following in Thorez’s footsteps, Emmanuel Mounier favors an open dialogue between Catholics and Communists, despite the Vatican’s rejection of such an unprecedented idea: On July 14th, 1949, The Catholic Holy Office forbade Catholics to join the Communist Party. The Church’s decision to sabotage any rapprochement caused much heart-​ache to the working class, Communist voters who had not renounced their religion, and was judged by Emmanuel Mounier as “une erreur historique massive.”15

Mounier felt that the Vatican’s ban against Catholic Communists was a massive historical mistake, thus he became an outspoken opponent of Pius XII, questioning the pope’s silence regarding the Nazis’ persecution of Jews.16 The pope’s controversial record on the Holocaust remains incriminating

106  André Bazin’s Film Theory in two ways. First, Pius XII spends many years in Bavaria, giving him roots in a heavily Catholic German region where no Jewish population survives Hitler’s anti-​Semitism. Second, during World War II, Pius XII does not take a clear and official stand against the Holocaust, of which he is very well aware. Reportedly he wants to protect German Catholics from the Nazi regime. In the 1950s, the decade of the Cold War, the pope embarrassingly maintains a conservative strategy antithetical to dialogue with French modernist and left-​wing Catholics, as well as secular and non-​Catholic areas of European society. He also pursues an isolationist stance that refuses to recognize the existence of other religions, such as the Palestinians’ Islamic faith (at the time of the founding of the state of Israel in 1948). Typically, he is more concerned with calling attention to how the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe leads to the imprisonment of Catholic cardinals in Poland and Hungary. Critical of the Vatican’s indifference toward the Jewish genocide during World War II and its exploitation of anti-​Stalinist feelings in the postwar period, Emmanuel Mounier is one of the few French public figures who publicly challenge Pius XII’s crafty style of politics. From the pages of Esprit, in 1935, Mounier opposes Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. In 1939 Mounier questions why the Vatican does not condemn Italy’s invasion of Albania.17 Mounier’s cause is taken up by Catholic writer François Mauriac, who, in 1951, rehashes Mounier’s condemnation of the pope’s silence about Albania. Mauriac further condemns Pius XII’s inactivity during the persecution of the Jews in Germany and Poland. Notoriously opposed to French colonial rule in Vietnam and Algeria,18 Mauriac’s preface to Léon Poliakov’s Bréviaire de la haine (Harvest of Hate) declares that this very first book on the Holocaust19 is not only important for German readers but also for the French public. In Mounier’s and Mauriac’s footsteps, Bazin is well aware of Pius XII’s silence during the Holocaust. In 1952 Bazin writes on Alfred Radok’s (1914–​ 1976) The Long Journey (Czechoslovakia, 1949), a film set in the transit camp of Theresienstadt. Although some real locations are used in the film, the half-​Jewish, half-​Christian director Radok mostly shoots his film in the studio. The result is a German expressionist look, which is dominant in his domestic film industry. Instead of condemning The Long Journey for its expressionism, Bazin compares Radok’s style to the “réalité d’un cauchemar” (a nightmarish reality).20 More specifically, Bazin maintains that expressionism has switched to a quasi-​documentary realism or living nightmare that opens the spectators’ eyes to the unimaginable:

Religion  107 I doubt that as a director Radok has consciously chosen the style of his film. Rather we have here an individual renewal of the expressionist esthetic style that has always been either hidden or explicit in Czech cinema. What is most impressive is that the most questionable aspects of expressionism, paradoxically, here become justifiably profound, taking on a sort of realist virginity.21

In Theresienstadt, the Nazis stage art performances by prisoners in order to receive a stamp of approval from the International Red Cross’s ineffective visits. Suggestive of how deception turns into madness, Radok shows a group of Jewish musicians giving a deafening performance of bombastic and irreverent music. In the meantime, hundreds of prisoners walk through heavy rain and mud to a train, on the way to their deaths in Auschwitz. By alternating between archival newsreel footage of the Nazis’ ascent to power and staged scenes of daily life in Prague, Radok intertwines history with fantasy, reality with horror, at a time when memories of the wartime period are too recent, confused, and very difficult to represent. In his review of this film, Bazin uses the phrase “virginité réaliste” to mean that one senses a level of documentary fidelity in relation to an experience that is both actual and mental.22 Despite his reliance on studio shooting, Radok, as the son of a prisoner tortured in Theresienstadt, conveys the closest possible echoes of his family’s and his community’s nightmare. The result is a highly sensitive depiction of Jewish family life, including attention to ritual objects, holidays, and neighborhood fears.23 In comparison to other films on the Holocaust from the same period, The Long Journey is characterized by a “realist virginity” because Radok openly deals with Czechoslovak anti-​Semitism and Christians’ collaboration with Nazism. Before the release of The Long Journey, hardly anyone brings these two topics into the open. Radok is the very first to handle the issues of wartime rejection and betrayal on the screen in such an explicit fashion. Hence, Bazin chooses the term “virginity.” In addition, Radok raises the two controversial topics of national anti-​Semitism and internal collaboration right before Soviet censorship stifles any further discussion of Holocaust history. Mauriac’s indictment of Vatican and French collaborators, Mounier’s criticism of Pius XII, and Bazin’s Personalist spirituality are three examples of a much more progressive French Catholicism after 1945. Unfortunately, with the encyclical Humani Generis (Of the Human Race) (August 12, 1950), Pius

108  André Bazin’s Film Theory XII opposes the radical priorities of the Nouvelle Théologie movement. In a similar initiative, two years before the Catholics’ effort toward reform in France,24 the pope openly intervenes in the Italian parliamentary elections of 1948 to support a conservative turn in the nation. Pius XII’s meddling in Italian politics is worth mentioning because Bazin is deeply aware of national differences in French and Italian Catholicism. He clearly demonstrates this knowledge in his reviews of Julien Duvivier’s films starring Fernandel as a local priest, Don Camillo, and Gino Cervi as a Communist mayor; the two are always trying to outwit each other.25 Eager to moderate the Vatican’s negative stance toward non-​Christian religions and its overall rejection of modernity, the Nouvelle Théologie movement included many French intellectuals. This new phase of religious rethinking and self-​criticism appeals also to lay individuals who, in some cases, had fought in World War II or had participated in the Resistance. Nouvelle Théologie, for example, counts on the support of the Jesuit priest Henri de Lubac, the Dominican priest Yves Congar, and the Jesuit priest and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This neomodernist Catholic avant-​garde movement was linked to the review Témoignage Chrétien. Nouvelle Théologie accepts Darwinian evolution and embraces quantum physics. Much closer to Mounier’s preference for Saint Augustine’s utopian views (Mounier, Traité du caractère), the Catholic intellectuals of Nouvelle Théologie are wary of Jacques Maritain’s Thomistic theology, with its ranking of sins according to their different degree of seriousness. In contrast to Nouvelle Théologie’s call for modernization, Maritain’s Thomistic system lends itself to all sorts of compromises that slow down change. Mounier criticizes Pius XII’s decision to ban the French left-​ wing worker-​priests movement in 1951. Against the backdrop of these social, political, and theological controversies, in 1950, Pius XII announces a new Catholic dogma: the Virgin Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven. As if this new development were not surreal enough, during the month of June of that same year, Pius XII reinforces his repressive stance on female sexuality. To make things worse, in 1947, this puritanical attitude transpires in the writings of the young Enrico Berlinguer, a future and major leader in the Italian Communist Party.26 And to top it all off, Pius XII stages the largest public ceremony ever held in Saint Peter’s Square for the canonization of Maria Goretti, a young girl brutally murdered. Cinema, of course, took notice.

Religion  109

Taking Risks Augusto Genina’s Il Cielo sulla Palude (Heaven over the Marshes, 1949), a movie about Maria Goretti, causes quite a sensation in the film world by winning first prize at the Venice Film Festival. Heaven over the Marshes is shot on location, and its sound is recorded on the spot, instead of being postsynchronized. Genina casts only local people to play peasant characters like themselves, living in the countryside near Rome. He directs his nonprofessionals so well that they sound utterly convincing when they speak their unscripted lines, in contrast to Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique (1946), with scripted dialogue. Even the neorealist Luchino Visconti, in La Terra Trema (1948), Bazin remarks, relies on dubbing the Sicilian dialogues in postproduction. Bazin applauds Aldo Tonti’s cinematography as well. In Heaven over the Marshes, Tonti’s camera work is even more restrained and less noticeably pictorial than his previous work for Visconti. Now the “pictorial and decorative theatricality” Tonti develops for La Terra Trema subordinates itself “to the most modest and prosaic subject.”27 Heaven may be over the marshes, but the gravitational pull of extreme poverty dominates in this miserable swamp. Genina shoots his film in one of the most forsaken regions of Italy, near Rome, the so-​called Pontine marshes. Although the story is set at the turn of the century, this swampy area remains notoriously wretched due to its extreme natural resistance to cultivation. In reviewing Genina’s film, Bazin raises serious questions regarding a repressive Catholic education for young girls preparing for their First Communion. Typically, this ceremony involves a white veil and dress, thereby invoking a marriage with Christ, comparable to a nun’s taking her vows. Insightfully, Bazin describes a cultural situation that discourages young girls from celebrating their physical transformation into women. Too much religious zeal leads to sexual sublimation and fear. In discussing how, for young Maria, catechism is the one and only form of schooling she has access to, Bazin writes: constantly focusing on catechism and the upheaval for her first Holy Communion, by themselves, these two pressures produce a banal piety. [ . . . ] Let us also acknowledge that a Christian education exercises a moral influence which does not help with unconscious desires. Maria’s behavior is not yet convincing.28

110  André Bazin’s Film Theory Bazin’s phrase “constantly focusing on catechism” calls attention to a sensitivity that escalates into an overreaction. Briefly, the plot of Genina’s film: Maria Goretti (Ines Orsini), a peasant girl, rejects the sexual advances of eighteen-​year-​old Alessandro Serenelli. In contrast to Maria’s demure behavior, Lucia, her best female friend, sees no contradiction whatsoever between catechism and dating. To further complicate Maria’s dilemma, Alessandro has grown up with her, day after day, like a brother and a friend. This is because the Goretti and the Serenelli families are so poor that they have lived together for many years in the same shack-​like house. Within these circumstances of unavoidable intimacy, Genina describes a culture rooted in machismo. Alessandro’s father does not hesitate to sexually harass Maria’s mother as soon as she loses her husband to malaria. Meanwhile, a secret history of mental illness runs through the Serenelli’s genealogical tree. Sexually rejected by Maria, but at the same time treated as her most preferred companion, Alessandro becomes more and more aggressive. In this context, illiteracy and fear turn Maria’s religious education toward an excess of religious zeal. Bazin does not discuss Heaven over the Marshes in detail. Primarily, he limits himself to situating Genina’s film within neorealist cinema. But in addition, he uses the film to offer some observations on the anticonformist and radical nature of sainthood. Before moving to Bazin’s theological comments, a few sequences in Genina’s film are worthy of additional analysis. To begin with, the director associates a punitive and anthropomorphic God with the mezzadria, or métayage, labor system. Although they toil desperately on a land that yields very little and earns them little money, Maria and her family owe money to their aristocratic landowner and his rapacious middlemen. In short, they work for a pittance. In this impossible situation, Maria and her father kneel down to pray in the middle of the marshes, under a cloudy heaven. As if they were always on the edge of falling into sin, they understand God to be an omniscient master “who sees everything we do.” At the end of the film, the unforgiving, omnipotent gaze of this deity reappears in Genina’s crane shot, looking down on Alessandro’s arrest. The point of view of this transcendent God not only coincides with the director’s camera on a crane, but also with their invisible, feudal landowner. Furthermore, this stern and ubiquitous God motivates Maria’s fear of saying yes to Alessandro. Paranoia about a punitive God reaches a climax during Maria’s lonely walk across the marshes. By relying on a mobile and independent camera in this scene, Genina seems to pay homage to Karl Freund’s

Religion  111 detached camera in the swamp of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927). In Murnau’s film, the camera abandons the married peasant to off-​screen space and precedes him to the spot of his fatal appointment with the city vamp who has enchanted him. In keeping with Freund’s legacy, Genina’s independent and all-​seeing camera movement observes Maria’s hesitant steps in the swamp. Her tentative motions demonstrate that, unlike Murnau’s peasant, she is deeply afraid of the uncertainties ahead. Vulnerable inside a spacious long shot, we see her isolated in the marshes. Meanwhile, the camera also reveals Alessandro, hidden behind the vegetation, spying on her movements. Maria’s feet test the slippery ground. She worries about walking in the swamp as much as she is uncomfortable with Alessandro’s advances. Only once in the film does she experience joy in encountering an unfamiliar space: when Alessandro takes her to the beach. There, she delights in seeing the waves for the first time, and spontaneously lifts her skirt, inadvertently revealing her bare legs to the lustful young man. Worth quoting at length are the comments Bazin makes that show how he secularizes the circumstances leading to the stabbing of Maria in order to question the validity of Goretti’s candidacy for Catholic sainthood: And even this martyrdom: a banal sex crime, . . . There is not a single aspect of this crime that does not have a natural explanation. The resistance of the girl is perhaps nothing but an exaggerated sense of propriety, the reflex of a scared little animal.29

Relying on original documents from the trial after the killing, Genina’s film shows Maria, in the short time before she dies of her stab wounds, as she asks her childhood friend to forgive her. This request acknowledges all the years they have spent together. For Bazin, this is an important decision—​a degree of self-​awareness on Maria’s part that redeems the criminal and the victim alike from their equal limitations in confronting sexuality. Nobody is an evil monster and everybody is a victim of poverty and ignorance in this film. The key rhetorical purposes of Bazin’s review are not easy to establish. Perhaps his agenda is to make a statement against Pius XII’s exploitation of Goretti’s case for the purpose of religious propaganda. Certainly, the critic points out that Goretti’s canonization and Genina’s film fare better in emotional Italy than in rationalist France. In a single sentence he juxtaposes French secular culture with the pope’s hold on Italian public opinion.

112  André Bazin’s Film Theory Pius XII’s canonization ceremony for Goretti is the ultimate media event before the advent of television. One can even say that it anticipates the “live” broadcast by showcasing the still living mother of the “saint.” Yet Bazin is more concerned with what constitutes serious sainthood. To him, Maria Goretti is a very minor figure in comparison with Saint Teresa of Avila, Thérèse de Lisieux, Bernadette Soubirous, and Saint Vincent de Paul: at least in France, this saint’s life has disappointed the Christians even more than it has the nonbelievers. [ . . . ] it is to Genina’s credit that he made a hagiography that doesn’t prove anything, above all not the sainthood of the saint. . . . He looks at sainthood from the outside, as the ambiguous manifestation of a spiritual reality that is absolutely impossible to prove.30

A spiritual reality can never be represented directly on film, and the attempt to do so leads only to failed special effects. The ambiguities of human behavior in grappling with religious faith are far more interesting to Bazin. Hence, he concludes: This is not, and this must not be a saint whose life we see going by, but rather the little peasant Maria Goretti. The camera lens is not the eye of God, and microphones could not have recorded the voices heard by Joan of Arc.31

Even if Genina’s camera takes on a God-​like point of view that Bazin fails to acknowledge, his basic argument is that the filmstrip cannot show God or the soul directly. It can only imply a human interrogation, search, or belief regarding something that is irrational, conceptual, and nonrepresentable. Bazin’s ultimate conclusion about sainthood is that it can be evaluated only retroactively, after the individual’s death, on the basis of facts and actions. In reflecting on Maurice Cloche’s famous film, Monsieur Vincent, Bazin writes:  “a saint does not exist as a saint in the present:  [Monsieur Vincent] is simply a being who becomes one and who, moreover, risks eternal damnation until his death.”32 In line with Sartre’s dictum that “existence precedes essence,” sainthood is not an a priori essence someone is born with. Rather it is the result of an accumulation of choices with attendant risks and no clear immediate resolution. An individual’s behavior can be evaluated only a posteriori. In the absence of such a case for Maria Goretti, Bazin criticizes the Vatican for its superficial use of hagiography to pursue religious propaganda.

Religion  113

Looking at Oneself from the Outside A central question in Bazin’s film theory is how, with its mechanisms of desire and belief, can the cinema differentiate among religious faith, spectators’ credulity, believable narratives, and moral responsibilities in a modern world ruled by utilitarian rather than spiritual values? In the course of highlighting the need for spiritual self-​interrogation through the cinema, Bazin works on lesser-​known neorealist films, such as Federico Fellini’s Il Bidone (The Swindle, 1955). In contrast to Sartre’s assertion that we are what we do, without any chance for appeal, Bazin argues that we could also be what we might become at any moment. And Bazin wonders whether visual appearances in film are capable of suggesting an individual’s spiritual epiphany just before death. In connection with this topic, two characters stand out in Il Bidone, a black comedy about callous criminals impersonating Catholic priests and robbing the poorest peasants of the Roman countryside. One of those characters is Picasso (Richard Basehart): a nice, sensitive, sentimental man, always full of good intentions, and always ready to take pity on others and on himself. Yet Picasso’s salvation is probably hopeless. He steals because he “looks like an angel.” [ . . . ] Incapable of overcoming his issues, of bridging them, Picasso is doomed to darkness and to ultimate downfall, despite the love and kindness he displays towards his wife and child. Picasso’s actions do not make him evil, but he is lost.33

Here the critic highlights Picasso’s inability to face deeper questions, behind his apparently well meaning, angelic face, with an innocent expression that is nothing but a form of laziness. Just because his face makes his life easier, Picasso can deceive himself and avoid any level of introspection. The second major character of Il Bidone is Augusto (Broderick Crawford). Augusto is the best actor in the whole gang of crooks and their leader. His actions may seem to be more despicable than Picasso’s, but this is not the case. By asking spectators to compare Augusto with Picasso, Fellini pushes his agenda forward. The director wants viewers to think through their own behavior in the light of their moral judgments of Others. Picasso, Augusto, and their accomplices set out to rob a peasant family that includes a paralyzed girl the same age as Augusto’s daughter. For the scam, Augusto impersonates a high-​ranking Catholic priest, while simultaneously

114  André Bazin’s Film Theory deftly employing distinctive gestures that recall the reactionary Christian-​ Democrat minister Giulio Andreotti, the notorious enemy of neorealism who censored Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D (1952). Thanks to the peasants’ religious naïveté, the swindle succeeds. Fooled by the promise of future riches to come from the Church, the poor family surrenders all its belongings to the criminals. Before the gang can leave, the family’s innocently unaware daughter expresses gratitude for Augusto’s superficial level of attention. Usually, Augusto is incapable of either charity or compassion; he thinks only of his own best interests. Yet this brief encounter has an impact on him because the destitute but pretty girl reminds him of his daughter. During their brief conversation, the semiparalytic girl never tries to appeal to his pity, but rather she states that she is grateful for the little that she has. This attitude of acceptance is comparable to his own neglected daughter’s resolute search for financial independence and her willingness to work, instead of going to school. In the wake of his interaction with the young woman, guilt about abandoning his family triggers Augusto’s decision to rob his accomplices and use their bounty for his daughter’s education. In this moment of insight, suddenly able to look at himself objectively, Augusto adds professional disloyalty to family betrayal. With his self-​awareness, something significant changes for the very first time, notwithstanding the complication of turning on his partners. Bazin observes: actions, whether good or evil, don’t permit [Picasso and Augusto] to be judged any more objectively than subjectively. The purity of the man lies deeper: for Fellini it is defined [ . . . ] by a certain permeability to grace. . . . [Augusto’s] conversation with the paralyzed girl introduces turmoil to his soul; it made him see, finally, not so much the accidental lie of his actions, as the essential imposture of his life.34

For Fellini, as well as for Bazin, “events are in fact never anything but the completely accidental instruments through which human souls feel their way”35 through life. No single action, no isolated choice, no one-​time decision can guarantee salvation. These are nothing but isolated instances in an ongoing process of groping in the darkness of one’s own spiritual reality. There is no formula for salvation. Alternatively, no single act of evil behavior automatically spells damnation. The complexities of human interiority escape the surface level of external observation and filmic recording. Something hidden

Religion  115 might be taking place in the depths of an individual’s being. Furthermore, nobody knows with certainty how one’s own or someone else’s level of self-​ awareness might play out, as the end of life approaches. The meaning of events is always unclear as they take place, while reality is endlessly intricate. This condition of moral uncertainty impacts Bazin as a film reviewer who is an engaged spectator and an educator for his readers. Worth noting is that Bazin’s position on the question of Augusto’s “salvation” or “damnation” changes from the review he writes for France Observateur to the review he publishes in Le Parisien Libéré, and then he eventually reverts to his Observateur position. The resolution of his indecisiveness comes when he again discusses Il Bidone in the light of Nights of Cabiria. Significantly, the ending of Nights of Cabiria emphasizes a profound change in terms of self-​esteem. This motivates Bazin to reconsider the existential trajectory of Fellini’s male characters. In Le Parisien Libéré, Bazin is much more pessimistic in regard to Augusto: In contrast to Gelsomina, the Fool, and Zampanò, this character [Augusto] is too far removed from childlike naïveté as far as finding his own path toward the Light. He will die groping around within the ignorance of his soul.36

Eventually Bazin concludes that Fellini’s male characters do not so much evolve as suddenly “ripen.” These immature males confront their immoralities only when they face the vertigo of death. Until then, they remain so stubborn in their ways that no critical self-​interrogation is likely to take place. Most importantly, Fellini’s “ripe” character is the result of events that build up with “vertical gravity,” instead of happening on the axis of “horizontal causality,” or through an evolutionary narrative marked by Darwin’s gradualism: As for the characters themselves, they exist and change only in reference to a purely internal kind of time—​which I cannot qualify even as Bergsonian, in so far as Bergson’s theory of the Données immédiates de la conscience contains a strong element of psychologism. Let us avoid the vague terms of a “spiritualizing” vocabulary. Let us not say that the transformation of the characters takes place at the level of the “soul.” . . . This does not mean at the level of the unconscious or the subconscious but rather at the level on which what Jean-​Paul Sartre calls the “basic project” obtains, the level of ontology.

116  André Bazin’s Film Theory Thus the Fellinian character does not evolve; he ripens or at the most becomes transformed (whence the metaphor of the angel’s wings, . . . ).37

Until some major rupture happens, Fellini’s immature males resist change. They feel weighed down, but do not understand why. Like spoiled grown-​ ups, they are stubbornly attached to their vices. Once they confront death, if they are still able to reach out to the neighbors they have neglected in life, they might become more vulnerable and introspective. At the end of Il Bidone, Fellini shows us Augusto, covered with wounds inflicted by his accomplices, reaching out toward nameless peasants. A few women and children go by, bent with fatigue under the weight of dry branches on their backs. Yet he remains alone, for he fails to get their attention. They do not see him and they do not hear him. At the very beginning of La Strada, Gelsomina will echo this iconography of twigs and wings on people’s backs, by carrying a bundle of thin branches, with the wind blowing into her cape’s folds. These faceless peasants are more than just visual filler in a starkly barren landscape, or even potential figures of assistance. They are a reminder of Augusto’s lifelong lack of compassion. With their loads on their backs, these peasants are Augusto’s very last vision of normal people struggling to survive. Meanwhile he looks more than ever like a wounded reptile on the rocks. But, simultaneously, these bent peasants may also represent an inkling of hope. Bazin’s “angelic” analogy endows them with a surreal quality justifiable only through death’s hallucinatory impact. No miraculous conversion is necessarily taking place, for they are only a glimpse of immanent grace. But it is as if, thanks to his waning eyesight, Augusto can begin to see another reality, and in so doing can look at himself from the outside for the very first time. Fellini’s increasingly surreal style—​from Il Bidone, via La Strada, to The Nights of Cabiria—​was no betrayal of neorealism, but a shift from a quasi-​ documentary sensibility to a visionary perspective still rooted in daily life. By concentrating on his images’ analogical potential, Fellini pushes for an introspective depth. In discussing Fellini’s approach, Bazin first calls on the term “symbolism,” only to soon revise that label in favor of poetry: There is no end to Fellini’s symbolism . . . these associations of objects and characters . . . derive their value . . . from realism alone . . . from the objectivity with which they are recorded. . . . it is enough to see the wing in the twigs for the old monk to be transformed into [an angel]. . . . One might say that Fellini . . . achieves . . . a poetic reordering of the world.38

Religion  117 Without insisting on Augusto’s “damned” or “saved” status, Fellini seeks a strange wealth in the fabric of daily life, because he is eager to make visible the invisible. Instead of associating appearances with deceptions, Fellini and Bazin believe that analogies between beings and things can reveal overlooked and redeeming connections.

Charlot and Cabiria In his review of Il Bidone, Bazin brings up the issue of redemption in connection with another famous character created by Fellini, Zampanò, the male protagonist (played by Anthony Quinn) of La Strada (1954): “So, we may believe that Augusto is saved, just like Zampanò.”39 The critic here refers to the moment when Zampanò feels guilty and mourns Gelsomina’s (Giulietta Masina) death, on the beach under a night sky. But there are no stars visible in the sky and there is no conversion. Zampanò never looks up while he cries for the first time in his life. In the absence of Nino Rota’s magical music during this sequence, silence speaks volumes. Only the halfwit Gelsomina can bring the brutal Zampanò to tears. Through each other, they have become one single whole: “La Strada is the story of two handicapped derelicts, one mentally and the other physically, but their love . . . discloses to each of them an inner depth with a purpose.”40 Zampanò’s humanization, however, comes from Gelsomina because she is much more open to childhood, the irrational, and the creativity of the natural world. For her, every leaf, every earthworm, is a fascinating microcosm of possibilities. Although Zampanò seems to make all the decisions, she is the one in touch with the world’s wonders, and she is the only one of the pair who can endow the film’s narrative with poetry. La Strada is simultaneously a documentary of an unknown Italy without monuments, the spiritual journey of two barely self-​aware creatures, and an ethnography of creativity based on the circus. To be sure, Gelsomina’s artistic persona enables Zampanò to diversify his performances. Only when she is present can he bring comedy to the act. Without her, he is limited to rote repetition of his strongman routine, as if he were either an animal or a machine. Interestingly, Bazin never takes occasion to discuss Gelsomina’s efforts to imitate Zampanò’s skills, using a toothpick, during their first meal in the trattoria. Although she is an adult woman, she behaves like a child who wishes to look as important as her new boss. In using the toothpick, however, she

118  André Bazin’s Film Theory also acts like a creature between a human and a monkey. Consequently, Gelsomina’s imitation becomes more mindless than creative. Effectively, she becomes the exact opposite of Charlot’s “inimitable imitation,”41 to use Bazin’s exact words. But instead of remaining stuck in this sort of monkey-​like mirroring, Gelsomina gradually acquires more of a unique personal voice. In contrast to Fellini’s irresponsible male characters, she wishes to be a caring wife, and confides her plan to an air-​bound figure—​a sort of philosophical messenger suggestive of an angel. More to the point, this spiritual mentor empowers her to such a degree that she begins to feel morally responsible for Zampanò, rather than living in fear of him. The Fool (Richard Basehart), a tightrope-​walking artist with wings of cardboard, explains to Gelsomina that the only way to make sense of life is to realize that everything needs everything else. Thus, the little pebbles on the side of the road and the huge stars shining in the night are equally important. Eager for a deep human attachment, Gelsomina decides to spend her life with Zampanò who, without her, would be nothing more than a bully pretending to be an artist. With the assistance of the Fool, Gelsomina learns to play a melancholic tune on the trumpet. He, in turn, is better suited to the miniature violin, with its range between the upbeat and the somber. Angel-​ like, the Fool is a goofy, daring clown as well as an empathetic, risk-​taking creature. He becomes a victim, because he can anger Zampanò more than anyone else with his free spirit and sense of humor. His talent for comedy and laughter challenges the literal and figurative constraints of Zampanò’s big muscles and heavy chains. In his review of La Strada, Bazin uses the term “interconnectedness”42 to describe the relationship between Gelsomina and Zampanò. Instead of psychology, Bazin notes, Fellini relies on objects to show changes in the relationship between his two major characters. Their caravan, for example, has an open or a closed flap according to the emotional situation at hand, without ever escalating into an explicit symbol calling attention to itself as such: The screen shows us the caravan better and more objectively than could the painter or the novelist. I’m not saying that the camera has photographed it in a straightforward manner—​even the word “photography” is too much here—​but rather that the camera simply shows us the caravan, or even better, allows us to see it. [ . . . ] Nothing that Fellini reveals to us owes any additional meaning to the manner in which it is shown. But that revelation nevertheless exists only on the screen.43

Religion  119 The key point, here, is that the caravan is the only thing that links Zampanò and Gelsomina during their life together on the road. Even if a mermaid adorns one side of the caravan, and an aggressive bird with a long beak appears on the opposite side, the camera never dwells on these two symbols. They remain barely noticeable and resist all linguistic explanations. In Bazin’s words, Fellini’s formal originality stems from how he “does not cheat on reality.”44 “Only the cinema could . . . confer on Zampanò’s extraordinary motorcycle-​driven caravan the mythic force that this object, both strange and commonplace, attains.”45 By intentionally rejecting the picturesque, La Strada is a story of desolate country roads, nameless villages, and anonymous town squares. The mountebank Zampanò needs Gelsomina to perform, and Gelsomina needs Zampanò in order to feel that she has a purpose in life. They are two social rejects who belong together. Yet the Fool’s death estranges these two misfits, because violence prevails over art. Without Gelsomina, Zampanò quickly degenerates into an aimless bum, until, one day, her music evokes their lost connection. On the beach, his memory of her transforms Zampanò from an animal into a human being. Poetry and spirituality are interchangeable in Fellini’s early films. Although Bazin does not analyze The Nights of Cabiria at length, he does make an insistent point of comparing Masina’s character, in this film and in La Strada, with Chaplin’s Tramp. But at the level of appearance alone, Bazin is likely to agree with Karl Schoonover’s detailed list of overlapping features: The ill-​fitting clothing and eccentric accouterments that they share accentuate the body’s hermeneutic significance. The awkward length of their sleeves underscores their devilishly callous shrugs, which are themselves barometers of their aberrant inclinations. Their high hems punctuate their backward kicks, delirious dances, and stomping cacophonous rages. The dark eyebrows against pale faces emphasize their emblematic sideways looks. The rhythmic sways of their handheld appendages, with Cabiria’s umbrella clearly referencing Charlie’s cane, syncopate with their bowlegged waddles.46

The sartorial aspects by themselves are not enough to establish the deeper qualities and connections of these two figures. Bazin refers to Charlie’s repetitive resourcefulness, namely his endless ingenuity and his grounding in the present. These strengths are in contrast with Gelsomina’s inability to take

120  André Bazin’s Film Theory care of herself. It could be added, however, that the Tramp displays a degree of self-​sufficiency conducive to loneliness. Although the Tramp does fall in love in The Gold-​Rush (1925), his character never finds an ideal soul mate. Everybody in the world loves Chaplin, but no woman takes the Tramp seriously, just as no man, except for The Fool, pays attention to Gelsomina’s looks and feelings. In contrast to the Tramp’s “sin of repetition,”47 Gelsomina and Cabiria ripen all of a sudden: Gelsomina does so to the point of total madness, in response to the Fool’s death, whereas Cabiria matures through an eye-​opening recognition of the oppressive reality of her romantic illusions. Especially interesting in Bazin’s reviews of La Strada and The Nights of Cabiria is his attention to how Masina’s screen persona evolves to differentiate itself from Charlot’s. Bazin asserts that in the shift from Gelsomina to Cabiria, Masina emancipates herself from the Tramp and develops her own independent acting style and distinctive construction of character. In 1955 Bazin states: “Her acting, which at first recalls Chaplin’s Little Tramp, reveals a second, much more personal vision: the unforgettable face of Gelsomina.”48 And, in 1957, after seeing The Nights of Cabiria, Bazin observes: As for Giulietta Masina, her interpretation was not the same as what I liked in La Strada. Her progress struck me as incredible. This time, her acting completely filled the character and the character filled the film.49

Bazin’s insights regarding the difference between Masina’s and Chaplin’s acting do not emerge only from his reviews of Fellini’s early films. They are also informed by his comparison of Chaplin and De Sica. Charlot is a living portrait of freedom and dexterity, because he can turn the sacred old rules of conformist behavior into a playground of new rules. Bazin notes that this happens without any sacrilege, anger, or offense because Charlot is simply and fully secular. He carries on outside any religious affiliation. Charlot must operate outside the “sacred” because his creativity is anticonformist in regard to all social rules: One of the most characteristic aspects of Charlie’s freedom in respect to the demands of society is his total indifference to the category of things held sacred. . . . But the principal strength of this portrait is . . . a radical a-​clericism . . . There is no sacrilegious intent. . . . ritual and faithful are

Religion  121 relegated to a world of the absurd, reduced to the condition of ridiculous, even of obscene objects, . . . deprived of all meaning.50

In a way, Chaplin not only calls attention to social injustices but also exposes the conditioning of all religious mythologies through his unique kind of physical comedy. He imitates norms of behavior that are not spontaneous, because they are already routinized forms of imitation in themselves. These norms are based on religious faith, profession, class, gender, age, and habit. In The Pilgrim (1923), for example, Chaplin is an escaped convict who pretends to be a Protestant minister. Completely out of synch with his congregation and its practices, the false reverend has to be reminded that he is supposed to deliver a sermon. Chaplin’s version of David and Goliath takes on the style of a vaudeville act. The Tramp’s gestures are incompatible with conveying a moral message to an audience of stern parishioners. Bazin underlines the comic incongruity of the ex-​convict in clerical garb: “It is almost as if he had introduced a Negro dance into the ritual.”51 Relatedly, I would add that, as far as Catholic iconography is concerned, the Paradise sequence in The Kid (1921) is similarly unforgettable. In that scene, the Angel Charlot flirts with a female Angel (Lita Grey) as they fly among other male winged angels competing for female attention with some stranded and horny devils. Here, Chaplin is imaginatively and sexually subversive, yet absolutely lovable and nonthreatening. In fact, in his film roles he can imitate everybody and everything so well that he effectively becomes everybody and nothing at the same time.52 Charlot’s oscillation between all or nothing is a paradoxical combination of resilience and self-​effacement. The Tramp is the cinema itself. Cinema starts with the machine’s passive recording, and Chaplin shares the medium’s mathematical precision in his slapstick routines. The medium begins to breathe through human energy, until it learns to think and create anew. Chaplin creates poetry through slapstick’s physical comedy, a poetry that always escalates into the complexities of human depth. Comparable to the dynamic power and frail status of the moving image, Chaplin’s machine-​like plasticity is intertwined with his sentimental appeal as a downtrodden bum. At the same time, Charlot’s resourceful marginality encourages his universal acceptance; he conveys a message of love and resistance. Notoriously in total control of his films by virtue of carrying out key production roles himself, Chaplin’s acting dominates the screen to such an extent that, for The Kid, he

122  André Bazin’s Film Theory selects Jackie Coogan, a choice based on how well this child actor can mirror him; Coogan can look and move like a miniature and younger Tramp. Paradoxically, Chaplin is a social hero, while Charlot is not a social character. As a symbol of the best humankind has to offer in defiance of economic greed and social injustice Charlot achieves worldwide impact and mythic status. Yet Chaplin’s gags are always organized around himself alone rather than in dialogue with other performers. Thus, these gags amount to props sustaining the display of his survival skills. It is as if a certain isolation were the price Charlot must pay for Chaplin’s enormous talents in writing, dance, music, acting, and directing. Caught between the running filmstrip and the motionless stage, Chaplin becomes an anthropocentric version of mechanical motion that never complicates itself introspectively or retrospectively. He understands only the present. Although film recording pushes him to make his performances absolutely exact, Chaplin’s talents are prodigious and independent of any medium; he would have become an amazing artist in whatever medium he would have chosen to work. Yet Bazin does point out that cinema’s international outreach skyrockets Chaplin to mythical stature.53 In comparing Chaplin to the Italian director and actor Vittorio De Sica, Bazin underlines the exceptional charisma of these two figures who can float between creative roles in front of and behind the camera during the filmmaking process. After claiming that the charm of De Sica becomes, thanks to the cinema, the most sweeping message of love the fifties has experienced since Chaplin, Bazin proceeds to clearly differentiate between these two figures. And their differences are fundamental: Chaplin concentrates on himself and within himself the radiation of his tenderness, which means that cruelty is not always excluded from his world; on the contrary, it has a necessary and dialectic relationship to love [ . . . ]. Charlie is goodness itself, projected onto the world. He is ready to love everything, but the world does not always respond.54

De Sica, Bazin explains, “infuses into his actors the power to love that he himself possesses as an actor. Chaplin also chooses his cast carefully, but with an eye to himself and to putting his character in a better light. We find in De Sica the humanity of Chaplin, but shared with the world at large.”55 Unlike Chaplin’s centripetal spin that rearranges the whole world according to his own will, Bazin’s De Sica is the ultimate example of an outward-​extending

Religion  123 warmth: “The tenderness of De Sica is of a special kind and for this reason does not easily lend itself to any moral, religious or political generalization.”56 De Sica uses miming in his direction of nonprofessional actors.57 However he does not expect them to simply imitate his pantomimes. Rather, he asks his performers to engage in the most mechanical activities, such as walking, looking, waiting, eating, counting, running, and sitting, until he sees something emerge out of his performers’ bodies that he can use for his fictional characters. His goal is to enable his nonprofessionals to discover and perform imaginary and immanent alter egos that they already have inside themselves. Thanks to his personal warmth and expansive approach to acting, De Sica summons out of his first-​time performers what they can become, helping them to find new roles or ways of being. In contrast to Chaplin’s near-​total control over his film projects, the cinema controls Cabiria in Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria. She is a romantic dreamer who seeks an ideal man’s everlasting love, the way the silent divas of Italian cinema always do on screen. During her visit to a male star, Lazzari (Amedeo Nazzari), she turns into a gullible and voyeuristic female spectator. Hidden in the actor’s bathroom, she looks through the keyhole and witnesses a passionate kiss between the dashing Alberto and his platinum-​blonde American lover, Jesse. In Lazzari’s mansion, Cabiria becomes easily disoriented and repeatedly bumps into reflecting surfaces.58 She suffers from a chronic condition of metaphorical blindness when it comes to seductive males. As a result, every time she falls in love, she gets robbed. The theme of blindness travels from the Tramp’s filmography to Masina’s Cabiria. After all, Fellini develops Nights of Cabiria out of Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), the story of a blind girl who sells flowers. Once she recovers her sight, she continues looking for the wealthy and secret Prince Charming who paid for her surgery. As soon as the formerly blind girl recognizes the touch of the Tramp’s hand and sees him for the very first time, she realizes that she has fallen in love with a figment of her imagination. Of course, the Tramp understands this just as well. His generosity is intelligent enough so that he forsakes a love based on her romantic illusions. In contrast to City Light’s realistic logic of romance, the cinema is responsible for all of Cabiria’s illusions about herself and about men in general. A list of cinematic allusions in Fellini’s eponymous film should clarify the difference between Chaplin’s and Masina’s acting styles. To begin, Masina’s “professional” name, Cabiria, is a reference to the child of Giovanni Pastrone’s

124  André Bazin’s Film Theory famous silent epic of 1914. In the sequence devoted to the neighborhood cabaret, Fellini’s Cabiria is hypnotized by a magician whose headgear with two horns suggests that he is the devil of cinema. He stages two films. The first is a peplum of rowing men in a trance. They have become Roman slaves and they jump ship during a storm. The devil’s second film references Genina’s Heaven over the Marshes. Just as Maria Goretti dreams of her white dress and little crown of white flowers for her First Communion, Cabiria waits for her Prince Charming all her life. The bridal veil with white orange blossoms worn by adult Italian brides in the 1950s is often similar to that worn by young girls for their First Communion. The film’s cinematic references do not end with the teatro di varietà. On her way to leave town with Oscar, the swindler who proposes marriage to her, Cabiria leaves behind the statuette of a female owl, which is another reference to silent cinema, in this case Giovanni Patrone’s Il Fuoco (1915), starring the diva Pina Menichelli. During this same sequence, Cabiria puts into her suitcase a nautilus shell large enough to listen to the sound of the sea. Besides pointing to Genina’s Maria Goretti, who receives this very same gift from Alessandro Serenelli, this object also suggests that Gelsomina, with her love for the sea, still lives inside Cabiria. Even Cabiria’s mambo in the nightclub has two cinematic sources: Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), one of Fellini’s immature swindlers in I Vitelloni (1953), performs this dance in the middle of the street; and, Robert Rossen’s Mambo (1955), with Silvana Mangano, marks the climax of this Latin dance in Italy just one year before the release of Nights of Cabiria. Cabiria’s repeated dance performances, however, betray her hidden feelings of inadequacy to the point that her mambos turn into masquerades of self-​confidence. Responding to her dances, film specialist Karl Schoonover explains: “Their physicality keeps us in a delicate tension between the cathartic thrill of watching the transcendence of social entrapment and the cringing discomfort of witnessing someone embarrassing herself.”59 Aggressive and insecure at the same time, Cabiria dances to let the rest of the world know that she is unashamed of her life, and is so anticonformist and self-​reliant that, unlike all the other prostitutes, she earns her living without a pimp’s protection. She can afford to be stubborn and seemingly fearless; she has her own bank account and, in the wasteland of the outskirts of Rome, her home is a petit-​bourgeois haven. While Cabiria waits for the right man, deep down she would like to stop prostituting herself. But such a change would require a substantial miracle in her life. After some hesitation, she decides to attend the procession to

Religion  125 the Madonna del Divino Amore (the Madonna of Divine Love). Shot in a quasi-​documentary style, this religious feast was very well known in Rome during the fifties. It is the dramatic and Catholic counterpart to Cabiria’s adventures on the stage of the teatro di varietà run by the devil of the cinema. Unfortunately, neither her prayers to the Virgin nor her earlier trance are enough to radically alter her life. She cannot sufficiently identify with, and join, the spectacle of hundreds of pilgrims walking to the sanctuary. Radical change—​which the term miracle encapsulates—​is too overwhelming and scary. Little wonder, then, that in the wake of this failed religious outing, the picnic of Cabiria and her friends becomes a profane indulgence in eating and drinking. Apart from this procession, during which Fellini even includes an actual priest delivering a sermon, there is only one episode based on irrational belief and social action that moves Cabiria as deeply as her exposure to hypnotism. This is her encounter with the “man with the backpack,” a nameless young man who delivers blankets and food to old people living in the caves outside of Rome. This relatively minor character is Fellini’s allusion to a militant spirituality, devoid of the spectacle of the Vatican and the decorations of the Divino Amore’s procession. Yet producer Dino De Laurentis surreptitiously deletes the scene before the release of the film to avoid censorship problems. Possibly inspired by the Abbé Pierre in France and his work with the poor, Fellini conceives of the “man with the backpack”60 as a counterbalance to Cabiria’s lighthearted encounter with Padre Giovanni. This little fellow looks like an old Franciscan monk handing out devotional images of Saint Anthony. Needless to say, Padre Giovanni is a reference to Rossellini’s The Flowers of Saint Francis (1950), a film that Fellini worked on.61 Freely moving through a wasteland of poverty, prostitution, and slums, Padre Giovanni charms Cabiria, who fails to understand the codes of conformist femininity and the responsible choice of a husband. Neither does she realize that Padre Giovanni is a fake, an ignorant Franciscan who might even try to sell his little images of Saint Anthony for sheer lucre. Encouraged as she is by the prospect of a radically new life with Oscar, Cabiria feels free to seek the friendship of Padre Giovanni. Thus, she chooses another swindler who is more of a religious transvestite than a real monk with institutional credentials. When The Nights of Cabiria screens at the Cannes Film Festival in 1957, Bazin views the version with the “man with the backpack.” Only after the screening of Cabiria in Paris, does he become aware that footage is missing, due to the cuts imposed by Dino De Laurentis.62

126  André Bazin’s Film Theory Whatever the case may be, there are only two moments in the entire film when Cabiria explicitly acknowledges her authentic self, from whom she is profoundly alienated. Her actual name is Maria Ceccarelli, a name abandoned before she undertakes her life of prostitution and assumes another identity, one spruced up by her movie-​made fantasies. During the hypnotist’s trance, “Maria Ceccarelli” is a name that Cabiria speaks as if it belongs to someone else. Later she whispers the name “Maria Ceccarelli,” as if she were thinking of another person, when she sits in the car of the “man with the backpack.” Precisely because she never develops herself into a Maria Ceccarelli who can think and choose, Cabiria is blinded by the cinema. In her life, the film medium represses a moral philosophy based on the self-​ consciousness of her own limitations. The unreconciled divide between Cabiria and Maria Ceccarelli takes the ending of Fellini’s film to a level of such emotional intensity that it justifies Bazin’s comment:  “[Masina] completely filled the character and the character filled the film.”63 When Oscar robs Cabiria on the eve of their wedding, she shouts at him to take all the money and kill her. For the very first time in her life, she really “sees” and understands what is happening to her. By pretending to love her and encouraging her to fall in love with him, Oscar’s imposture becomes far more painful than any theft. Terrified by her lucidity of vision and unable to victimize her further, Oscar runs away. Now having lost all her savings, Cabiria crosses alone the dark forest, emerging onto a road with young people playing music. No longer the gullible female spectator she had been, Cabiria’s romantic illusions have been replaced by an appreciation for the community around her. No longer the competitive mambo dancer, and with no money and no romance, Cabiria begins to consider new ways of being. A change at the level of self-​consciousness has taken place beneath the surface of her expressive and mobile face. Masina’s physiognomy is as unique as Chaplin’s, but, in this case, also radically different from his. The Tramp already knows what he is and why, so well and so deeply that, through mimicry, he can become everything else. In Cabiria’s case, her mambo masquerades of self-​confidence are a denial of Maria Ceccarelli’s vulnerable feelings. Fellini ends his film with Masina looking toward his camera, breaking through the fourth wall in an extreme close-​up. On her face a smile lingers, between sadness and relief. The viewer can spot just a small touch of makeup, the white, frozen tear of a clown’s disguise. The actress pays homage to, and mourns, the Chaplinesque

Religion  127 Gelsomina that she is born out of, and which she outgrows, both as a character and as a mature actress.

Saint Sulpice and Max Ophuls By using Genina’s film, Heaven over the Marshes, to write against Catholic hagiography, Bazin nurtures a cinema “that does not reduce religion to simple moral or social propaganda, and the cinema to the level of its instrument.”64 A Franciscan emphasis on sobriety of means, or what Blaise Pascal associates with Jean Racine’s (1639–​1699) dépouillement,65 is in clear contrast to the kitsch paraphernalia sold in religious shops around the Parisian church of Saint Sulpice. Located only one subway stop from the Saint Germain-​des-​Prés of the existentialists, the area of Saint Sulpice is characterized, on one hand, by the powerful and very intellectual religious orders of the Jesuits and the Dominicans and, on the other, by a shameful display of Catholic consumerism. The cinematic equivalent of Saint Sulpice’s pious kitsch surfaces in Max Ophuls’s baroque style of filmmaking. Antoine De Baecque points out in his biography of François Truffaut that the launching of Ophuls’s positive reputation as an auteur is due to Truffaut, who does not sway in favor of Bazin’s opinion. Their critical disagreement about Ophuls, however, does not mar the mutual respect that the two critics feel for each other. Truffaut “had to convince a public that is extremely skeptical and sees the German director as a gentle and eccentric dreamer specializing in slightly sugary Viennese pastries.”66 In stark contrast to Truffaut’s defense of Ophuls, after the release of Lola Montès (1955), starring Martine Carol, Bazin unleashes against baroque and rococo Catholic ornament in Ophuls’s work: But Ophuls is . . . a baroque filmmaker. Not only because of his fetishistic predilection for little wooden angels and the tormented pseudo-​realism of his Jesuitical style, but more seriously because of his manner of expressing the essential with a proliferation of details of secondary importance.67

Bazin’s rejection of Ophuls strikes a major note of dissent regarding the “auteurist fever” that is spreading across Cahiers du Cinéma:

128  André Bazin’s Film Theory It’s not by chance that the endless number of baby Jesuses in the Italian Renaissance are just little kids escaped from Lilliput. Little men already armed with smiles, winks, and intelligence (à la Shirley Temple).68

Bazin’s reference to Shirley Temple exposes how children in paintings and kids fabricated in Hollywood are distorted by adult stereotypes. In the fine arts, the painter’s manual skills unknowingly channel adults’ assumptions in regard to childhood. Thanks to its nonanthropocentrism, the glass eye of the camera has no preset agenda when looking at very young children who are still spontaneous. In light of Ophuls’s Jewish background, Bazin’s association of the director’s style with the baroque iconography of Saint Sulpice merits further consideration, especially in the case of Lola Montès. This famous courtesan is an outcast, a woman without a country, and as such she mirrors the cosmopolitan career of Max Ophuls. Born in the city of Saarbrucken, between the French Lorraine and the German Alsace, Ophuls worked in Germany, France, Italy, and the United States. Because of history’s cruelty against his Jewish race, Ophuls’s peripatetic cinema reflects the painful displacement of individuals with no national roots. By implication, the narrative repetitions of Ophuls’s films are complicit with a fear of change. His characters are constrained within a Viennese aristocratic fantasy. In his review of Ophuls’s final film, the extremely expensive Lola Montès, Bazin argues that the female protagonist has no depth. She never makes a mistake, never stops seducing, and never loses her confidence. The critic associates Ophuls’s heroine with the shallow spectacle of Austrian Catholicism: Spiritually from Austria, he no doubt had a predilection for the baroque style, which manifests not only in flights of chubby-​cheeked little angels even in the Normandy churches of [Le] Plaisir, but also in an even more profound sense in the actual style of his directing.69

Due to his fondness for living myths rooted in the everyday, Bazin is disappointed by Ophuls’s metaphorical use of the circus in Lola Montès; it neither champions creativity nor celebrates freedom. Instead, it flirts with death in an obscene manner. Discussing Lola’s circus as an “hallucinatory metaphor of Hell,” Bazin concludes that the courtesan Lola Montès enters into a Faustian pact with the devil, namely the circus barker who is her business partner and her new lover. Like him, Lola only understands profit and spectacle. Thus she

Religion  129 knowingly chooses Hell because it’s part of her personality! Perhaps also because she loves the Devil and he is good to her. Let’s not feel sorry for her. Moreover I’m speaking of metaphor, not of symbol. The circus is just a circus, but we acknowledge that great directors surpass reality.70

In Lola Montès, Ophuls’s moving camera is more of a nostalgic reverie than a progressive force. Bazin does acknowledge the realism of Ophuls’s circus. What infuriates him is that this circus has no poetry the way it does in Fellini. The tent of Lola Montès covers, instead, a money-​making factory emblematic of capitalist greed. One year before the release of Lola Montès, in 1954, Truffaut’s controversial essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema”71 attacks the perfectionist literary adaptations of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost as prime examples of what he labels the “Tradition of Quality, or Cinéma du Papa.” Even though Ophuls relies on short stories by Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, and Guy de Maupassant, the challenges of literary adaptation and the stylistic pitfalls of the chastised “Tradition of Quality” do not interest Ophuls in any way. The fluidity of Ophuls’s camera stands apart from any established cinematic tradition, which is why it fascinated Truffaut. With a much more discerning eye and a better sense of taste than Bazin’s, the young critic understands the historical and cultural reasons behind Ophuls’s nostalgia for Vienna, the city of Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein, a cultural capital of music, opera, and literature. In contrast to Bazin, Truffaut senses that a sincere emotional struggle in regard to a lost past underpins the director’s arabesques with his restless camera.

Robert Delannoy’s Religious Adaptations Despite their differences on Ophuls, Bazin and Truffaut agree that Jean Delannoy’s La symphonie pastorale (1946) and Dieu a besoin des hommes (1950) belong to the Tradition of Quality. These two films are literary adaptations carried out in the safety of the studio. In Cahiers du Cinéma, in 1954, Truffaut challenges Aurenche and Bost for their algebraic approach to adaptation, which he called “adaptation équivalence.” Truffaut’s argument is openly polemical:

130  André Bazin’s Film Theory Since adaptation, if we are to believe Aurenche and Bost, is an exact science, they will one day have to explain to us what criteria, what system and what internal and mysterious geometry of the masterpiece they are adapting, govern the way they cut, multiply, divide and “rectify” it.72

Truffaut’s contempt for these two major scriptwriters is comparable to Bazin’s well-​known dislike of classical mathematics, whose exceedingly clean logic he applies to the Hollywood policier. Yet, in contrast to Truffaut’s wrath, Bazin is more measured in his assessment of these two adaptations. After all, Delannoy’s religious adaptations provide the critic with an opportunity to comment on a Protestant director and two Protestant screenwriters dealing with literary sources produced by Catholic writers. Adapted from André Gide’s eponymous text (1919), Jean Delannoy’s La symphonie pastorale is a stuffy, yet titillating film. Dudley Andrew summarizes Delannoy’s overall method: “There is a glass between the viewer and this film, the glass of store window barring us from the action and asking to hold it visually in place, to understand it, but certainly not to enter it or to help construct it ourselves.”73 Delannoy’s Symphonie pastorale deals with self-​delusion and hypocrisy. A Calvinist pastor’s hypocrisy causes him to deny his sexual attraction to his blind adopted daughter, Gertrude. The story’s central question is: how can it be that physical blindness makes life significantly more erotic than normal eyesight? In La symphonie pastorale, blindness is both metaphorical and literal, moral and experiential. In Bazin’s words, “Faith is the operative mechanism in the trap that the pastor sets for himself; it is the moral alibi for his sin.”74 In Gertrude’s case, however, blindness is all she has known since birth. Tutored by her lustful and all-​seeing mentor, she imagines a world that is pure and beautiful, with singing birds and objects she enhances through her exploratory touch. Once she recovers her sight after a surgical operation, she sees snow for the first time. But the reality of a few snowflakes dancing in the air disappoints her. Most of all, she is saddened by the suffering world she discovers. Unable to cope with how her innocent beauty destroys the pastor’s relations with his entire family, Gertrude refuses to live within an impure reality. Her earlier untroubled experience of purity, eroticism, and blindness has become impossible to hold on to, and daily life has lost all its magic. Clinging to a frozen perfection, she commits suicide in the snow and ice that surround the pastor’s house.

Religion  131 Although La symphony pastorale is the biggest box-​office success since the Liberation, due to its combination of repressed eroticism and Protestant religion, Bazin prefers Jean Delannoy’s Dieu a besoin des hommes (God Needs Men, 1950). This literary adaptation, scripted by Aurenche and Bost, is based on a novel, Un recteur de l’Île de Sein (Island Priest), published in 1944 by the Catholic writer Henri Queffélec. Unlike Truffaut, whose intense dislike for this creative duo leads him to dismiss all of their work, Bazin grants this film from the Tradition of Quality considerable credit. He states, “the Protestant sensibility is not indispensable to the making of a good Catholic film, nevertheless it can be a real advantage.”75 Set in a forsaken land off the coast of Brittany, but shot in a studio for the most part, Delannoy’s film deals with poor fishermen. They live off shipwrecks and constantly abuse each other. This community is so isolated that all rules of civility are extremely thin. There is a desperate need for sacredness and for moral codes of mutual respect. In regard to Pierre Fresnay’s portrayal of Delannoy’s protagonist, Bazin observes: “Fresnay’s aristocratic and slightly Southern accent is miraculously transformed here into a gravelly speech, a kind of barking of the soul.”76 Unable to cope with the islanders’ brutality, the local Catholic priest betrays his mandate and abandons the community. The local sacristan decides to act as a substitute priest in an effort to sustain whatever level of compassion remains in his community. Little by little, he fills the void left by the duly appointed, but absent, priest. Meanwhile, the islanders realize that their emotional sufferings have only increased following the departure of their priest. They have no one to talk to, and their church—​the sole site of communal gathering—​looks more and more disheveled after each storm. One day it rains inside the basin used for baptismal ceremonies. The sacristan interprets this accident as a natural “sign” demanding better care of the local church. Thus, he begins to assume the full ceremonial role of a regular priest. Understandably, the islanders quickly realize that they cannot go on. They need to choose one of themselves to represent a collective mandate that stands for compassion and forgiveness, while it operates separately from the punishments of justice. Eventually these shared needs escalate into the sacristan’s temporary self-​appointment, until the islanders face a new and even worse Catholic priest dispatched from the church authorities on the mainland. The replacement priest arrives with guards and knows nothing of the local way of life. Nor does he even care to learn. For Bazin, this second Catholic priest is an

132  André Bazin’s Film Theory inadequately developed character in comparison to the local sacristan’s complexity. The critic even wonders whether this second weak and institutional Catholic character amounts to a Protestant anticlerical gesture on the part of the filmmakers. Thus, he writes: The adaptation has at least one regrettable weakness: the character of the priest. . . . The revolt of the islanders, and even more so of the false priest, is too easily explained by the stupidity of the new priest. Casting Jean Brochard as the new priest, moreover, . . . was itself an act of heavy-​handed anticlericalism.77

The two entities—​the islanders who live like beasts and their legitimate, yet disinterested, priest—​play crucial illustrative roles in Bazin’s argument that any religion needs both external validation and internal acceptance in order to achieve and maintain the “regularization of a free union.”78 Bazin also refers to religion as a purifying bodily organ79 without which a community would poison itself. In Protestantism, the Church can reside in one’s own home, and local churches may institutionalize their own rules through independent interpretations of the Scriptures. Bazin is well aware that, due to its extreme isolation, the situation on the island of Sein is more easily compatible with the do-​it-​yourself Protestant approach, rather than Catholicism’s centralized hierarchical model. In Delannoy’s film, the despondent Catholic priest nearly tramples on the Eucharist hosts baked by local women. The immanent quality of the sacred, here, derives from the local flour and local water the women have used to make these hosts. Bazin points out: “They are merely small pieces of bread. But even the most irreligious viewer will gasp at the horror of this gesture.”80 The indigenous creation of the hosts endows these objects with a special aura, fostering fellowship. Instead of developing topics such as this into a richer and more open-​ended narrative of shared experience, as Bazin would have hoped, Delannoy’s film turns into a closed-​off tragedy, unresolvable by either Protestant or Catholic institutional means. This theological dead-​end becomes undeniable, since no viable choice is possible between the available options of an unwilling priest and a self-​taught one. Neither figure is able to mediate between the local and the global. In the end, Bazin is disappointed with Aurenche and Bost for replacing the original end of the literary source with a much more facile conclusion equivalent to “a barking of the soul.” In the novel, the Catholic bishop resigns

Religion  133 himself to acceptance of the sacristan’s self-​taught ways. In the film, however, in spite of a spectacular demonstration of the false priest’s independence during a burial at sea, no condemnation and/​or removal of the disrespectful Catholic clergyman follows. The islanders sheepishly proceed to attend his mass and defer to his institutional authority. Bazin concludes that the rebellious islanders and their self-​appointed sacristan-​priest earn the audience’s sympathy. At the same time, the entrenched presence of the unsympathetic priest serves the purpose of reinforcing the French secular attitude of contempt toward Catholic institutional hierarchies and their dogmatic ways.

Bazin’s Ontology, Bresson’s Stylistics “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” is considered Bazin’s most famous and important essay.81 Yet, in his 1952 essay “Le journal d’un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson,”82 Bazin’s discussion of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951) is an equally foundational work that translator Hugh Gray is not alone in believing to be the finest piece of film criticism ever written. Curiously, “Ontology” is an essay on “embalming duration” in a figurative way that ranges from likeness to resemblance. By contrast, “Stylistics” deals with how Bresson thins out the protagonist’s face despite his frequent close-​ups. Since less is more, this facial icon of suffering becomes an abstract conduit of spiritual energy from one character to another, and from Diary to the audience. Despite this dichotomy between Bazin’s emphasis on photographic preservation and Bresson’s emptying out of the visual register, the “Stylistics” and the “Ontology” talk to each other in ways that illuminate Bazin’s immanent and phenomenological definition of spirituality. In cinema’s lifelike and illusionist context, the word “spirit” is, of course, difficult to pin down, because it ranges from soul to a human’s last breath. Spirit may also apply to the idea of an electrified ghost or mobilizing emotion that is consubstantial with the filmic image’s shadowy status and its quasi-​immaterial presence. Whatever the case may be, Bazin is interested in how a character’s last breath and the blank frames at the end of a film leave behind themselves a trail of energy that invites spectators to think through their own ethos in life. That Bazin’s language in the “Stylistics” derives from the “Ontology” is clearly demonstrable from one example. In the scene set in the confessional’s dark space, the lit face of a young woman, Chantal, looks “like a seal stamped

134  André Bazin’s Film Theory on wax.”83 Bazin’s phrase not only describes the translucent pallor of her flesh but also evokes her face’s resemblance to a death mask, even though she is so young. Regardless of her age, Chantal is already an individual in an advanced state of moral decay. In these circumstances, on one hand, the mutuality between light and Chantal’s skin color reasserts the physical bond of object and model in photography. On the other, the worn-​out combination of seal and wax within a mold suggests an egocentric fixity that contradicts the confessional as a place for moving out of oneself. Bazin’s “seal stamped on wax” fits the young woman’s preoccupation with death, to the extent that her phantom-​like face conveys her suicidal fantasy to the priest. The critic explains: Naturally Bresson,  .  .  .  is only concerned with the countenance as flesh, which, when not involved in playing a role, is a man’s true imprint, the most visible mark of his soul. It is then that the countenance takes on the dignity of a sign. He would have us be concerned here not with the psychology but with the physiology of existence.84

Through scars and wrinkles, the countenance records on its fleshy surface the ravages of time, the traces of aging, the tolls of moral decay and physical stress. The reason why Bazin returns to his vocabulary of the “Ontology” and views the girl’s face as a death mask is that Chantal looks like a living dead. Her face alone speaks much more eloquently than the prose of a book, where language can be deceiving. The area of the face, with its movements and expressions, is beyond anyone’s control, even her own. Chantal’s face reveals her anger and suffering as she struggles with her father’s affair and her mother’s indifference. An adaptation of the eponymous novel (1936) by Georges Bernanos (1888–​1948), Diary of a Country Priest features an idealistic young priest, suffering from severe stomach pains, who is sent to his first parish in the village of Ambricourt, in the north of France, where he confronts a hostile and unwelcoming community. In Ambricourt, the villagers’ faces are similarly unhappy, albeit for different reasons, because every single character is suffering. Arranged through a proliferation of close-​ups, Bresson’s bleak “gallery of portraits” prominently includes the priest’s face, whose expression conveys a state of constant pain. He is always about to vomit due to the relentless spasms in his stomach. After his own death from cancer, however, the priest’s countenance becomes more

Religion  135 than just flesh, pain, or wax. Despite its literal disappearance from the screen, Bazin declares that the priest’s young face is the only one that acquires “the dignity of a sign.” In contrast to other characters, who die of old age (the Countess) or who choose suicide (Doctor Delbende), the young man’s death is marked by a black Christian cross on a blank screen. Once his unforgettable face disappears from the screen, the destiny of all humankind lingers on through the sign of universal suffering symbolized by the Christian cross.85 Bresson’s abstract, yet Christological, ending continues to invite all kinds of speculation. As a Christ-​like figure, the young priest feels abandoned by God during his miserable time in Ambricourt. Night after night he experiences God as increasing silence, absence, and doubt. During his final agony, in a friend’s filthy apartment in Lille, the young priest realizes that only human beings can break this silence and make God’s love present in this world, by changing their attitude toward others. Love moves people toward each other. Likewise, the images of cinema move within an energetic flow that is both intellectual and emotional in its impact on audiences. Owing to this centrifugal passage of energy, inside the film and from the film outward, Bazin can claim that the priest’s cross attains the “dignity of a sign.” The Christian symbol fills in for a loss of presence, but it also celebrates how this absence creates important space for new energy and ethical choices to be carried out by those who are still living. Needless to say, the “dignity of a sign,” or an absent presence, enjoys a photographic ontology, to the extent that the cross belongs to Christ as well as to every other human being. Even if Bazin were to deal at greater length with Bresson’s adaptation of the Bernanos novel, he would probably conclude that Diary moves well beyond the usual dialectic of word and image in film adaptations. This is not a film based on an exchange between the visual and the verbal. Bresson’s agenda is much more ambitious than the transformation of the protagonist’s face into writing.86 Bazin’s “Stylistics” is not an essay on ekphrasis. Its essential concern is not with how the priest’s face becomes visually displaced by images of written notes and scribbled pages. There is no iconophobia in this film whose stylistics celebrate, instead, an ontological plurality. The organizational principle of Bresson’s Diary and Bazin’s “Stylistics” relies on references to literature, radio, theater, and film. Diary is a film that rethinks cinema in the light of other media. As if all these aesthetic resources were still inadequate to the task, Diary’s experimental, avant-​garde complexity pushes Bazin to call on scientific and religious references as well. Only in this way can Bazin explain why Bresson’s

136  André Bazin’s Film Theory Diary attains the level of “pure” cinema by means comparable to De Sica’s very different purity in Bicycle Thieves (1948), which Bazin mentions in the “Stylistics.” Bresson’s project in Diary is to push the remapping of the senses to an extreme limit, and by so doing, the director prefigures an experiment in intermediality which proves to be notably inspirational for the future filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague. One may detect in Bresson’s exhaustive remapping of the senses an anticipation of Jean-​Luc Godard’s permutations across word, graphics, line, color, sound, objects, silence, and music. Bresson wants the audible word to become flatly inexpressive or awkwardly spoken. Verbal exchanges in his film sound as if the microphone were recording sentences read deadpan from a book, rather than dealing with a combination of nonprofessional and professional actors delivering their fictional characters’ lines. Since a remapping of the senses is at stake, Bazin does not only look at Bresson’s images but also listens to them. Thus, he concludes that Diary is comparable to a radio broadcast of off-​screen sounds. On one hand, Bresson’s expansion of the viewer’s listening range depends on an experimental use of a recitative; on the other, it leads Bazin to imagine Diary as “a silent film with spoken titles,” and “a text post-​synchronized on a monotone.”87 Perhaps one could argue that sound prevails over a word and image dialectic in order to sense interiority. So extreme is the remapping of the senses in Bresson’s film that the question arises as to whether Diary is most accurately described as a sound film without images, or a sound film without acting, or perhaps a silent film with sentences written by Bernanos and used as spoken intertitles by Bresson. Only a few years before Diary, in 1945, Béla Balázs wrote a very lyrical essay on the face in close-​up and soliloquy in silent cinema, paying special attention to Danish actress Asta Nielsen, and to Maria Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Based on the original documents from Joan’s trial, Dreyer’s Passion is heroic.88 Set next to it, Diary is simply ordinary, radically anonymous in its content. In fact, while we know the name of the quasi-​nonprofessional Swiss actor, Claude Laydu, who plays him, the young country priest remains nameless in Bresson’s film, as well as in Bernanos’s novel, which is written in the first person. Appropriately, Dreyer shows the shadowy image of a Christian cross. This symbol is stretched over an undulating surface that looks like a flag moving in the wind.89 In contrast to Bresson’s Diary, Dreyer is dealing with a historical

Religion  137 event, in which both a national flag and the Christian cross are significant. Joan dies in a public execution in the midst of a war between England and France. She is a heroine, a martyr, a mad woman, a visionary. In contrast to Dreyer’s Protestant film, where a local community reads the Scriptures and decides their interpretations, Diary is a universal, Catholic “passion.” As such, it observes the structural logic of the Medieval Passion Play. Yet nobody around the country priest is aware of his agony. Furthermore, in the desolation of Ambricourt, there is no need for national or political history. Even though it is rooted in the lives of anonymous people, the allegory of Christ’s passion is so familiar that it can adapt itself to all situations, without requiring a key to unlock its presence and significance. According to Bazin, Bresson’s Way of the Cross becomes an analogy for every individual’s anonymous and unpredictable journey toward death: “Each bears his own cross and each cross is different, but all are the Cross of the Passion.”90 The Way of the Cross is a reminder that no human being is impervious to suffering and death, even though we all die in a different way, just as we each live in a different way. In The Passion, Dreyer’s mysticism is generated by the bold photography which presents readable and mute faces that are expressively rich, while these very same images strive for a painterly aura. Well aware that Joan is famous for hearing supernatural voices, Bresson not only avoids Dreyer’s pictorial mysticism but also rejects supernatural appearances and reduces them to the priest’s lonely hallucinations. Even when the young man declares that he has caught a glimpse of the “Divine Countenance,” his delirious words clash against the immanence of daily life, that is, the rough hands of Seraphita, the peasant girl who comes to his rescue. Dreyer’s Passion is a silent film, but its images are filled with words spoken by expressive and knowing faces, according to a historically accurate script. The coincidental and mundane noises of daily life have no place inside a sealed medieval courtroom. This self-​contained space allows Dreyer to rule out all contingency. Any makeup on Falconetti’s face, for example, would disturb the gravity of the legal proceedings and their basis for inclusion in the historical record. By contrast, the use of Ambricourt in Bresson’s Diary is centrifugal and constantly suggesting something contingent beyond its frame. As if he were looking for answers in a dark and unknown universe, Bresson’s protagonist walks around with a shaky lamp on his way to church at night.91 There, praying and faith are far more difficult than writing.

138  André Bazin’s Film Theory In his detailed analysis of Diary, Tony Pipolo quotes the young priest’s feeling of imprisonment: “Behind me there was nothing. Before me, there was a wall, a blank wall.” Pipolo goes on to say: “We hear this in voice over as he looks so intently off-​screen with what Bresson aptly calls ‘the ejaculatory force of the eye.’ ” Pipolo continues: “the viewer anticipates, almost physically, a cut to the object of his glance that we feel certain is just beyond the frame. But of course nothing in the off-​screen space materializes to answer this shot, not even the cross hanging on the wall, which we see moments later behind the priest.” Instead of the cross behind him, the young man in voice-​ over claims that “there was nothing.” This mental erasure of the cross, Pipolo remarks, “seems to accentuate the blankness ‘before’ him . . . , precluding the viewer’s filling in the picture with knowledge of the cross’s presence in the off-​screen space to which he looks.”92 During the film’s conclusion, Bresson’s empty screen is not only death’s void; it also becomes a blank slate for a new beginning. In Bresson’s Diary, horror vacuii turns into an open space for individual reflection in the face of death. Bresson’s adaptation of Bernanos’s novel is not only an example of pure cinema, but also an achievement comparable to Mallarmé’s blank page or the use of silence in the poetry of Rimbaud.93 Thus, in the “Stylistics,” Bazin celebrates Bresson’s radical approach on the scale of the very same Symbolist poets who backed up Paul Valéry’s rise to fame in French intellectual culture during the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast to Valéry’s elitist social circles, Bazin lives in a completely different world of cultural activism. Well known for his disdain of the realist novel and its superfluous details, Valéry is the flagbearer of mental abstraction, secularism, skepticism, and purification of language in poetry. Bazin notes that “Valéry condemned the novel for being obliged to record that ‘the Marquise had tea at five o’clock.’ ” The film critic later compares Bresson’s excision of Bernanos’s visual details to “lines drawn across an image to affirm its transparency, as the dust affirms the transparency of a diamond; it is impurity at its purest.”94 Whereas for Valéry the search for perfection leads to poetry, and only poetry, for Bazin the residual impurities of realism are necessary because they match human imperfections. Given the atheist Valéry’s intense association with science and his passionate dislike of religion, Bazin’s ironic reference to this famous poet might be his concise and veiled way of suggesting that Bresson’s realist adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s Catholic novel proves

Religion  139 Valéry wrong. To be sure, Bresson’s Diary demonstrates that the novel in film can thrive with the same rigor and purity that Valéry approvingly ascribes to mathematics. Significantly, Bresson’s adaptation relies on a “creative fidelity,”95 which in effect endows Bernanos’s book with a new level of energy. In the “Stylistics,” Bazin references Kierkegaard’s concept of “repetition” to help demonstrate that the film’s ending welcomes the eclipse of the protagonist’s face and its replacement with invisible spectators looking at the screen. Bazin’s allusion to Kierkegaard’s repetition emphasizes, in a quasi-​prophetic way, how a person’s death may, unintentionally, lead to the envisioning of an alternative moral order.96 Death produces a void open to new thinking. By rewriting a brief phrase lifted from the Gospel of Saint Luke concerning Christ’s birth: “a grain of sand that gets into and seizes up a piece of machinery,”97 Bazin relies on Kierkegaard’s repetition to make the point that every event, small or large, does heavily matter in the order of things. Whether or not someone is wretched, their death is cause for all of us to examine how and why we live. Possibly to offset the Danish philosopher’s irrational penchant for the supernatural and to underline perceptual rejuvenation, Bazin responds to Bresson’s eschatological interrogation of death with a zoological image of rebirth, invoking the “recurrent spasms of childbirth or of a snake sloughing off its skin.”98 Scandinavian scholar Arne Melberg explains that Kierkegaard’s repetition, or “moving forward,” is based on an irrational leap of faith toward the unknown. This concept stands in opposition99 to both Platonic recollection and the Hegelian notion of synthesis issuing out of thesis and antithesis. In Kierkegaard, “the now of repetition is always an after. But not only: since the movement of repetition also makes it new, makes ‘the new.’ ”100 In an uncanny way, Melberg’s explanation of Kierkegaard’s repetition also clarifies how and why the nonanthropocentric, equalizing impact of filmic recording yields a special eye and fulfills Bazin’s definition of the cinema as “objectivity in time.” In his “Ontology” essay, Bazin claims that every photographic trace not only repeats, but also adds something new to the order of things, because every moment in time is different. Melberg’s comment fits, as well, Bazin’s description of Bresson’s adaptation process as “creative fidelity,” by means of which mechanical recording and filming the book “word by word” becomes far more than simple duplication.

140  André Bazin’s Film Theory By “dreaming” Bernanos’s text over again, and opening the empty screen to our suspension of disbelief in the soul’s afterlife, Bresson’s adaptation achieves cinematic reinvention. The film becomes more faithful to the book’s spirit the more it takes “creative license” with its literal detail and, simultaneously, the more irrational belief in both art as creativity and religion as spirituality can challenge the viewer’s rational mind. The present tense of Kierkegaard’s repetition is prophetic, because it becomes a passage into the future, thanks to an absence. More concretely, a lonely diary can pave the way for the dialogical text that the film becomes, by addressing the spectator through the voice-​ over, written text, and, eventually, death. To fill this void with the energy of hope, the young priest’s friend, the defrocked seminarian Louis Dufrety, writes a letter to report the former’s death to his mentor, the curé de Torcy, and promises to visit in person. In a film in which literary adaptation takes the form of a surreal dialectic of recording and dreaming, Dufrety’s straightforward letter, devoid of melodrama, stands out in an open-​ended current of intellectual and emotional exchanges. Thanks to a voice-​over suspended between Dufrety as the writer and the curé de Torcy as the reader, we learn that the young priest’s last spoken words were: “What does it matter? All is grace.” By changing others, the young priest changes and finds himself. “All is Grace” seals a peaceful death. The young priest has found solace in his vocation before dying. By acting like “a grain of sand” inside a machine, the priest’s death disrupts the laziness of Dufrety’s self-​centered and mechanical life. A blank screen tries to end a narrative that instead goes on searching for answers in the spectators’ minds. Bresson’s film concludes with the lifelike motions of the cinema converging into the deathlike stillness of photography. Within this screen of vibrating emptiness, a black cross looms large. Time as death is the real. Time’s flow is also the reality of Otherness, contingency, grace, and God.101 Everything becomes equal in front of cinema’s lens, just as we are all mortals in front of life. In the wake of this leveling process, the white screen and the white page become alike and exchangeable. A strong believer in the power of spiritual legacies, but too much of a Darwinian to accept the Christian soul, Bazin is neither a mystic nor a spiritualist. For the film theorist, what rescues memory in front of death is “the dignity of signs,” namely, cinematic resurrection. A sign that compensates for the void, the black cross is a religious symbol that objectively participates in a social mythology. The cross is not only a reminder of Christ’s crucifixion

Religion  141 but also a symbolic answer to Sartre’s nihilist view of existence. The projected light lingering on Bresson’s screen reminds us that cinema’s parallel world straddles empty actuality and ontological fullness. In the wake of this photographic paradox, there might be much more to death than just the end of suffering.

5  Epilogue Wind and Dust

In response to Edgar Morin’s Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire (1956),1 Bazin notes that the advent of this turn-​of-​the-​century medium fits an ancient myth: the story of the human ambition to represent life in motion. Thanks to the cinema, Bazin writes, “civilization has returned as close as possible to the most archaic and perhaps universal human myth.”2 Is Bazin proposing a philosophy of history that is simultaneously evolutionary and circular? To begin with, circularity applies to how, from the stereoscope to 3-​D immersion, pure cinema makes itself disappear into the end of cinema. Whether or not the “end of cinema” corresponds to neorealism, the latter is an ontogenetic phenomenon because it contains the seeds of its own destruction. Is Bazin’s “end of cinema” a temporary stage within an evolutionary trajectory? Or does he imply that cinema never ends, because this medium dies and then it regenerates in a new way? Or, even better, in speaking of the end of cinema during the forties and fifties, is Bazin unknowingly anticipating the end of photographic cinema and the arrival of new technologies such as digital imaging? Bazin’s film theory deserves to be further interrogated from the point of view of competing philosophies of history; however, all these questions fall outside the scope of this book, which is limited to metaphors and allusions on art, science, and religion. This book has explicated two very different concepts in Bazin’s film theory—​ anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism—​by suggesting that this film critic’s worldview was based on an anti-​anthropocentric ethos. Without a doubt, Bazin and Edgar Morin shared a comparable anthropological approach to the cinema. In regard to the ontology of the photographic image, Morin and Bazin conceptualize cinematic recording in a similar way. In her introduction to The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, translator Lorraine Mortimer says that for Morin: “The image . . . contains the magical quality of the double, but interiorized, nascent, and subjectivized. The André Bazin’s Film Theory. Angela Dalle Vacche, Oxford University Press (2020) © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190067298.001.0001

Epilogue  143 double possesses the psychic, affective quality of the image but in an alienated magical form.”3 An advocate of photography as mummification, Bazin argues that its image is a Double which becomes the Other in relation to a Self. Of course, the dialectic of Self and Other is central to Bazin’s Personalist and anti-​anthropocentric film theory.4 By dealing with a social technology that combines economic profit with storytelling, Morin and Bazin agree that the cinema compensates for isolation in modern life through “affective participation.” By so doing, cinema educates communities to share narratives and values. Cinema’s illusory doubling of the world depends on irrational belief. The Double, in turn, is compatible with Mounier’s interest in Otherness. Indeed, the Double, the Mummy, the Shadow, and the Other are all variations on the modern tension between substance and appearance.

Anti-​Anthropocentric Anthropocosmomorphism Morin’s priority—​ the imagination with its emotions—​ is most compatible with Bazin’s irrational belief turning into hope. Furthermore, the film critic supports the anthropologist’s view that the cinema is an anthropocosmomorphic medium. Regardless of these points of intersection, Bazin’s cosmology is quite different from Morin’s. On all accounts, the film critic is most sensitive to Pascal’s tragic view of humankind struggling with a silent and unknowable God. With his typical penchant for irresolvable dilemmas, Pascal maintains that man is too imperfect to master the cosmos rationally and too self-​aware to ignore the irrational appeal of the cosmos. Through this very same Pascalian paradox, Bazin understands Morin’s anthropocosmomorphism in an anti-​anthropocentric manner. One way or another, all the surviving films ever made constitute a record of the twentieth century. No such opportunity for the memory of the future and the future of memory exists before 1895. Even if, through the cinema, humankind contributes to the history of the universe, Bazin’s anti-​anthropocentric film theory reminds us that we are never in control or at the center of the world we live in. Interested in Lucien Lévy-​Bruhl’s studies on primitive mentality,5 Morin turns to Jean Epstein’s film theory, which is keen on cinema’s power to vivify inert matter and satisfy a modern longing for magic.6 In bringing up the notion of photogénie, originally coined by early film theorist Louis Delluc,7

144  André Bazin’s Film Theory Epstein calls attention to the special value that the filmic image confers on reality.8 Together, Epstein and Morin understand cinema’s impact in an animistic way. On the contrary, for Bazin, what they call photogénie derives from the objectifying impact of the camera lens (objectif) on the world, which is egalitarian and nonanthropocentric rather than animistic, mystical, or pantheistic.9 Not surprisingly, Morin’s anthropocosmomorphism brings to mind Bazin’s association of magic and anthropomorphism, where this psychological reaction remains inevitable and automatic. Bazin never attributes a moral consciousness to unthinking nature or unfeeling technology. This is not to say the French critic does not appreciate analogical interconnections among beings and things. On the contrary, these very same analogical overlaps help him raise questions on what demarcates a human from a machine, an animal, a plant, and an object. Most importantly, even though he appreciates Epstein’s fascination with natural forces and Jean Renoir’s sensualist pantheism,10 Bazin never situates God inside nature, nor does he believe in any utopian cosmic harmony or in Einstein’s singular mathematical reality. Despite his animistic analogy between the self and the cosmos through anthropocosmomorphism, Morin never argues for an anthropocentric, superhuman fusion. This very extreme, futuristic, Christological scenario, instead, propels Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s controversial religious philosophy.11 A Jesuit paleontologist and a geologist, Teilhard stands out as an impressive Darwinian scholar. He contributes to major research expeditions on the origin of man, from Asia to Africa. One point of intersection between Bazin and Teilhard de Chardin is the Abbé Breuil, or Henri Breuil (1877–​1961). This Jesuit paleontologist and archaeologist studied the Paleolithic caves of Lascaux. Discovered by 1940 in Dordogne, these caves opened to the public eight years later. Bazin mentions Paleolithic art in his brief history of image-​making for his “Ontology of the Photographic Image” essay. Intrigued with the irrational power of images, Bazin highlights the magical properties of animals painted on the walls of the Lascaux caves. Executed before a hunt, these images claim a propitiatory value. Indeed Bazin’s phenomenological and Christological film theory should never be confused with Teilhard’s “noo-​sphere”—​that is, a strictly mental universe of disembodied images or displays of artificial intelligences—​ through which Gilles Deleuze anticipates today’s way of living with multiple screens, virtual realities, and neural nets.12 Teilhard de Chardin was

Epilogue  145 trained as a scientist, but was hardly in touch with the arts. His evolutionary Darwinism, which degenerates into a superhuman reincarnation, greatly differs from Bazin’s. Bazin mentions Teilhard once in his work, and he does so probably because Teilhard stands out as a charismatic, yet contested figure during the fifties.13 A familiar presence in Paris’s most exclusive circles, Teilhard de Chardin never intersects with the postwar film culture that Bazin spearheads from the early forties to the late fifties. In contrast to Bazin’s unassuming educational style, Teilhard’s upper-​class origins explain his frequentation at the Collège de France and his scientific conversations with the atheist Paul Valéry, from one soirée to the next. In contrast to the institutionally sponsored research trips (Cambridge, Yale) that Teilhard participates in, Bazin’s writings sustain the maturation of an ephemeral and promiscuous medium that learns about itself from scratch. While Bazin modestly operates under the radar and in the deepest trenches of working-​class culture, Teilhard skyrockets himself into the Institut Catholique in the Saint Sulpice neighborhood. At the same time, Teilhard’s futuristic, extraplanetary ideas get him in trouble with the Vatican. Repeatedly, Bazin states his lack of interest in the Saint Sulpice circles, but he is flexible enough to make an important exception. He befriends the Sulpicien priest, Amédée Ayfre (1922–​1964), author of several books on cinema and spirituality.14 Bazin’s stress on the opacity of the world, the ambiguities of quantum physics, and the randomness of lived experience stand in clear-​cut opposition to Teilhard de Chardin’s teleological trajectory of knowledge, redemption, and salvation. With him, religion acquires the colors of science fiction. According to Georges Cuenot’s excellent biography,15 Teilhard de Chardin’s three evolutionary phases—​geogenesis, biogenesis, and noogenesis—​do not stop with the development of an ethical self-​consciousness. They presuppose an ultrahuman leap into the divine. Teilhard argues for a transhuman mutation that goes much further than either human biology or Bazin’s emphasis on cinema’s ethical impact. Toward the end of his life, the omnivorous Teilhard becomes interested in cybernetics. Bazin, instead, criticizes the world of artificial intelligence and rejects André Cayatte’s courtroom drama films, with robot-​like characters ruled by their actions’ legal geometry. In contrast to Teilhard’s exposure to robotics, Morin’s homme imaginaire is, first and foremost, the film spectator looking at himself as the Other, over and over again, as if someone new is there each time, whenever a film is

146  André Bazin’s Film Theory projected against a white screen. Not trained in aesthetics, Morin neglects to explain the importance of the arts and the sciences in the cinematic experience. The question, therefore, arises of how can an ethical and spiritual evolution develop, thanks to the cinema as an impure medium made of art and science? When they sit in the dark, spectators become as motionless as plants, and, as such, they resemble the stillness of photography and painting. Spectators can also become animals in motion, to the extent that they respond to nervous stimuli triggered by moving elements on screen, enabling them to explore the world vicariously, through camera movement. They can also become a gravity-​defying machine, like an airplane during an aerial view that miniaturizes the world; or they can reduce themselves to an insect’s size when they look at gigantic elements on the screen in close-​up. To be sure, Bazin’s spectator is also shaped by the film theorist’s ranking of the arts, as a system based on time and literature, over space and painting, and by his “tree of the sciences”16 with all its interrelated disciplines from biology all the way down to mathematics. As far as the arts are concerned, literature, editing, and the thinking mind are on top; theater, camera movement, and the world are in the middle; painting and the senses are at the bottom. Bazin’s tree of the sciences reverses the arts’ mind-​world-​body sequence with time, space, and the senses ranked in such a way so that language and thought have priority over the sensuality of pictorial images. As soon as we move to what Bazin calls “the tree of the sciences,” within the interfaces of contingency with biology and abstract logic with mathematics, biology belongs to the top from which it points to the finite and inevitably frail organisms of all living entities. The chemistry and physics of interaction with the world are in the middle; and the mathematics of the rational, abstract mind sit at the bottom. This reduction of human logic to such an inferior position is a sobering and anti-​anthropocentric gesture that balances the prominence of literature and thought in Bazin’s system of the arts. In the cinema, Bazin’s system of the arts and the tree of the sciences complement each other in such a way that lifelike motion compensates for physical decay, while the blind spots of subjective perception prevail over the proofs and the truths of scientific knowledge. In the end, one can live perfectly well without religion and without spirituality. Yet the irrational remains an unavoidable component of the human experience, which the cinema addresses by triggering emotions.

Epilogue  147

The Wild Grass of Saintonge Bazin’s very first essay, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” and his very last, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge” (1958),17 deal with art history and his preference for the Romanesque style over Renaissance perspective.18 In his critical biography, Dudley Andrew clarifies the plan behind a filmmaking project that Bazin conceived near the end of his life: Early in 1957, after some conversations with Pierre Braunberger, the man who produced so many of the New Wave’s efforts, Bazin decides to make a short documentary on the Romanesque churches of the Saintonge district in France, the area in which he had grown up.19

To film silent architectural structures in the Saintonge area (Figures 5.1–​5.7), on the west central Atlantic coast of France, is a project less complicated to organize than a literary adaptation with sets, props, actors, legal rights, and dialogue. Between 1957 and 1958 Bazin knows that he does not have much time to live, nor much energy to work with. He is aware that every single day makes a difference. This feeling of irreversible countdown might explain his choice to return to the Saintonge region of his youth, at the very end of his life. After all, this topic and location date back to when he studied in La Rochelle and possibly rode a bicycle in his free time to explore the nearby countryside. Furthermore, his decision to film suggests that he is eager to experience the cinema from all angles, at least once, before dying. Of course, Bazin knows very well that the stones of Saintonge make visible the destructive passage of time, together with the persistence of human emotions, century after century. Most importantly, this project offers Bazin the opportunity to visualize for his readers the major coordinates of his film theory. Thus, his essay on Saintonge is like an intellectual testament written in the form of a preliminary treatment or scenario. Notwithstanding the proximity of the Saintonge region to La Rochelle,20 Bazin’s attachment to the Romanesque style of the early Middle Ages may look suspicious to some readers unfamiliar with his work. As Sarah Wilson explains: The Romanesque and medievalist revival of the late 30s was accentuated during the occupation of France, and was not, of course, unrelated to the

148  André Bazin’s Film Theory general return to artisanal and pre-​industrial values that were being promoted under Vichy.21

In regard to this reactionary movement back to the Middle Ages, Bazin’s political record is crystal clear. In his critical biography, for example, Dudley Andrew mentions that the young critic constantly avoided Catholic collaborators.22 Worth mentioning is that Bazin’s foray into religious art had nothing to do with the Art Sacré movement, with Père Marie-​Alain Couturier at its center. This high-​profile Dominican became a towering figure in the heart of the Parisian art world. Trained in the craft of stained-​glass windows as a young man, Père Couturier sponsored work by Pierre Matisse and knew Pablo Picasso personally. Besides staying away from all political affiliations, Bazin shuns intellectual elites and upper-​class circles. Nothing is more removed from Bazin than the art galleries and the art magazines resurfacing after the German Occupation. Without losing his love for abstraction and experiment in film, Bazin knows that realism and narrative have always been the gospel of the illiterate poor. Bazin wants his Saintonge documentary to celebrate contemporary life over the vestiges of the past. Eager to reach a new and larger audience, beyond the written page, Bazin focuses on an ethnography of spontaneous vitality. His ideal plan is to shoot the film in the spring, after the pruning of the linden trees that typically grow along the roads leading to these Saintonge churches. This timing is already a gesture in favor of new life, the present, and the future, since the art-​historical photographs for this topic are usually taken in the winter. At that time, the trees are so barren that artistic detail is easier to grasp from a distance and in context with the rest of the architecture. Even if Bazin engages in all the preparatory art-​historical research necessary for this documentary, art history is not his major topic. Besides preferring spring over winter, he avoids the specialized architectural and sculptural language which the French-​born Henri Focillon (1881–​1943), an expert on the Saintonge Romanesque, would expect from one of his students in a thesis on this subject.23 The Saintonge region becomes geographically important during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, because this period sees the development of a pilgrimage route to the Spanish site of Santiago de Compostela, passing through Saintes, an important town in the Saintonge-​Charente-​Maritime region. Despite the common association of medievalism with mysticism, an

Epilogue  149 attentive reading of Bazin’s Saintonge essay discloses that his orientation is Personalist and more existentially spiritual than traditionally Catholic or institutionally religious. In fact, Bazin reminds his readers of two cultural phenomena relevant to the past and the present of this region: on one hand, he underlines the “ferocity of the wars of religion” which agitated this landscape; on the other, he pauses on the “relative indifference to religion among the population of the Charente region.”24 Despite the Middle Ages’ reputation for darkness, suffering in the flames of Hell, and a punitive God, Bazin points out that Saintonge’s terrifying bestiary comes up against a deeply rooted rural wisdom based on serenity and moderation. Without a doubt, after the French Revolution, with the secularization of all political life, the Saintonge villages witnessed the impact of this new, anti-​ecclesiastical climate of opinion. The silent films of Albert Capellani25 (1874–​1931), for example, set in the days of the French Revolution of 1789, show the persecution of priests in the neighboring and very Catholic region of Vendée. Released in 1913, Capellani’s Germinal circulates only ten years after the anticlerical laws of 1903, the expulsion of the orders, and confiscation of Catholic schools. Despite this wave of lay initiatives fueled by the French government since the eighteenth-​century, even today, the Catholic newspaper La Croix appears to be a major source of information for the inhabitants of Saintes. Undaunted by this area’s negative and backward religious reputation, Bazin’s approach is more anthropological and meteorological rather than theological or political. Far away from powerful castles and wealthy towns, his beloved little churches sit in a fabric of farms, cemeteries, open land, and small villages. Their presence is barely noticeable, while their modest size makes them look like barns next to gasoline stations and luncheonettes. The ambition behind Bazin’s film is to document an anti-​conformist and down-​to-​earth kind of spirituality. He cares to show how the human element is only one among many other local aspects. The film’s protagonist is the wind, or motion itself:  the symbiotic encounter between wild vegetation and worn-​out stones that is provoked by the weather. Through this project, Bazin returns to a place whose century-​old weathering he can transfigure into the “charm of the stones.”26 Still he avoids all nostalgic and picturesque temptations. The Saintonge region charms

150  André Bazin’s Film Theory

Figure 5.1–​5.7  Views of Saintonge churches, photographed by André Bazin. Courtesy Janine Bazin and Dudley Andrew.

Epilogue  151

Figure 5.1–5.7  (Continued)

152  André Bazin’s Film Theory

Figure 5.1–5.7  (Continued)

Bazin so much that he wants his camera’s lens to soften the white stones and move like a caress over the “white robe of the churches.”27 Innumerable tiny churches punctuate the Saintonge countryside. Their overall effect is comparable to a blanket of white pebbles scattered across the land. It is as if Bazin were planning an aerial view. These churches’ exceptional frequency and humbleness strike a note of contrast with more isolated and famous places of worship in the Burgundy area, between the important centers of Poitiers and Angouleme.28 In these much bigger towns, the Romanesque churches have a triangular space, or tympanum, on top of the central entrance. Thus, there is enough

Epilogue  153 room for a causal narrative with climax, dénouement, and resolution. By contrast, in Saintonge, the small church façades cannot sustain such an imposing threshold. Without an architectural tympanum, they limit themselves to a few rounds of sculptures. At the same time, these churches—​often only as large as an unassuming chapel—​hold on to the rounded shape of the Roman arch. Characterized by round walls and curvy domes outside, with low ceilings and billowy naves inside, the typical little Saintonge church looks young and feminine. By contrast, the thickness of its indoor walls strikes a note of contrast with the harrowing decay of its external walls, devoured away by sea salt. Clearly, the windswept harbor of La Rochelle is not far away. In mixing sacred and profane elements, the sinuous sculptures of Saintonge feature acrobats, musicians, comedians, craftsmen, farmers, centaurs, sirens, virgins, madmen, fools, and kings, but also Adam and Eve, Samson and Delilah, Cain and Abel. In a word, just as Bazin spells out the social mythologies of different filmic genres, Saintonge’s art relies on a religious and mythological, vernacular and fantastic potpourri. Here, the cinema is anticipated by the legends of the Old and the New Testaments. Saintonge’s sculpture freely draws from famous characters and stereotypes of human behavior, by reinventing old and well-​known tales. The sculptors in charge of decorating these churches became the equivalent of oral storytellers wandering from village to village. As if they belonged to a picture catalogue before Darwin’s evolution, the plant, the beast, and the human intertwine their extremities in a chain of mutual support, but also of constant fear and destabilization. The anthropocentric humanism of the Renaissance looms far away. In Saintonge, all living creatures seem to need each other, while different species constantly battle with one another as well. Altogether, interdependence, competition, mixed breeding, and supernatural occurrences explain why the farm animal can morph into a dragon with sharp teeth; someone looking like a peasant can drop his plough and take on Saint Peter’s keys to Paradise. Mouths spew out flames, and birds acquire fishlike fins. Any modern understanding of science is still impossible, since magic and alchemy cultivate the bizarre, the occult, the monstrous, and the hybrid. Unraveling like a comic strip, these sculptural reliefs bear witness to humankind adrift in superstition. The world of Saintonge is so ancient with magic, yet so strangely modern due to its sensorial overload, that it becomes a roller coaster of tears and laughter, cruelty and rebellion, blissful joy and horror. These sculptures’ equalizing approach is based on metamorphosis, while their

154  André Bazin’s Film Theory serial unleashing of miracles and catastrophes invokes early medieval chronicles called annals. In these texts, the years go by in an even, list-​like, and chronological manner. The annals track natural calamities, good harvests, floods and plagues, births and deaths, conquests and ceremonies: although every year is different, each event is uncontrollable and, therefore, absolutely equal in importance to every other; the frequency of horny angels and winged devils remind the viewer that witchcraft rules; medieval chronology is nothing but an enumeration in space without any temporal differences. Just as neorealist cinema privileges a quasi-​documentary approach to daily life, likewise Saintonge’s sculptures specialize in the chores, skills, objects, and tools of nearby farms, cemeteries, hostels, artisanal spaces, and merchants’ shops. At the same time, these sculptures chronicle the drinking, burials, lust, music, feasting, and dancing of the nearby inhabitants. By choosing the Saintonge area over other locations, Bazin privileges local folklore over architectural monumentality: The sculptor of Saintonge rejects grand dramatic subjects. He’s an observer of daily life, treating sacred themes and profane life with the same realism. This is undoubtedly true of all Romanesque sculpture, but perhaps nowhere other than in Saintonge has the artist restricted himself to that zone of familiarity, far removed from the great terrors and the grand mystical symbolisms that enliven so many Romanesque capitals and tympanums. It could be said that a sort of rural wisdom, combined with serenity and moderation, emerges from Saintonge, in harmony with its history and its landscape, and has humanized and tempered the medieval religious soul here.29

The “naive” features of Saintonge’s art bring to mind the simplified, but synthetic approach of children’s drawings. The characters of this elementary mise-​en-​scène smile, cry, scream, and frown with their protruding eyes, teethed or beaked mouths, triangulated faces, and round bellies. Hats and shoes tell stories dealing with profession, trade, poverty, and wealth. These sculptures are filled with holes, missing limbs, eroded cheeks. The typical, initially white, stone of Saintonge is malleable as well as friable. These sculpted performers look like photographic negatives in a state of progressive decomposition. In both sculpture and photography, time is allegedly frozen when everything remains indoors. However, due to their constant outdoor exposure, these chains of polymorphous beings slowly disappear into nooks and

Epilogue  155 crannies. The stones crumble into dust. In a similar way, when photographic glass plates spend too much time in the sun, their transparent skin-​like images peel off and shrivel up into waste. In contrast to the fully three-​dimensional Gothic style, so seriously involved in transcendence, apocalypse, and punishment, Bazin praises the curvy, Romanesque placidity. Boredom is not an issue in these isolated dwellings: any accidental visitor can look at a church façade and experience amusement in front of tongues sticking out, leaping shapes, and grotesque couplings. In these cases, the realist component is minimal, but the expressive power is at a maximum. Referring to a specific cultural group, called Combat des Vertus et des Vices, discussed by historian Monsieur Le Chanoine Tonnellier,30 Bazin lingers on how wavy folds of dress sit on top of flat arms and legs. Strange flowers and oversized leaves interrupt the animal menagerie typical of the Romanesque style. Fancy peacocks, ominous bats, and repulsive lizards run around portals and down little columns. Without Renaissance perspective to establish hierarchy inside a mathematical space, any figure can become independent and float inside a larger scheme, as if a spiritual élan or an inspirational encounter were a banal matter of fact. Openly didactic rather than deceptively illusionistic, within the Romanesque style each emotional state looks like a first-​time experience. The subtleties of irony and hypocrisy, satire and innuendo do not fit in this theocentric culture that parades a direct connection with Heaven and Hell. Nothing is fake, while everything is sudden, extreme, irreversible, and authentic. Horror, joy, pain, fear pierce every stone with an abstract intensity of motive and sincerity of expression. Instead of triggering superficiality and condescension, the local sculptors’ naive skills guarantee depth and seriousness. While the passions stored in these sculptures may seem to challenge photography’s indifferent automatism, Saintonge’s church façades can become comparable to a cinematic screen. All around these little churches, a multiplicity of forces takes over: scorching sun, frantic downpours of rain, blizzards of snow, and thick layers of fog or mist. No matter the season, a special breed of wild and tenacious grass—​one of the lowest and most stubborn levels of botany—​unravels like a snake-​like strip of celluloid falling from the reel onto the ground: Asleep for centuries in the villages, but not dead, they have become a part of and absorbed by the life and the vegetation around them. Many of the

156  André Bazin’s Film Theory churches have been invaded by the greenery—​even penetrated by it, like the chapel at Saint Ouen, whose stones are held in place only by the roots of ivy and new vines.31

In a state of semi-​abandonment and quasi-​anonymity that protects them from ill-​advised contemporary restorations, the churches surrender themselves to a new form of random or experimental architecture based on the wild grass redesigning everything it encounters. The famous French, nineteenth-​century architect Eugène Viollet-​le-​Duc (1814–​1879) would scorn any assignment in the region of Saintonge. Famous for his restoration of the castle of Carcassonne, Viollet-​le-​Duc focuses only on large and prestigious projects. Bazin brings his name up in discussing traditional literary adaptations during the fifties. In front of the unruly greenery running all over the walls inside and outside, Viollet-​le-​Duc would enforce a drastic cleaning.32 No weeds would interfere with his preservationist esthetic. Wild grass would undermine the nationalism implicit in Viollet-​le-​ Duc’s typically French grandeur. In the Saintonge region, villages are too ordinary and unadorned to justify lawn design at any level. Within this general state of calm disarray, seeds and spores can find cracks in the stones. Thus, they begin a new level of vegetative life in systematic defiance of time and weather, potential tourist markets, and art historical tours. Bazin calls all this wild grass “l’herbe folle de l’espérance” (the wild grass of hope).33 Unexpectedly, the monopoly on narrative action reverses itself from sculpture to weeds, sprouts, and roots. The emphasis switches from art to nature. Nothing could be more photographic in method, since, in his “Ontology” essay, Bazin declares that nature becomes the artist.34 Bergson’s erratic and discontinuous élan vital, along with Bazin’s preference for contingency over coincidence, are the undisturbed rulers of Saintonge. Usually associated with stillness due to the fact that they do not have a nervous system, plants evoke origins, grounding, passivity, and lack of action, unless water, air, and wind take over and make the vegetation move. Here, this rule does not apply. All by itself, wild grass travels as fast as burning fire or flowing water. In addition, the sounds and cries of farm animals may disturb the search for a museum-​like sterile setting. The most timid flowers, such as daisies, lavender, and dandelions have just enough color to look rebellious, by sticking out of a few tombstones. Occasionally, a tabernacle with a few votive candles replaces a traffic sign.

Epilogue  157 Like photographs which retain the shapes of objects and leave behind memories, plants are notorious for their ability to absorb enormous quantities of solar energy and transform it into the oxygen that sustains the whole world around them. There cannot be any human life without plants. In short, greenery is key to our survival. Likewise, photography pushes the imagination to look back and think forward. Based on air and water, vegetable photosynthesis is one of the most vital and unobtrusive biological processes the earth has ever developed. Animals may dominate Saintonge’s sculptures, but botany looms even larger in Bazin’s film theory. His theme of cinema’s vital contribution to mass culture seems to resurface through the important roles played by botany, with oxygen released into the air through photosynthesis. The codependence of architecture and vegetation strikes Bazin, because the relentless spreading of wild grass amid the stones keeps these buildings’ physiognomies constantly changing and lifelike. In a similar manner, a film changes every time it is screened, due to how its audience’s inner sense of temporality is constantly altering. Although Bazin is adamant that his film would explain how these churches integrate themselves into the local human geography of farms and cemeteries, he does not stop there. He is so keen on movement and change, that he describes how the very profane local poultry takes over a sacred space reserved only to saints inside the abbey of Trizay: where the chickens nest in the niches of saints, where the multi-​lobed arches are covered with wire netting to serve as chicken coops, where wood is stored in the magnificent little apses as if next to the oven, where the chapter house has become a hay barn. Meanwhile, from one column to another the green beans are drying on wires.35

In this universe of domestic animals and green beans, Bazin’s art historical and ironic exactitude with polylobes and absidioles leaves no doubt that modest agriculture is as important as religious architecture. Possibly thinking of what his filmmaking crew might need to know in advance for working in this location, Bazin hints at the fact that the smallest churches look like abandoned private homes. Thus, contemporary visitors may get a key from some neighbor, either the owner of a nearby farm, or the guardian of the nearby cemetery. Although Bazin does not go into this degree of detail, as soon as one opens the door of a small Saintonge church, a sort of physiochemical microstorm clouds all vision and rushes out of this airtight

158  André Bazin’s Film Theory time capsule. Inside, religious figures made of wood, straw, and rocks, as well as shells and worn-​out candles, overwhelm all expectations with their bright irreverent colors so well preserved under seal. Protected within an undisturbed container, a chromatic wealth of saturated reds, yellows, blues, and greens survives with the defiance of gaudy crayons for young artists’ picture books. After his preproduction scouting of the Saintonge area, the film critic’s personal relationship to this geography warrants further attention. Bazin’s readings on the Romanesque style go back to 1937, when he spends the 1937–​38 school year in the École Normale d’Instituteurs in Versailles. At that time, this institution is the best preparation for the entrance examination to the École Normale Supérieure de Saint Cloud. The admission to Saint Cloud requires written and oral exams. According to film specialist Ludovic Cortade, one section of Bazin’s written exam gives out the following instructions: L’Art Gothique en France (les candidats sont invité à visiter et à étudier un ou plusieurs monuments de leur région. Ils pourront apporter à l’examen oral des cartes postales les représentant. [Gothic Art in France (Candidates are urged to visit and study one or more monuments in their region. They can bring to the oral exam postcards of these monuments.)]36

Cortade also tells us that the required art history reading was:  “Chapter Three” from Louis Réau’s L’art primitif, l’art médiéval. French art historian Réau owes his reputation to research bridging the gap between Western and folkloric Eastern European art. The transnational slant of Réau’s work prepares Bazin for the early medieval “universalism” hovering over the Saintonge region. Needless to say, medieval universalism fits perfectly into Bazin’s realist film theory. In fact, the medieval querelle between universalism and nominalism37 anticipates the tension between phenomenological hermeneutics of faith and poststructuralist hermeneutics of suspicion typical of the second half of the twentieth century. A resting point for pilgrims walking from France to Spain, the town of Saintes is most cosmopolitan around the year 1000. It is the unavoidable crossroad for adventurous and determined travelers who walk from Northern to Southern Europe. Back in these days, the time such a trip takes might coincide with one’s whole lifespan. Bandits and thieves, pregnancies and plagues are always competing with the healthy independence and the communal support required by such a long adventure.

Epilogue  159 The Asian sculptural references included in the church façades lend Bazin the opportunity to further highlight his film theory’s universalist bent: That diabolical big-​mouthed figure, devouring the column, . . . where the Marquis de Chasseloup-​Loubat seemed, rightfully, to see a resemblance to Tao Tie, the Chinese glutton. It’s not only from . . . the Middle East via the Crusades, with the manuscripts, ivories, and fabrics, but even from the Far East.38

Just as the moving image travels and links different cultures, likewise the Romanesque style involves a vast geography which, through merchants and soldiers, monks and artists, spreads itself all over Christian Europe. Its range of action absorbs images and themes from faraway countries, such as China and the Arab world. So wary is Bazin of elitist models that he explains the Romanesque style through parallels between cinema’s mass appeal and Latin, the shared official language of the Middle Ages. The result is that cinema, just like Latin, becomes the lingua franca of the twentieth century: We are at the dawn of a sort of artistic technocracy comparable to that of the Greco-​Roman world, or the Christian era when, in the Middle Ages, a renowned theologian could teach equally (depending on the facilities offered him) in Ghent, Frankfort, Paris, or Perugia.39

Besides percolating in his mind between 1938 and 1945, the Romanesque art of Saintonge reappears when Bazin reviews Amédée Ayfre’s book, Dieu au cinéma (1953). Prompted by Ayfre’s choice of examples, Bazin latches on to a sequence from a little-​known Swedish film. Concerned with witchcraft, greed, and forgiveness, Alf Sjöberg’s Himlaspelet (The Heavenly Play /​ Le chemin du ciel, 1942) suggests a metatextual definition of cinema as a medium capable of tuning into the irrational, Otherness, and the unknown: I would have chosen, at the beginning of Chemin du ciel, that curious traveling shot along a wall pierced by grilled openings behind which we follow the hesitant steps of a man with a lantern, as he seeks to find traces of God in a series of naively religious paintings on the wall opposite.40

160  André Bazin’s Film Theory Obviously, Sjöberg’s man with a lamp makes an impression on Bazin, because he looks like an imaginary director or hypothetical spectator for whom cinema can become a flashlight for secrets or a chandelier for spectacles through which to illuminate the world we live in.41 While art itself will never reveal the origins of human creativity, the cinema, at least, can shed some light on reality’s darkness. Furthermore, cinema’s penchant for a suspension of disbelief speaks to this medium’s emotional power to inspire love. Even if God is love, for those who believe, God remains “hidden.” Of course, the theme of the Hidden God comes to Bazin from a Marxist literary critic, Lucien Goldmann. In 1955 this specialist writes on Pascal’s thought and Racine’s works,42 by underlining how the tragic nature of the human experience results from a condition of quasi-​blindness. One wonders if Bazin has this book in his library. Interestingly, his film theory argues that, on one hand, cinema’s light can manipulate; on the other, the nonhuman eye of the camera enjoys a heuristic or revealing potential. It objectifies everything and it makes time visible through photography and camera movement in film. Most importantly, this dialectic between human creativity and technology can lead to unexpected moments of illumination and perceptual rebirth. In Le chemin du ciel, the traveling shot explores a discontinuous layout of openings. They reveal glimpses of “naively religious paintings” on a pockmarked wall. This scene enables Bazin to recognize the ways in which the chalky stones of Saintonge geology turn over time into Romanesque ruins: But some of those harmonies, or at least the material of that stone, will come through in black and white. I’m thinking especially of the manner in which the stone has been eaten away, hardening in places, falling into dust in others, and thus curiously superimposing on the original sculptural ornamentation the random tracery of wear and wind.43

A mixture of abstraction and figuration, the Romanesque style anticipates the arabesques of art nouveau and the grotesque combinations of Surrealism. Art Nouveau and Surrealism, in turn, stand respectively for cinema’s historical birth at the turn of the century. Possibly exposed to Émile Mâle’s (1862–​1954) and Henri Focillon’s (1881–​ 1943) writings on the Romanesque through Louis Réau’s familiarity with these two towering scholars, Bazin’s essay on Saintonge starts with a quote from Mâle:  “Nowhere else in France has Romanesque art found greater

Epilogue  161 appeal.”44 Here Bazin’s choice of Mâle stems from how the latter is the first to popularize Saint Augustine’s proto-​semiology of natural and cultural signs. In his introduction to On Christian Doctrine, the translator D. W. Robertson remarks that for Mâle, “the symbolic technique of medieval art” is “essentially analogous with the symbolic techniques of Scriptural interpretations.”45 In contrast to Mâle’s allegorical reading of medieval iconography in the light of spiritual issues, Henri Focillon’s influence on Bazin is more complicated to chart. In 1924 Focillon succeeds Mâle as professor of medieval archeology at the Sorbonne. By 1931, he publishes his groundbreaking book, L’an 1000, l’art des sculpteurs romans. Focillon argues that art forms change over time. In addition, since stylistic changes cannot be reduced only to external variables, he situates formal mutations within the changing use of materials and techniques. One thing is for sure:  by the mid-​thirties, when the discipline of film studies had not even been born, Erwin Panofsky and Focillon agree that “cinema is the medium of reality.”46 More specifically, according to Christophe Gauthier, Focillon is intrigued by how the cinema expresses itself through the documentary genre at the highest level: “There are some admirable documentary films: Nanook of the North and Moana are examples. But the cinema as spectacle more often has recourse to fantasy.47 In his essay, “Evolution and Event in Qu’est-​ce que le cinéma?,” Tom Conley argues that Bazin’s “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” (1951) and his “Evolution of the Language of the Western” (1955) were influenced by Focillon’s art historical theory.48 Without a doubt, Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) is an important source for Focillon’s The Life of Forms (1934)—​a book published one year after the art historian starts teaching six-​week courses at Yale, where in 1938 he receives a Chair in Medieval Art. Even if the link between Bergson and Focillon is clear, a direct relationship between Bazin and Focillon cannot be easily established. One can only acknowledge that Bazin thinks of cinema as a living form which grows, matures, and evolves. After appointing Focillon in the role of Bazin’s mentor, Conley unravels the former’s life of forms in four stages: experimental, classical, radiating, and baroque. Considering Bazin’s negative views on the baroque in his essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” and his repeatedly scientific, rather than art-​historical, use of the term “radiating,”49 Focillon’s fourfold scheme does not fit with the systematic and metaphorical language of Bazin’s essays.

162  André Bazin’s Film Theory Instead of forcing a scheme developed by Focillon for static images into “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” the strength of Bazin’s very last piece lies in its celebration of movement. Likewise, the critic’s appreciation of resilience and interconnections points to Bergson’s élan vital. The wild grass growing within the stones of the Saintonge churches is the dominant figure of such a vital impulse. One could even argue that Bazin’s wild grass stands for all the genre films ever made, never seen or never discussed, a gigantic mass of looping celluloid that slowly disintegrates into a vinegar-​like smelly powder of assorted chemicals. Of course movement means time, space, change, and chance. In a word, cinema itself, as soon as the elements of recording, editing, and projection come literally into the picture. Thus Bazin’s focus on the wild grass is more than just a way to answer his famous question “What is cinema?” By stressing the humblest roots of this medium, the theorist returns to how impure cinema oscillates among mass communication, popular culture, and previous art forms. Through the tenacity of weeds turning into chainlike roots, Bazin reminds his readers of the direct contact that exists between model and copy, object and trace in photography. Finally, the appearance of wild grass as an unintended part of the architecture depends on the contingency of the wind, which, just like time, is an energizing as well as corrosive force. Bazin speaks of the wind most frequently. A  first example comes from his review of Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique (1946). In the context of this quasi-​documentary film with nonprofessional actors, Bazin brings up the famous anecdote: “Look!” shouted the first viewers of the Lumière cinematograph as they pointed at the leaves on the trees, “look, they’re moving.” The cinema has come a long way since the heroic days when crowds were satisfied with the rough rendition of a branch quivering in the wind!50

As if the Farrebique example by itself were too uncouth, Bazin comes up with a second reference proving that cinema’s wind circulates and touches all. This meditation on the leaves rustling in the wind emerges from Bazin’s review of Marc Allegret’s documentary, Avec André Gide (1952). There one can see the famous writer sitting in a garden with Jean-​Paul Sartre: “The first esthetic emotion ascribed to the cinema is that which moved the spectators in the Grand Café to cry out ‘the leaves are moving.’ Gide saw it and this simple spectacle overwhelms us.”51 Just one year later, in one of his 1953 reviews

Epilogue  163 Bazin writes: “the fresh wind that blows over the cinema. As long as such revelations are possible, the cinema will continue to live.”52 As a source of motion and life, perceptual changes and revealing epiphanies, cinema’s wind can break down the medium’s stereotypes. One wonders whether Bazin’s emphasis on the wind is his way of responding on behalf of the cinema to Paul Valéry’s famous line: “Le vent se lève! . . . il faut tenter de vivre! [The wind is rising, we must try to live!],” from his poem Le cimetière marin (1920) (The Graveyard by the Sea). In Le cimetière marin, the illustrious polymath and incredibly popular Valéry meditates on human finitude by thinking of his parents buried in the cemetery of his native town, Sète. Unlike Valery, the ever-​sickly Bazin, with tuberculosis and leukemia, precedes his own parents to the grave in 1958. November 11 is Bazin’s last day alive. Honored with a public funeral, the entire world of cinema mourns his premature death. Bazin’s obituary appears in Cahiers du Cinéma and next to it, Jean Renoir writes: “Bazin was like Ariadne’s mythic thread . . . without him, the dispersion [in the labyrinth] would have been complete.”53 Renoir’s overview of film history as a labyrinth takes us all back to the beginning of Bazin’s career. As a young critic, he earmarks his ideas on photography by turning to ancient Egypt’s labyrinthine pyramids.54 As for graveyards by the sea, one should keep in mind that in Bazin’s Saintonge essay, two buildings stand out for their respective involvement with light and the sea. The first is the tower of Fénioux, made of stones cut like fish scales (Figure 5.8). This building is not a church or a lighthouse for ships adrift in the sea, but a “lantern of the dead” standing out in an unmemorable rural area. Looking like a piece of art brut, it is an orientation structure with a small opening on its top where a light points toward a cemetery: Also in the architecture, let’s not forget those enigmatic lanterns of the dead, and especially the one at Fénioux, whose little scale-​encrusted tower stands on a bundle of slender columns, erected in the middle of a field where the sheep graze.55

The second building mentioned by Bazin, Talmont (Figure 5.9), exemplifies an intriguingly fortified Romanesque church. It looks halfway between a lighthouse on the edge of the sea and a ship’s prow ready to cast off from the earth. In this case, the whole planet is reduced to a spectacularly steep cliff. Religious architecture, here, becomes a leap into the unknown.

164  André Bazin’s Film Theory

Figure 5.8  12th-​century lantern of the dead at Fenioux, Charente-​Maritime, France. Classed as a historic monument since 1862. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons: licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-​Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

And how could Bazin not respond to the role assigned to the wind by the Gospel of Saint John? During the planning stages of Bresson’s film, Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (A Man Escaped, 1956), the director ponders on: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). At least for a while, Bresson wonders whether an abbreviated version of this phrase—​Le vent souffle où il veut (The wind blows where it pleases)—​might be the right title for his tale of spiritual imprisonment set in a Nazi jail. There, war and politics intertwine themselves with fears

Epilogue  165

Figure 5.9  Église Sainte-​Radegonde de Talmont-​sur-​Gironde. Fortified church (11th, 12th, and 16th century) as seen from east with renewed ramparts and bedrock. Talmont-​sur-​Gironde, Charente-​Maritime, France. Photo: JLPC /​ Wikimedia Commons /​CC BY-​SA 3.0.

due to personal betrayals and emotional insecurities among the prisoners themselves.56 Once it is transported in the context of Bazin’s film theory as a whole, this very same wind takes on a special trajectory. On one hand, it links the cinema with wild grass, meteorological weather, and cosmological time. On the other, it spells out the paradoxical combination of human free will and God’s providence. There is still more to tell in regard to the wind as a spiritual trope and as a metaphor for the cinema in general. In Bazin’s language, Bergson’s élan vital is more than just wild grass. It becomes a “souffle vital.”57 In his anthropology of religion, Régis Debray (1940–​), a colleague of Edgar Morin, points out that the “spirit” of spirituality is comparable to breath. Significantly, the verb “to breathe” in Greek is pneuma. Yet pneuma also means soul, besides the scientific fact that energy or energheia depends on deep breathing and oxygen intake.58 We may never know for sure whether the universe we belong to is the one and only exception ever to have been born out of energy, time, space, and

166  André Bazin’s Film Theory matter. Perhaps different universes coexist in the cosmos at large, in such a way that they possibly build on the cinematic idea of parallel worlds. As far as this planet is concerned, the photographic cinema of the twentieth century is a spiritual mind-​machine that allows for creativity and helps us to orient ourselves as ethically responsible human beings. In the end, what matters most is that the very last word of Bazin’s essay on “Les églises romanes de Saintonge” is vent: Je pense notamment à la façon dont elle s’est laissée ronger, durcissant par place, tombant à d’autres en poussière et superposant ainsi curieusement au grouillement de la sculpture originale les entrelacs hasardeux de l’usure et du vent. (I’m thinking especially of the manner in which the stone has been eaten away, hardening in places, falling into dust in others, and thus curiously superimposing on the original sculptural ornamentation the random tracery of wear and wind.)59

Wondering about the future of the medium to which he has dedicated his entire life, Bazin’s essay on the churches of Saintonge reads like a farewell to his readers and colleagues in Paris. With his typewriter on his bed, maybe Bazin was thinking of the flight into dust of all things and of his own imminent death.

Notes Chapter 1 1. For a detailed biography of Bazin, see Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (1978), rev. ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. Dudley Andrew, “Edgar Morin: Cinema, the Very Image of Human Complexity,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), 408–​421. 3. For a negative view of Bazin’s work, in regard to neorealism as a postwar liberalism, see Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 398–​399. Also, in regard to lack of coherence in Bazin’s work, see Noël Carroll, “Cinematic Representation and Realism:  André Bazin and the Aesthetics of Sound Film,” Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 94–​171. 4. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1960). 5. Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man (1956), trans. Lorraine Mortimer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 72. 6. On Bazin and Sartre, see Andrew, André Bazin, 47. 7. Jean-​Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2007), 42; Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 114. 8. On Bazin and Merleau-​ Ponty, see Mauro Carbone, “Le philosophe et le cinéaste: Merleau-​Ponty et la pensée du cinéma,” in La chair des images: Merleau-​ Ponty entre peinture et cinéma (Paris: Vrin, 2011), 85–​127. 9. See Oliver Gaycken, Devices of Curiosity:  Early Cinema and Popular Science (New  York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 2015); James Leo Cahill, Zoological Surrealism:  The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Inga Pollmann, Cinematic Vitalism:  Film Theory and the Question of Life (Amsterdam:  Amsterdam University Press, 2018); Scott Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science and Early Cinema in Germany (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015). 10. Andrew, André Bazin. 11. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945), in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 10. 12. Emmanuel Mounier, Refaire la Renaissance (1932), preface by Guy Coq (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974).

168 Notes 13. Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism (1949), trans. Philip Mairet (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989). 14. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 15. 15. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 107. 16. Concerning Lotte Eisner and German Expressionism, see Bazin’s review, “L’écran démoniaque,” France Observateur 132 (20 November 1952). 17. André Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality” (1948), in What Is Cinema? vol. 2, essays selected and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 38. 18. Edgar Morin, L’homme et la mort dans l’histoire (Paris: Corea, 1951). 19. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 10. 20. André Bazin, “Montage interdit,” in Qu’est-​ ce que le cinéma? I.  Ontologie et langage (Paris:  Éditions du Cerf, 1969), 119. See also Luchino Visconti, “Towards Anthropomorphic Cinema,” in Springtime in Italy:  A Reader on Neo-​Realism, ed. David Overbey (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1978), 83–​85. This essay by Visconti has nothing to do with Bazin’s psychological notion of anthropomorphism in relation to animals. Visconti’s anthropomorphism describes the mobilization of the Fascist statue into the local, nonprofessional actors of La Terra Trema (1948). Bazin finds this film to be too painterly, despite its neorealist casting. On Visconti’s pictorialism and emphasis on the human figure in Senso (1954), see also Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 134–​147. See also André Bazin, “Le petit journal du cinéma,” Cahiers du Cinéma 56 (1 February 1956): “Quant à l’esthétique, je ne manque pas de questionner Visconti sur sa position à l’égard du néoréalisme.” 21. André Bazin, “Les périls de Perri,” Cahiers du Cinéma 83 (May 1958). 22. Annette Michelson, “Review of André Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 1,” Artforum 6:10 (Summer 1968), 67–​71. At the beginning of her review, Michelson juxtaposes two statements: “Things are . . . why manipulate them?”—​Roberto Rossellini, and “Cinema is a manipulation of reality through image and sound.” —​Alain Resnais. 23. Sergei Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature:  Film and the Structure of Things (1939–​ 1947), trans. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge, UK, and New  York, NY:  Cambridge University Press, 1987), 216–​382. 24. Antoine De Baecque, Camera Historica:  The Century in Cinema, trans. Jonathan Magidoff and Ninon Vinsonneau (New  York, NY:  Columbia University Press, 2012),  56–​60. 25. On Fuller and the liberation of Falkenau, see also Philip Watts, Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 26. Bazin, “Montage Interdit,” 127: “Quand l’essentiel d’un événement est dépendant d’une présence simultanée de deux ou plusieurs facteurs de l’action, le montage est interdit.” 27. André Bazin, “Première disillusion,” Parisien Libéré 1492 (1 July 1949); and his “La Dame du Lac,” Parisien Libéré 1120 (21 April 1948). On the dialectic of subject and object in relation to Hollywood stardom, see Dudley Andrew, “André Bazin: Dark Passage into the Mystery of Being,” in Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice,

Notes  169 eds. Murray Pomerance and R. Burton Palmer (New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 2016), 136–​149. 28. Bazin, “Première désillusion.” 29. André Bazin, “Le journal d’un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, 139. 30. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 14–​16. 31. The expression “freedom and necessity” comes from Bazin, “Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 134. 32. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 15.

Chapter 2 1. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 9–​16. 2. André Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” in Qu’est-​ce que le cinéma? I. Ontologie et langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969), 17. Enrie’s 1931 photograph follows a former one taken by Enrie’s friend, the Turinese lawyer Secondo Pia in 1898. 3. Philip Rosen, “Belief in Bazin,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its After-​ Life, ed. Dudley Andrew with Hervé Joubert-​Laurencin (New  York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 2011), 107–​118. 4. Sir David Brewster, “Photogenic Drawing or Drawing by the Agency of Light,” Edinburgh Review 76 (January 1843), 309–​344. 5. Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” 11–​19. 6. Charles Sanders Peirce’s definitions of “index” and “icon” are found in “On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation (1885),” The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1 (1867–​1891), ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 225–​228. 7. Bazin’s emphasis on recording in photography and cinema justifies his phrase that these two media, in a basic sense, harness energy from the cosmos and, for this reason, they show “a fragment of the universe.” This phrase comes up in “Le cinéma et la peinture,” La Revue du Cinéma 19:20 (Fall 1949), 116: “la photographie et a fortiori le cinéma nous montrent toujours un fragment de l’univers” (emphasis is Bazin’s). Please note that the untranslated French text of “Le cinéma et la peinture” from La Revue du Cinéma is different from the essay “Peinture et Cinéma,” published in volume 2 of Qu’est-​ce que le cinéma? (1969). 8. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 18: “The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities.” 9. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 15. 10. Marie-​José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy:  The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 11. André Bazin, “Continent perdu,” France Observateur 296 (12 January 1956):  “La présence de la caméra, et donc la présence de l’homme, sont une donnée a priori

170 Notes du spectacle, elles impliquent qu’on ne saurait rien nous montrer que cette présence contredise.” 12. André Bazin, “Every Film Is a Social Document,” trans. Paul Fileri, in Film Comment 44:6 (2008), 40–​41; “Tout film est un documentaire social,” Lettres Françaises 166 (25 July 1947). 13. The contrast between medieval and Renaissance realism comes up on the cover of Travail et culture: Bulletin de la culture populaire (June–​July 1946), with a reference to Fernand Léger on this very same topic. 14. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 12. 15. Jonathan Friday, “Photography and the Representation of Vision,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59:4 (2001), 351–​362. 16. Jean-​Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986), 286–​298. 17. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), trans. Ellen Frothingham (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005). 18. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” reprinted in Clement Greenberg:  The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, ed. J. O’Brian (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1986), 85–​93. 19. André Bazin, “Bambi,” Parisien Libéré 1131 (5 May 1948). 20. André Bazin, “La nuit est mon royaume,” Parisien Libéré 2228 (12 November 1951): “Les aveugles ont toujours tenté les cinéastes, pour de bonnes et de mauvaises raisons. [ . . . ] Le regard sans objet de l’aveugle est plus pénétrant que le nôtre, obscurci par le monde, car il semble qu’il sache voir au-​delà des apparences, à travers les êtres et les choses. Il est un peu comme notre conscience en dehors de nous.” 21. André Bazin, “A la recherche du temps perdu: Paris 1900,” Écran Français 118 (30 September 1947): “réalisent le paradoxe d’un passé objectif, d’une mémoire extérieure à notre conscience.” 22. Paula Amad, “Film as the ‘Skin of History’: André Bazin and the Specter of the Archive and Death in Nicole Védrès’s Paris 1900” (1947), Representations 130:1 (Spring 2015), 84–​118. 23. André Bazin, “A la recherche du temps perdu: Paris 1900,” Écran Français 118 (30 September 1947): “Proust trouvait sa récompense du temps retrouvé dans sa joie ineffable de s’engloutir dans son souvenir. Ici, au contraire, la joie esthétique nait d’un déclivement, car ces ‘souvenirs’ ne nous appartient pas.” 24. Andy Masaki Bellows and Marina McDougall, with Brigitte Berg, eds., Science Is Fiction:  The Films of Jean Painlevé, trans. Jeanine Herman (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2001), 145–​146. See also André Bazin, “On Jean Painlevé,” in What Is Cinema?, trans. and annotated by Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), 21–​23. 25. Bellows et al., Science Is Fiction, 145–​146. 26. André Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” in What Is Cinema, vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 37. 27. André Bazin, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1,  41–​52.

Notes  171 28. Dudley Andréw, “Malraux, Bazin, and the Gesture of Picasso,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its After Life, ed. Dudley Andréw with Hervé Joubert-​ Laurencin (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011), 153–​166. See also André Bazin, “Le film d’art est-​il un documentaire comme les autres?,” Radio Cinéma Télévision 75 (24 June 1951). 29. André Bazin, “La peinture vue par un trou de serrure,” Arts 340 (4 January 1952): “pour utiliser la peinture, le cinéma la trahit et cela sur tous les plans. L’unité dramatique et logique du film établit des chronologies ou des liens fictifs entre des oeuvres parfois très éloignées dans le temps et dans l’esprit.” 30. On cinema in relation to the arts and science, see Angela Dalle Vacche, “The Difference of Cinema in the System of the Arts,” in Opening Bazin Postwar Film Theory and Its After Life, ed. Dudley Andréw with Hervé Joubert-​Laurencin (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2011), 142–​152. 31. André Bazin, “Sur les films de peinture: Réponse à Bourniquel,” Esprit 161:11 (1949), 818:  “il est évident que l’écran ne cesse de fausser l’équilibre de la composition, le rapport des valeurs et qu’il est au surplus irrémédiablement infirme des couleurs. Mais au lieu de lui imputer ces impuissances, ne peut-​on au contraire s’étonner qu’en partant d’une matière radicalement modifiée dans ses structures spécifiques le film nous restitue pourtant une oeuvre qui existe indubitablement avec sa logique et son unité? Imagine-​t-​on de casser une horloge en petits morceaux et de la remonter autrement? Si le film, quelque mal qu’on en pense, existe tout de même, c’est donc que l’oeuvre d’art ne saurait se comparer à une mécanique de précision et qu’elle ne cesse pas d’exister même lorsqu’elle est attaquée dans ses éléments ou dans sa structure.” 32. See note 7. 33. André Bazin, “L’espace dans la peinture et le cinéma: À propos de van Gogh,”Arts 210 (15 April 1949), 1. 34. Bazin, “La peinture vue par un trou de serrure”: “Il ne les faut point juger seulement en référence à la peinture qu’ils utilisent mais par rapport à l’anatomie et à la biologie de cet être esthétique nouveau-​né de la conjonction de la peinture et du cinéma.” 35. André Bazin, “Painting and Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, 168. 36. Bazin, “La peinture vue par un trou de serrure,” Arts 340 (4 January 1952). 37. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 14. 38. Bazin, “Sur les films de peinture,” 819. 39. On fossilization, see Jane B.  Reece, ed., Campbell Biology, 9th ed. (Boston, MA: Benjamin Cummings/​Pearson, 2011), 556. 40. André Bazin, “Quand Rubens et van Gogh font du cinéma,” Parisien Libéré 1474 (6 June 1949):  “un mouvement virtuel, d’une espace de rotation suspendue dans l’immobilité de la peinture et qui attend de la sensibilité de celui qui contemple la toile une délivrance imaginaire.” On the art documentary in Belgium, see also Steven Jacobs, Art and Cinema: The Belgian Art Documentary (booklet included in 3-​DVD boxed set) (Ghent: Cinematek, 2013). 41. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935–​ 1936), in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–​252.

172 Notes 42. Clement Greenberg, “The Avant-​Garde and Kitsch” (1939), in Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, by Gillo Dorfles (New York, NY: Universe Books, 1970), 116–​126. 43. Bazin, “L’espace dans la peinture et le cinéma: À propos de Van Gogh.” 44. Bazin, “L’espace dans la peinture et le cinéma: À propos de Van Gogh,” 7. 45. Bazin, “Le cinéma et la peinture,” 116: “la photographie et a fortiori le cinéma nous montrent toujours un fragment de l’univers” (emphasis is Bazin’s). 46. Bazin, “Painting and Cinema,” 166. 47. On still life and the cinema, see Angela Dalle Vacche, “Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse: Still Life and the Close-​Up as Feminine Space,” in Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 221–​247. 48. Bazin, “Quand Rubens et Van Gogh font du cinéma.” 49. Bazin, “Sur les films de peinture,” 818. 50. Dudley Andrew, “Malraux, Bazin, and the Gesture of Picasso,” in Opening Bazin, 156. 51. Bazin, “Sur les films de peinture:  Réponse à Bourniquel,” 818:  “l’efficacité du film vient de ce que Resnais ne nous montre jamais un tableau dans son ensemble, cadre compris. Grâce au montage, au cadrage cinématographique, l’intérieur du tableau, aux mouvements de la caméra et à certaines astuces de montage qui parviennent à donner l’illusion parfaite d’une troisième dimension picturale par l’utilisation de deux tableaux traitant une même scène de deux points de vue différents, l’oeuvre de Van Gogh cesse en quelque sorte d’être une série de tableaux pour devenir un univers illimité, résultat de la fusion de toute son oeuvre, et où le cinéaste nous promène aussi librement que dans la réalité.” 52. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 12. 53. Bazin, “La peinture vue par un trou de serrure.” 54. Bazin, “Le cinéma et la peinture,” 119 (caption): “Un des meilleurs travelling réalisés par Alain Resnais dans Van Gogh. La caméra se meut exactement dans l’univers du peintre. À la première image, on voit l’ensemble du tableau. À la seconde, on s’est réapproché de la porte. Puis, dans le même mouvement, sans transition, on pénètre à l’intérieur du café: troisième image, qui est celle d’un autre tableau. La caméra continue d’avancer pour s’arrêter devant une table (quatrième image).” 55. André Bazin, “La vie passionnée de Vincent van Gogh,” Éducation Nationale 6 (February 1957): “Il ne s’agit pas de nous expliquer pourquoi Van Gogh était ‘fou’ et quel était le rapport nécessaire entre cette folie et sa prédilection pour le jaune, par example, mais de nous faire approcher au plus près de ce point d’incandescence spirituelle où la transmutation nous sera rendue sensible par son rayonnement.” 56. Bazin, “La vie passionnée de Vincent van Gogh,” Éducation Nationale 6: “Je pense surtout à des scènes d’intérieurs hollandais, correspondant à la série des mangeurs de pommes de terre, ou au décor du café d’Arles qui inspira l’hallucinant tableau nocturne.” 57. Bazin, “La vie passionnée de Vincent van Gogh: La peinture à l’huile,”Parisien Libéré 3855 (1 February 1957): “Le film n’est d’ailleurs pas loin de la réussite dans sa première partie, celle qui nous relate . . . l’extraordinaire expérience spirituelle et humaine du jeune pasteur suffragant dans les mines du Borinage. Vincente Minnelli a su avec un

Notes  173 réalisme qui n’est pas sans rappeler parfois la leçon du premier cinéma soviétique, évoquer . . . l’effroyable misère des mineurs.” 58. Bazin, “La vie passionnée de Vincent van Gogh,”: “C’est ainsi par exemple que le père Tanguy nous est montré surmonté de son comique petit chapeau rond comme si cette coiffure lui était habituelle, alors qu’il est plus probable que Van Gogh inventa cet accoutrement amusant. De même père Roulin et son fils se promènent dans les rues comme s’ils descendaient des tableaux. C’est faire ressembler la nature à l’art, selon le mot de Wilde, qui n’est vrai qu’a posteriori. Van Gogh a transformé notre vision des tournesols, mais avant qu’il ne les peigne les tournesols n’étaient pas encore ‘des Van Gogh.’ ” 59. André Bazin, “A Bergsonian Film: The Picasso Mystery,” in Color, the Film Reader, eds. Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (New York, NY, and London: Routledge, 2006),  57–​62. 60. Bazin, “Le film d’art est-​il un documentaire comme les autres?” 61. André Bazin, “The Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” What Is Cinema? vol. 1, 142. 62. Bazin, “The Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 143. 63. Bazin, “The Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 142.

Chapter 3 1. On natural selection and the box office, see André Bazin and Jean-​Charles Tachella, “Les secrets d’Orson Welles,” Ecran Français 169 (21 September 1948): “La première règle du cinéma est faire rester les gens dans leur fauteuil.” (The first rule of cinema is to keep people in their seats.) 2. Bazin’s view of nature based on natural selection emerges from his review of the Russian scientific documentary Sables de mort (1943), in Écran Français 56 (24 July 1946). Set in central Asia and filmed by Alexander Zgouridi, this film was screened at the 1947 Venice Film Festival. See “Le cinéma en gondole: Films vus à Venise,” Écran Français 115 (9 September 1947): “Quant à la mort de la tendre gerboise aux yeux de fiffette sous l’étreinte scintillante du boa des sables, elle suggère après les tendres baisers au cadavre, préliminaires à la déglutition, on ne sait quel monstrueux coït digestif.” (As for the death of the young desert rat in the sparkling grip of the sand boa, it suggests, after tenderly kissing the corpse before swallowing it, some kind of monstrous digestive coitus.) 3. André Bazin, “Cinéma français: Demain la crise?,” Carrefour 632 (24 October 1956). Bazin states that cinema is “un organisme déjà affaibli et virtuellement malade” (an organism already enfeebled and ill). 4. Reviewing Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution (1957), in “Témoin à charger,” Parisien Libéré 4185 (24 February 1958), Bazin states: “C’est que le cinéma ne se suffit pas de cette algèbre policière, il lui faut un peu d’humanité. Billy Wilder l’a mieux compris que réalisé.” (That thriller algebra is not enough for the cinema; it needs a little humanity. Billy Wilder understood it better than he directed it.) However, in discussing Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (1941), Bazin speaks of a “sobriété mathématique (mathematical

174 Notes austerity)”: “Chasse à l’homme,” Parisien Libéré 1487 (25 June 1949). Bazin’s discussion of suspense as an aspect of modernity brings together the policier and neorealism. In his negative review of Alex Joffé’s Les Fanatiques (A Bomb for a Dictator, 1957) in France Observateur 392 (14 November 1957), he states: “Naturellement, ce genre de scénario doit compenser ou étayer le côté en quelque sorte géométrique et déterminé de ces structures policières par un contrepoint d’incidents réalistes qui ont pour double fonction de faire entrer la vie dans la mécanique et de mettre celle-​ci en péril en bloquant les rouages. C’est par là que le néo-​réalisme pouvait renouveler le suspense.” (Naturally, this type of scenario must compensate for the somewhat specific geometric side of these policier structures with a counterpoint of realistic incidents that have a dual function of bringing life to the engine and also endangering it by jamming the gears. Thus neorealism can revive the suspense.) 5. André Bazin, “La cybernétique d’André Cayatte,” in Qu’est-​ ce que le cinéma? III: Cinéma et sociologie (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1960), 169–​176. 6. Herbert Spencer, Principles of Biology (1864) (Sacramento, CA:  Franklin Classics, 2018)). 7. André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 22. This is an extract of an essay originally published in Critique 6 (1 November 1946). 8. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-​ Garde,” Wide Angle 8:3–​4 (Fall 1986), 381–​386. 9. André Bazin, “De la politique des auteurs,” Cahiers du Cinéma 70 (1 April 1957): “le résultat mille fois plus hasardeux encore en cinéma qu’en peinture ou en litérature.” 10. André Bazin, “Le monde du silence,” in Qu’est-​ce que le cinéma? I: Ontologie et langage (Paris:  Éditions du Cerf, 1969), 59:  “la réalisation matérielle par ces surhommes subaquatiques rencontre en nous-​mêmes de secrètes, profondes et immémoriales connivences.” This essay was originally published as: “Le monde du silence,” France Observateur 303 (1 March 1956). 11. Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” 22. 12. Bazin, “Le monde du silence,” in Qu’est-​ce que le cinéma? I, 59–​64. See also “Le monde du silence: À quoi rêvent les poissons?,” Parisien Libéré 3558 (17 February 1956), and “Le monde du silence:  Icare sous-​marin,” Radio Cinéma Télévision 319 (February 1956). 13. Bazin, “Le monde du silence,” 59–​60: “la beauté de ces images relève d’un magnétisme bien plus puissant et qui polarise toute notre conscience [ . . . ] nous ne sommes qu’un grain abandonné avec quelques autres sur la plage océane.” 14. André Bazin, “Entomology of the Pin-​Up Girl,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2, 158. 15. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907), trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), 132–​133. 16. André Bazin, “Le nouveau style américain: Le cinéma est-​il majeur?,” Écran Français 60 (21 August 1946). 17. André Bazin, “Quand les microbes jouent les vedettes,” Parisien Libéré 953 (10 October 1947).

Notes  175 18. Bazin, “Le monde du silence,” 60: “Cette libération des chaines terrestres est aussi bien symbolisée au fond par le poisson que par l’oiseau, mais traditionnellement, [ . . . ] le rêve de l’homme ne se déployait guère que dans l’Azur. Sec, solaire, aérien. [ . . . ] C’est finalement la science plus forte que notre imagination qui devait, en révélant à l’homme ses virtualités de poisson, réaliser le vieux mythe du vol, bien davantage satisfait par le scaphandrier autonome [ . . . ] pour se trouver non plus dans la situation fugace et périlleuse du plongeur, mais dans celle de Neptune, maître et habitant de l’eau. L’homme enfin volait avec ses bras!” 19. Bazin, “Le monde du silence,” 60: “L’homme . . . est un animal marin qui porte sa mer à l’intérieur.” 20. On calculus as the mathematics of the moderns, see Pete A. Y. Gunter, “Introduction,” in Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 32. 21. Andrew C. Papanicolaou and Pete A.  Y. Gunter, eds., Bergson and Modern Thought:  Towards a Unified Science, Models of Scientific Thought, vol. 3 (London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1987), 11. 22. No wonder Albert Einstein shows great respect for poet Paul Valéry. Valéry’s admiration for Mallarmé rests on the poem “A Throw of Dice Will Never Abolish Chance” (1897), which is a linguistic attempt to erase chance from language. See André Bazin on Einstein, in “Au carrefour du siècle,” Parisien Libéré 1322 (15 December 1948). Contingency is a crucial aspect of Bazin’s film theory; for example, see “De la politique des auteurs”: “le résultat mille fois plus hasardeux encore en cinéma qu’en peinture ou en litérature.” 23. André Bazin, “Portrait d’un assassin:  Un bon cadre,” Écran Français 230 (28 November 1949). In this article, Bazin quotes Jean Renoir as saying:  “Einstein et Oppenheimer travaillent à Princeton dans la plus complète indifférence à l’utilisation de leurs travaux scientifiques comme ils le pourraient faire à Florence ou à Paris.” (At Princeton, Einstein and Oppenheimer work with complete indifference to the use of their scientific labors, just as they might in Florence or Paris.) 24. André Bazin, “Le journal d’un cure de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” What Is Cinema? vol. 1, 142. 25. On time as clock, see Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), trans. F. I. Pogson (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001), 109. 26. The five Platonic solids are the tetrahedron, octahedron, cube, icosahedron, and dodecahedron. On Euclid and Plato, see Mario Livio, The Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, the World’s Most Astonishing Number (New York, NY: Broadway Books, 2003). 27. Bazin, “La cybernétique d’André Cayatte,” 174–​175: “Les tiers et leur comportement sont la résultante d’un quadrilatère des forces, dont la branche longue serait l’époque, la societé, le milieu, la conjoncture historique, et la branche courte la mode d’éducation familiale. [ . . . ] il s’agit toujours de ramener le réel à une organisation intelligible et sans mystère, animée par le ressort de la logique et régularisée par le balancier du pour et du contre.” 28. Bazin, “La cybernétique d’André Cayatte,” 176:  “Or ce qui distingue le réel de l’abstraction, l’événement de l’idée, le personnage vraisemblable d’une simple équation

176 Notes psychologique, c’est la frange de mystère et d’ambiguité qui résiste à toute analyse. [ . . . ] En d’autres termes, l’abstraction n’est légitime au cinéma que dans les modes de récits qui la désignent comme telle. . . . André Cayatte nous propose un univers juridique et mécaniste peuplé d’automates. Nous attendons la révolte des robots.” 29. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, 13. In discussing director and actor So Yamamura’s Les bateaux de l’enfer (Kanikôsen /​ The Crab Cannery Ships, 1953), reviewed in “Les bateaux de l’enfer,” Parisien Libéré 3870 (19 February 1957), Bazin returns to his metaphor of the snowflake for each photographic negative and sets it in contrast to Eisenstein’s emphasis on collective events: “Eisenstein . . . ne voyait les événements que dans leur réalité collective: le crystal de neige ne compte guère pour lui au prix de l’avalanche.” 30. Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 27–​28. 31. André Bazin, “Du réalisme dans les films policiers,” France Observateur 259 (28 April 1955). See also André Bazin, “On ne meurt pas comme ça,” Écran Français 54 (7 September 1946), and “Le film policier n’est pas un genre mais obéit à une loi: la logique (1–​2),” Radio Cinéma Télévision 91 (11 October 1951). 32. André Bazin, “La police est photogénique dans [La Dernière Rafale],” Parisien Libéré 1509 (21 July 1949): “Il n’y a plus depuis longtemps dans le film américain de vrais et de faux [?]‌, seulement des formes identiques issues de la même matrice platonicienne.” 33. André Bazin, “ ‘M’ le maudit ‘Remade’ in Hollywood,” Parisien Libéré 2309 (15 February 1952): “on ne nous a pas épergné le coup inévitable de la psychanalyse et du complex d’Oedipe mal liquidé. Hollywood a décidément bien peur du mystère. Mais il n’y a point de poésie sans mystère.” 34. André Bazin, “La grande horloge,”, Parisien Libéré 1439 (28 June 1949):  “une mécanique bien montée, mais . . . le mouvement d’horlogerie invisible et silencieux qui entraine implacablement la mise-​en-​scène compte parmi ce qu’on peut faire de mieux dans le genre.” 35. André Bazin, “Le style c’est le genre,” Cahiers du Cinéma 43 (1 January 1955): “L’intérêt essentiel est centré sur l’algèbre policière, [ . . . ] c’est comme si un autre film renaissait de cette révélation.” (The major interest is the police investigation. [ . . . ] it is as if another film grows out of this one’s resolution.) 36. Bazin, “Le style c’est le genre”: “La catharsis est totale parce que l’art dépensé dans le film n’est ni au-​dela ni en deçà de son sujet. Le genre est accompli à la perfection et c’est cette perfection, l’absence totale de reste dramatique, qui défend l’esprit après l’avoir si rudement secoué. . . . Chaque genre, fût-​ce le plus modeste, comme le policier ou le vaudeville, a sa noblesse et engendre sa catharsis dès l’instant qu’il est un genre vrai, c’est-​à-​dire qu’il a son style propre et que ce style est exactement accompli.” 37. Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Celle qui n’était plus (Paris: Denoël, 1952). 38. Belgian author Georges Simenon (1902–​1989) created the character of Paris police inspector Maigret, who figured in many romans policiers written between the 1930s and the 1970s, some of which were made into films. 39. Bazin, “Le style c’est le genre.” 40. Bazin comments on the “stylized realism” of Story of a Love Affair in this review: “Chronique d’un amour,” Parisien Liberé 2163 (28 August 1951).

Notes  177 41. On this point, see André Bazin, “The House of Wax: Scare Me . . . in Depth!,” in André Bazin’s New Media, ed. and trans. Dudley Andrew (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014), 251–​253. 42. Bazin, “Du réalisme dans les films policiers,”: “L’exactitude documentaire, cautionnant le mythe, renforce sa crédibilité et entretient la confusion utile avec la réalité auquelle il se substitue.” 43. André Bazin, “Colline 24,” Parisien Libéré 3307 (29 April 1955):  “extraordinaire sentiment de véracité que procure la séquence du cambriolage traitée comme un documentaire chirurgical.” 44. On Dassin’s Rififi as an example of pure cinema, see André Bazin, “Du Rififi chez les hommes,” Parisien Libéré 3295 (15 April 1955). 45. André Bazin, “Colline 24”: “ce reportage reconstitué est à la fois exacte et périmé. La technique qu’il décrit a été utilisée.” 46. André Bazin, “Du Rififi chez les hommes,” Parisien Libéré 3295 (15 April 1955): “J’aime l’admirable finale du retour de Jean Servais, agonisant au volant de sa voiture, uniquement soucieux après tant de vaines tueries de ramener à sa mère un enfant vivant et qui joue inconsciemment avec un revolver de cow-​boy. Cette séquence aurait pu être conventionelle et grandiloquente, la simplicité des moyens et la sincérité du sentiment en font quelque chose de bouleversant.” 47. André Bazin, “Note sur De Sica,” Cahiers du Cinéma 33 (1 March 1954); André Bazin, “Un film miraculeux: Miracle à Milan,” Parisien Libéré 2238 (24 November 1951); André Bazin, “Miracle à Milan: Cinéma, poésie, justice, et charité,” Radio Cinéma Télévision 98 (2 December 1951); André Bazin, “Un film de De Sica: Miracle à Milan,” France Observateur 82 (6 December 1951):  “Totò urbaniste baptise les rues et les places 4 fois 4 font 16, 9 fois 9 font 81, parce que ces froids symboles mathématiques sont plus beaux pour lui que des noms mythologiques.” 48. On the novel, published by Bompiani in 1943, and on the ban of the film Miracle in Milan in the Soviet Union, see Dario Tomasi, “Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini, verso la svolta,” in Storia del Cinema Italiano 1949–​1953, ed. Luciano De Giusti (Venice: Marsilio, 2003); see also Franco Pecori, Vittorio De Sica (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980). 49. Bazin, “Un film miraculeux.” 50. André Bazin, “Vie et mort de la surimpression,” Qu’est-​ce que le cinema? I,  27–​30. 51. Andre Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2, 21. 52. “Things are  .  .  . why manipulate them?” Rossellini’s comment is cited by Annette Michelson, “Review of André Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 1,” Art Forum 6:10 (Summer 1968): 67–​71. 53. Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” 30: “aesthetic geology.” 54. André Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en scène,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2,  64–​66. 55. Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en scène,” 62–​63. 56. Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” 36. 57. Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” 37. 58. André Bazin, “Bicycle Thief,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2, 60. 59. Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” 24.

178 Notes 60. Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en scène,” 67. 61. Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” 37. 62. Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” 37. 63. Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” 24. 64. Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” 38. 65. Bazin, “Bicycle Thief,” 57. 66. Zeno’s paradox is an example of spatial, point-​by-​point thinking that rejects the flow of time. If everything is motionless at every instant of time, and time is made of instants, then motion is impossible. Bergson’s duration opposes Zeno’s paradox. 67. Bazin, “Bicycle Thief,” 60. 68. An asymptote is a line that the curve of a function tends toward as the independent variable of the curve approaches some limit (usually infinity). 69. André Bazin, “Umberto D: A great work,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2, 82. 70. Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en scène,” 78. 71. Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en scène,” 78. 72. Bazin, “Umberto D: A Great Work,” 82. 73. Henri Bergson, “The Life and Work of Ravaisson,” in The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Audison (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007), 195. 74. Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en scène,” 68. 75. Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” 31. 76. Bazin, “The Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 134. Other references to Faraday can be found in Bazin’s review of René Clement’s Gervaise (1956):  “Gervaise de René Clement,” Éducation Nationale 25 (4 October 1956), and in his review of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1947): “La soif du mal,” France Observateur 422 (4 June 1958).

Chapter 4 1. Régis Debray, Dieu, un itinéraire: Matériaux pour l’histoire de l’Éternel en Occident (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacobs, 2001). 2. André Bazin, “Le troisième homme,” Parisien Libéré 1588 (21 October 1949). 3. André Bazin, “De Sica:  Metteur-​ en-​ scène,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 73. 4. Leslie Diana Sawchenko, “The Concept of the Person: The Contributions of Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Mounier to the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur” (MA thesis, Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, Alberta, 2013), 48. 5. André Bazin, “Charlie Chaplin,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 152–​153. 6. In this study, I do not deal with Bazin and censorship, but the Yale André Bazin Archive warrants further examination on this topic. See, for example, “Le Vatican: L’Humanité et la censure,” France Observateur 302 (23 February 1956). Interestingly, as far as the intersection of cinema and religion is concerned, Bazin saw Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and, in regard to its mysticism, he

Notes  179 declared, “I was bored.” “Le jeu des pronostics a commencé,” Parisien Libéré 3944 (17 May 1957). 7. André Bazin, “Vie et mort de la surimpression,” in Qu’est-​ce que le cinéma? I: Ontologie et langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969), 27–​30. 8. André Bazin, “À propos de Pourquoi nous combattons:  Histoire, documents et actualités,” in Qu’est-​ce que le cinéma? I, 31–​36:  “loin de faire faire aux sciences historiques un progrès vers l’objectivité, le cinéma leur donne, par son réalisme même, un pouvoir d’illusion supplémentaire” (36). 9. Bazin, “Vie et mort de la surimpression,” 27: “L’opposition que certains voudraient voir entre la vocation d’un cinéma consacré à l’expression presque documentaire de la réalité et les possibilités d’évasion dans le fantastique et le rêve offertes par la technique cinématographique est, dans son fond, artificielle. [ . . . ] L’un est inconcevable sans l’autre. [ . . . ] Le fantastique au cinéma n’est permis que par le réalisme irrésistible de l’image photographique. [ . . . ] Ce qui plait en effet au public dans le fantastique cinématographique, c’est évidemment son réalisme, je veux dire la contradiction entre l’objectivité irrécusable de l’image photographique et le caractère incroyable de l’événement.” 10. André Bazin, “Cinéma et théologie,” Esprit 176:2 (February 1951), 237–​245: “Comme le cinéma tient déjà en lui-​même du miracle, il était tout indiqué pour faire pleuvoir les roses sur la terre et jaillir les sources du sable aride” (238). 11. André Bazin, “La fille des marais,” Radio Cinéma Télévision 68 (6 May 1951): “Ces êtres sont ce qu’ils sont, et s’ils sont, de surcroit, les signes de la grâce, la grâce n’impressionne pas la pellicule. Mais seulement l’esprit de ceux qui ont des yeux pour voir.” 12. André Bazin, “Lourdes et ses miracles,” Parisien Libéré 3483 (22 November 1955); André Bazin, “ Lourdes et ses miracles,” France Observateur 289 (24 November 1955). 13. Sarah Wilson, “Catholics, Communists and Art Sacré,” Yumpu, 5, accessed January 10, 2018, http://​www.yumpu.com/​en/​document/​view/​4025117. 14. Wilson, “Catholics, Communists and Art Sacré,” 6. See also Sarah Wilson, “Art and Politics of the Left in France:  1935–​1955” (PhD diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1991). 15. Sarah Wilson, “Art and Politics of the Left in France: 1935–​1955.” 16. John Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left:  1930–​ 1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 9. 17. Robert A. Ventresca, Soldier of Christ:  The Life of Pope Pius the XII (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 149. 18. Marc Coppin, La Côte d’Opale en Guerre d’Algérie 1954–​ 62 (Villeneuve-​ d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2012), 134–​136. 19. Léon Poliakov, Bréviaire de la haine: Le III Reich et les juifs (Paris: Calmann-​Lévy,  1951). 20. André Bazin, “Le ghetto concentrationnaire,” Cahiers du Cinéma 9 (February 1952),  58–​60. 21. Bazin, “Le ghetto concentrationnaire”:  “Je doute que le réalisateur Radok ait consciemment voulu le style de son film. [  .  .  .  ] qu’il s’agit surtout d’un regain d’influence peut-​être individuel de l’esthétique expressioniste qui a toujours été latent

180 Notes sinon explicite dans le cinéma tcheque. L’étonnant c’est qu’ici les caractéristiques les plus contestables de l’expressionisme retrouvent paradoxalement une justification profonde, une virginité réaliste.” 22. André Bazin, “Ghetto Terenzin,” France Observateur 87 (10 January 1952):  “En sorte que l’on a, devant le film, le sentiment probablement justifié d’une fidélité documentaire à sa réalité objective et mentale.” 23. Jiri Cieslar, “Living with the Long Journey:  Alfred Radok’s Daleká cesta,” Central European Review (CER) 9:20 (4 June 2001), http://​www.ce-​review.org/​01/​20/​ kinoeye20_​cieslar.html. 24. Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris (1919–​ 1933) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 25. On Italian Catholicism in contrast to French secularism and French Catholicism, see André Bazin, “Le petit monde de Don Camillo,” Parisien Libéré 2406 (1 June 1952), and “Le retour de Don Camillo,” Parisien Libéré 2724 (17 June 1953). 26. Leo Goretti, “Irma Bandiera, Maria Goretti:  Gender Role Models for Communist Girls in Italy (1945–​56),” Twentieth Century Communism 4:4 (May 2012), 14–​37. 27. André Bazin, “Un saint ne l’est qu’après,” in Qu’est-​ce que le cinéma? IV: Une esthétique de la Réalité:  Le néo-​réalisme (Paris:  Éditions du Cerf, 1962), 60:  “complètement subordonnée à la matière la plus modeste et la plus prosaïque.” 28. Bazin, “Un saint ne l’est qu’après,” 61–​62: “l’assiduité au catéchisme et la ferveur de la première communion sont les seuls jalons, banals, d’une piété commune. [ . . . ] Admettons même que l’influence morale de l’éducation chrétienne ne se borne pas à fournir un alibi aux véritables mobiles inconscients, la conduite de Maria n’est pas encore convaincante.” 29. Bazin, “Un saint ne l’est qu’après,” 61: “Et ce martyre même, . . . . Un quelconque crime passionel. . . . Il n’est pas un trait de ce crime qui ne souffre une explication naturelle. La résistance de la fille peut n’être qu’une pudeur physiologique exacerbée, un réflexe de petite bête qui a peur.” 30. Bazin, “Un saint ne l’est qu’après,” 63: “cette vie de saint ait déçu, du moins en France, plus encore les chrétiens que les incroyants. [ . . . ] Mais c’est justement le mérite de Genina d’avoir fait une hagiographie qui ne prouve rien et surtout pas la sainteté de la sainte . . . de la considérer autrement que de l’extérieur et comme la manifestation ambiguë d’un fait spiritual rigoureusement indémontrable.” 31. Bazin, “Un saint ne l’est qu’après,” 64: “Ce n’est pas, ce ne doit pas être une sainte que nous voyons vivre, mais la petite paysanne Maria Goretti. Les objectifs ne sont pas les yeux de la foi; le micro n’aurait pas pu enregistrer les Voix de Jeanne d’Arc.” 32. Bazin, “Un saint ne l’est qu’après,” 63: “un saint n’existe pas au présent, seulement un être qui le devient et qui d’ailleurs jusqu’à sa mort risque de se damner.” 33. André Bazin, “Il Bidone ou le salut en question,” in Qu’est-​ce que le cinéma? IV, 130–​131: “Picasso . . . est un gentil, un tendre, un sentimental, toujours riche de bonnes intentions et prêt à s’apitoyer sur les autres ou sur lui-​même, mais le destin de Picasso est probablement sans espoir. Il vole parcequ’il ‘a l’air d’un ange’ [ . . . ] Incapable de réagir vraiment, de remonter les pentes intérieures, Picasso est promis à l’obscurité et à la déchéance définitive, en dépit de sa gentillesse et

Notes  181 de son amour pour sa femme et son enfant. Picasso n’est pas méchant, mais il est perdu.” 34. Bazin, “Il Bidone ou le salut en question,” 130:  “leurs actes ne les jugent pas plus objectivement que subjectivement par le mal ou le bien qu’ils opèrent ou la pureté des intentions. La pureté de l’être se situe plus profondément, elle se définit essentiellement pour Fellini par la transparence ou l’opacité de l’âme, ou encore, si l’ont veut, une certaine perméabilité à la grâce. [ . . . ] La conversation avec la fillette paralytique . . . a introduit en même temps le trouble dans son âme, elle lui a fait apercevoir non pas tant le mensonge accidentel des ses actes, que l’imposture essentielle de sa vie.” 35. Bazin, “Il Bidone ou le salut en question,” 132: “les événements ne sont jamais en effet, chez Fellini, que les instruments combien accidentels du tâtonnement des âmes.” 36. André Bazin, “Il Bidone après La Strada,” Parisien Libéré 3572 (5 March 1956): “Mais, à la différence de Gelsomina, du Fou, et de Zampanò, son héros est trop loin de l’esprit d’enfance pour se frayer la voie vers la Lumière. Il mourra, tâtonnant encore dans l’ignorance de son âme.” 37. André Bazin, “Cabiria,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2, 85. 38. Bazin, “Cabiria,” 89. 39. Bazin, “Il Bidone ou le salut en question,” 130: “Ainsi, pouvons-​nous croire Augusto sauvé, comme Zampanò.” 40. Bazin, “Il Bidone après La Strada”:  “La Strada est l’histoire de deux pauvres êtres disgraciés dans leur corps et dans leur intelligence, mais dont l’amour, . . . , finit par révéler à eux-​mêmes l’âme et son destin.” 41. On Chaplin’s miming mimesis like no one else, see André Bazin, “Si Charlot ne meure  . . . .” Cahiers du Cinéma 17 (November 1952), 2–​5: “l’inimitable imitation de Charlot.” 42. André Bazin, “La Strada:  Le chemin de la poésie,” Parisien Libéré 3270 (17 March 1955). 43. André Bazin, “La Strada,” in Qu’est-​ce que le cinéma? IV, 124: “L’écran se borne à nous montrer la roulotte mieux et plus objectivement que ne pouvait le faire le peintre ou le romancier. Je ne dirai pas que la caméra l’a tout platement photographiéê, le mot même de photographie serait de trop, elle nous la montre tout simplement, ou mieux encore, elle nous permet de la voir. [ . . . ] Rien de ce que nous révèle Fellini ne doit un supplément de sens à la manière de la montrer. Mais cette révélation pourtant n’existe que sur l’écran.” 44. Bazin, “La Strada,” 124: “qui ne triche pas avec la réalité.” 45. Bazin, “La Strada,” 123: “seul le cinéma pouvait . . . conférer à l’extraordinaire roulotte motocycliste de Zampanò la force de mythe concret auquel atteint ici cet objet insolite et banal tout à la fois.” 46. Karl Schoonover, “Histrionic Gestures and Historical Representation:  Masina’s Cabiria, Bazin’s Chaplin, and Fellini’s Neorealism,” Cinema Journal 53:2 (Winter 2014), 94. 47. Bazin, “Charlie Chaplin,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, 150. 48. Bazin, “La Strada: Le chemin de la poésie”: “Son interprétation qui évoque d’abord évidemment Charlot, apparait une seconde vision beaucoup plus personelle  .  .  .

182 Notes l’inoubliable visage de Gelsomina.” On the similarities and differences between Chaplin and Masina, see Schoonover, “Histrionic Gestures.” 49. André Bazin, “ . . . et le dernier Fellini,” France Observateur 366 (16 May 1957): “Quant à Julietta [sic] Masina, son interprétation n’était pas ce que je préférais dans La Strada. Ses progrès m’ont paru ici incroyables. Cette fois, son interprétation remplit pleinement le personage et le personage remplit le film.” 50. Bazin, “Charlie Chaplin,” 152. 51. Bazin, “Charlie Chaplin,” 152. 52. Donna Kornhaber, Charlie Chaplin, Director (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 168–​180. 53. Bazin, “Charlie Chaplin,” 147. 54. Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en scène,” 72. 55. Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en scène,” 72–​73. 56. (Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en scène,” 70. 57. Angela Dalle Vacche, “Directing Children on Screen:  The Problem of Self-​ Consciousness,” in François Truffaut, eds. Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 403–​419. 58. Schoonover, “Histrionic Gestures,” 110. 59. Schoonover, “Histrionic Gestures,” 108. 60. The Criterion DVD of Nights of Cabiria has a special feature on this character. 61. André Bazin, “Les nuits de Cabiria,” Parisien Libéré 4073 (16 October 1957): “Cabiria petite soeur spirituelle du Poverello d’Assisi.” 62. Bazin, “Cabiria: The Voyage to the End of Neorealism,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2, 84, footnote. 63. Bazin, “ . . . et le dernier Fellini.” 64. André Bazin, “Le 7eme art tel qu’on l’écrit: Avant-​garde et mysticisme au cinéma” Parisien Libéré 2807 (23 September 1953): “qui ne réduise pas la religion à une simple propagande morale ou sociale, et le cinéma au rang de son instrument.” 65. André Bazin and Jacques Doniol-​Valcroze, “Notes sur Cannes,” Cahiers du Cinéma 34 (April 1954), 30–​38. 66. Antoine De Baecque, Truffaut, A  Biography, trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Knopf, 1999), 92. 67. André Bazin, “Lola Montès,” Éducation Nationale 4 (26 January 1956): “Mais Ophuls est . . . un cinéaste baroque. Non seulement par sa prédilection fétishiste pour les angelots de bois doré et le pseudoréalisme tourmenté du style Jésuite mais, plus sérieusement, pour sa façon d’exprimer l’essentiel par la prolifération de l’accessoire.” 68. André Bazin, “Des cailloux du Petit Poucet au chemin de la vie: L’enfance et le cinéma,” Écran Français 233 (19 December 1949): “Ce n’est pas un hasard si les innombrables enfants de Jésus de la renaissance italienne ne sont tout que petits mômes échappés de Lilliput. Petits hommes déjà tout armés de sourires, de clin d’oeil et d’intelligence (des Shirley Temple avant la lettre).” 69. André Bazin, “Le metteur-​en-​scène Max Ophuls est mort,” Parisien Libéré 3901 (27 March 1957): “Spirituellement de l’Autriche c’était sans doute une prédilection pour le style baroque, lequel ne se manifeste pas seulement par de vols d’angelots joufflus

Notes  183 jusque dans les églises normandes du Plaisir, mais de façon plus profonde dans le style même de sa mise-​en-​scène.” 70. Bazin, “Lola Montès”: “choisit sciemment l’Enfer parce qu’il est dans son personage! Peut-​être aussi, après tout, parce qu’elle aime le Diable et qu’il le lui rend bien. N’allons donc pas la plaindre. Au demeurant je parle de métaphore non le symbole. Le cirque reste un cirque, mais on reconnaît les grands metteurs-​en-​scène à ce que la réalité dépasse chez la réalité.” 71. François Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in The French New Wave:  Critical Landmarks, eds. Ginette Vincendeau and Peter Graham (London: Palgrave, 1999). Originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma, 1954, http://​ www.newwavefilm.com/​about/​a-​certain-​tendency-​of-​f rench-​cinema-​t ruffaut. shtml. 72. Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.” 73. Dudley Andrew, Film in the Aura of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 106. 74. André Bazin, “Cinéma et théologie,” Esprit 19 (February 1951), 237–​245. 75. Bazin, “Cinéma et théologie,” 240: “il semble que si la sensibilité protestante n’est pas indispensable à la réalisation d’un bon film catholique, elle a des chances d’être un atout.” 76. Bazin, “Cinéma et théologie,” 47:  “On ne sait par quel miracle le grasseyement aristocratique et légèrement méridional de Fresnay arrive à se muer ici en un parler rocailleux, une sorte d’aboiement de l’âme.” 77. Bazin, “Cinéma et théologie,” 244: “L’adaptation présente au moins une faiblesse regrettable: le personage du prêtre. [ . . . ] La revolte de l’île et plus encore celle du faux recteur est trop facilement explicable par la sottise du nouveau curé. Le faire interpréter de surcroit par Brochard  .  .  . était déjà d’un anti-​cléricalisme maladroit.” 78. Bazin, “Cinéma et théologie,” 241: “la régularisation d’une union libre.” 79. Bazin, “Cinéma et théologie,” 242:  “Privé de son organe religieux, la Société s’empoisonne, son sang pourrit.” 80. Bazin, “Cinéma et théologie,” 243: “Ce ne sont en effet que de petits morceaux de pain. Mais le spectateur le plus mécréant aura le souffle coupé par l’horreur du geste.” 81. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1,  9–​16. 82. André Bazin, “Le journal d’un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, 125–​143. 83. Bazin, “Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 133. 84. Bazin, “Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 133. 85. On this film, see Raymond Durgnat, “Bresson and Bazin: Two Strains of Christian Realism?,” in Robert Bresson, ed. James Quandt (Toronto: Cinematheque of Ontario, 2011), 419–​428. 86. Noa Steimatsky, The Face on Film (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2017), 235–​257. 87. Bazin, “Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 138–​139.

184 Notes 88. On The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), see David Bordwell, The Films of Carl-​Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 66–​95. 89. Steimatsky, The Face on Film, 250. 90. Bazin, “Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 135. 91. Andrew, Film in the Aura of Art, 126–​127. 92. Tony Pipolo, Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 84. 93. Bazin, “Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 141. 94. Bazin, “Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 127 and 131. 95. On Gabriel Marcel’s creative fidelity, see Sawchenko, “The Concept of the Person.” 96. Arne Melberg, “Repetition (in the Kierkegaardian Sense of the Term),” Diacritics 20:3 (Fall 1990), 71–​87. 97. Bazin, “Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 131. 98. Bazin, “Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 134. 99. Melberg, “Repetition (in the Kierkegaardian Sense of the Term),” 73. 100. Melberg, “Repetition (in the Kierkegaardian Sense of the Term),” 74. 101. On Bresson’s screen at the end of Le journal, powerful insights come from Seung-​ Hoon Jeong, “Multiple Indexicality and Multiple Realism in André Bazin,” The Major Realist Film Theorists: A Critical Anthology, ed. Ian Aitken (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2016), 94–​109.

Chapter 5 1. Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Mortimer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). See also Edgar Morin, l’homme et la mort dans l’histoire (Paris: Corea, 1951). 2. André Bazin, “L’homme imaginaire et la fonction magique du cinéma,” France Observateur 331 (13 September 1956): “la civilisation est revenue au plus près du mythe humain le plus archaïque et peut-​être le plus universel.” 3. Lorraine Mortimer, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Edgar Morin, The Cinema or the Imaginary Man, xxiii. 4. On Edgar Morin, see Dudley Andrew, “Edgar Morin,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (New York: Routledge, 2009), 408–​421. 5. Lucien Lévy-​Bruhl, The “Soul” of the Primitive (New York: Macmillan, 1928). 6. André Bazin was well aware of Jean Epstein’s films and writings on the cinema. He writes: “Le seul moment où nous avons senti cette année souffler l’esprit du cinéma fut la retrospective Epstein, non pas tant à cause des fragments de films présentés par Henri Langlois, que de la ferveur, de la piété des allocutions de Jean Cocteau, Abel Gance, Charles Spaak et Jean Dreville” (“Pour un festival à trois dimensions,” Cahiers du Cinéma 23 [May 1953]). Bazin also uses Epstein’s term photogénie, see “Bilan d’un festival,” Écran Français 106 (8 July 1947): “photogénie de ses paysages et de ses interprètes.”

Notes  185 7. On Louis Delluc’s photogénie, see Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave 1915–​ 1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 95. 8. On Epstein, see Christophe Wall-​Romana, Jean Epstein:  Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy (Manchester, UK:  Manchester University Press, 2013); Sarah Keller and Jason Paul, eds., Jean Epstein:  Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2012). 9. André Bazin, “L’intelligence des objets,” France Observateur 271 (21 July 1955): “la poésie de l’objet est la véritable matière du film.” 10. André Bazin, “Naissance de la couleur,” Parisien Libéré 2262 (21 December 1951). 11. André Bazin, “Bus Stop, de Joshua Logan,” France Observateur 338 (1 November 1956):  “L’efficacité purement cinématographique demeurent pour eux l’alpha et l’oméga.” 12. Gilles Deleuze, The Time-​Image (1985), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 13. Bazin, “Bus Stop, de Joshua Logan.” 14. Amédée Ayfre, Conversion aux images? (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1964). 15. Georges Cuenot, Teilhard de Chardin:  A Biographical Study (Baltimore, MD:  Helicon, 1965). 16. André Bazin, “Un musée des ombres: Magie blanche, magie noir,” Écran Français 182 (21 December 1948): “l’arbre de science de la photographie.” 17. André Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge:  Projet de film d’ André Bazin,” Cahiers du Cinéma 100 (October 1959), 55–​ 61. Bazin’s piece was published posthumously. 18. Even though his preference for the Romanesque is unique, André Bazin is not the first to relate the Middle Ages to the cinema. For example, Élie Faure, inspired by Erwin Panofsky, compares a film’s complex organization to a medieval cathedral. On this point, see Eva Kuhn, “La cinéplastique d’Élie Faure ou du cinéma et de la plasticité des arts,” Regards Croisés 5 (2016), 62–​73; Muriel van Vliet, “L’esprit des formes est un—​Élie Faure: Pour une estétique révolutionnaire,” Regards Croisés 5 (2016), 74–​85. 19. Dudley Andrew, André Bazin, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 204. 20. André Bazin, “Le salaire du péché,” France Observateur 347 (31 January 1957). 21. Sarah Wilson, “Art and Politics of the Left in France: 1935–​1955” (PhD diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1991), 3. See also Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia:  Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1995); Michele Cone, French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art before, during, and after Vichy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 22. Andrew, André Bazin, 41. 23. Elizabeth Lawrence Mendell, Romanesque Sculpture in Saintonge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940). The author of this monograph studied at Yale with Henri Focillon. On Henri Focillon and the life of forms in relation to Henri Bergson, one of Bazin’s philosophical influences, see Andrei Molotiu, “Focillon’s Bergsonian Rhetoric and the Possibility of Deconstruction,” In—​Visible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies 3 (Winter 2001). http://​www.rochester.edu/​in_​visible_​culture/​issue3/​molotiu.htm.

186 Notes 24. Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 58. 25. For a cinematic overview of the French regional landscapes, see André Bazin, “Le Tour de France du cinéma,” Écran Français 209 (27 June 1949). 26. Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 61. 27. Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 59. 28. For Bazin, the early medieval church of Torcello is comparable to the humble but resilient atmosphere of a small church in Saintonge: “J’aimerais mieux vous parler d’une admirable excursion à Torcello, ville morte de la lagune, ou subsiste, au milieu des marécages, une prodigieuse basilique du XII siècle et qui tire de cette solitude bouleversante une pureté austère qu’on cherche en vain dans Venise.” (“La France est très bien placée au Festival de Venise,” Parisien Libéré 1543 [30 August 1949]). 29. Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 57–​58: “Le sculpteur saintongeais répugne aux grands sujets dramatiques, c’est un observateur de la vie quotidienne, traitant avec le même réalisme la vie profane et les thèmes sacrés. Ce fait est sans doute commune à toute la sculpture romane, mais nulle part, peut-​être plus qu’en Saintonge, l’artiste ne s’est tenu dans cette zone d’humanité familière, à distance des grandes terreurs et aussi des grands symbolismes mystiques qui animent tant de chapiteaux ou de tympanes romans. On dirait que une sorte de sagesse paysanne, associée à ce génie de la mesure et de la sérénité qui se dégage de la Saintonge, en harmonie avec son histoire comme avec son paysage, a humanisé et tempéré ici l’âme religieuse médiévale.” 30. Paul Tonnellier (1886–​1977) was an ordained priest, historian, and archaeologist who wrote a series of monographs on the churches of Saintonge. He was a founder and first director of the Académie of Saintonge, and a canon (chanoine) of the Church. 31. Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 59: “Endormies dans les villages depuis des siècles, mais non point mortes, elles se sont laissé investir et comme absorber par la vie d’alentour et jusqu’à la vie végétale. Nombreuses sont les églises envahies de verdure, si même elles n’en sont pas absolument pénétrées comme cette chapelle de Saint Ouen dont les pierres ne tiennent plus que par les racines de lierre et de la vigne vierge.” 32. Bazin compares the literary adaptations of Pierre Bost and Jean Aurenche to Viollet-​ le-​Duc’s philosophy of restoration. 33. André Bazin, “Les nuits de Cabiria: L’herbe folle de l’espérance,” Parisien Libéré 4073 (16 October 1957). 34. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, 15. 35. Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 60: “où les poules couvent dans les niches des saints, où les arcs polylobes aveuglés de grillage pour servir de poulailler, où le bois est entreposé dans les magnifiques absidioles en cul de four, où la salle capitulaire est devenue la grange à foin, cependent que d’un chapiteau à l’autre les haricots achèvent de sécher sur des fils de fer.” 36. E-​mail from Ludovic Cortade, March 20, 2009. See also Louis Réau, Iconographie de l’art chrétien (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955). On the connections among Louis Réau, Emile Mâle, and Henri Focillon, see A. Frolow, “Revue de Louis

Notes  187 Réau. Iconographie de l’art chretien,” Revue de l’Histoire de Religions 50:2 (1956), 229–​232. 37. Universalism argues that human beings share the features of art, thought, and language, whereas nominalism denies the existence of all universals and abstract features. On universalism, see Bazin, “Le Tour de France du cinéma” : “L’immense audience du cinéma exige que le singulier y prenne valeur d’universalité simple et directe.” See also André Bazin, “Le langage de notre temps,” in Regards neufs sur le cinéma (Paris: Peuple et Culture, 1954). 38. Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 58: “Cette étrange figure de grand’goule diabolique, dévoreur de colonne, . . . où le marquis de Chasseloup-​Laubat estime avec vraisemblance reconnaître un avatar du T’ao T’ie, le glouton chinois. Ça n’est donc pas seulement l’Arabie . . . et le Proche-​Orient par les Croisades, les manuscrits, les ivoires et les tissus, mais à travers l’ Orient, l’Extrème Orient même.” 39. André Bazin, “L’auteur de la Grande Illusion n’a pas perdu confiance dans la liberté de création,” Écran Français 230 (28 November 1949). On the Middle Ages and the cinema, see also André Bazin, “Peut-​on s’intéresser au cinéma? ” Misc B:  Bulletin Intérieur: Maison des Lettres, December 1, 1942: “la diffusion du cinéma est le plus grand fait esthético-​social qui se soit produit depuis le moyen-​age. [  .  .  .  ] Nous sommes à l’aurore d’une sorte de technocratie artistique comparable à celle du monde gréco-​latin ou chrétien quand, au moyen âge, un théologien renommé professait indifféremment (et au grés des facilités qu’on lui offrait) à Gand, Francfort, à Paris ou à Pérouse.” 40. André Bazin, “Livres de cinéma: Amédée Ayfre, Dieu au cinéma,” Cahiers du Cinéma 25 (7 July 1953): “J’aurais choisi, je crois, au début du Chemin du Ciel, ce curieux travelling latéral le long d’une muraille percée d’ouvertures à grilles, derrière lesquelles on suit la marche hésitante d’un homme qui, avec une lanterne, cherche à reconnaître sur le mur opposé, à travers une suite de peintures naïvement religieuses, les traces de Dieu.” See also Mélisande Leventopoulos, “D’André Bazin à Amédée Ayfre: La circulation du Personnalisme dans la cinéphilie chrétienne,” COnTEXTES 12 (20 September 2012), http://​journals.openedition.org/​contextes/​5513; on Catholicism and the cinema, see also Mélisande Leventopoulus, “Une église moderne en images: La cause cinématographique du Père Raymond Pichard (1947–​1954),” 1895 63 (Spring 2011), 70–​89. Père Raymond Pichard produced Georges Rouquier’s Lourdes et ses miracles (1955). For a thorough overview of Catholic cinephilia, see Mélisande Leventopoulos, Les catholiques et le cinéma: La construction d’un regard critique (France 1895–​1958) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015). 41. André Bazin, “Theatre and Cinema, Part Two,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, 107. 42. Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God:  A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine (1964), trans. Philip Thody (London and New York: Verso, 2016). 43. Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 61: “Mais quelque chose même de ces harmonies, ou du moins de la matière de cette pierre, pourra passer dans le noir et le blanc. Je pense notamment à la façon dont elle s’est laissée ronger, durcissant par place,

188 Notes tombant à d’autres en poussière et superposant ainsi curieusement au grouillement de la sculpture originale les entrelacs hasardeux de l’usure et du vent.” 44. Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 55: “Nulle part en France, l’art roman n’a connu plus de séduction.” 45. Augustine of Hippo, Saint, On Christian Doctrine, trans. and intro. D. W. Robertson Jr. (New York, Liberal Arts Press, 1958), xiii. 46. Tom Levin, “Iconology at the Movies:  Panofsky’s Film Theory,” in Angela Dalle Vacche, ed., The Visual Turn: Film Theory and Art History (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2002), 85–​114. 47. Christophe Gauthier, “Une branche nouvelle sur l’arbre des formes? Focillon, Élie Faure et le cinéma,” in Histoire du cinéma, problématique des sources, eds. Irene Bessier and Jean Gili (Paris: INHA-​Université de Paris1-​Maison des sciences de l’homme-​ AFRHC, 2004), 295–​310:  “Il existe d’admirables films documentaires:  Nanook, Moana en sont des exemples. Mais le cinéma comme spectacle a recours le plus souvent a l’affabulation.” 48. Tom Conley, “Evolution and Event in Qu’est-​ce que le cinéma?,” in Opening Bazin, ed. Dudley Andrew with Hervé Joubert-​Laurencin (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2011, 32–​41. See also Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms, trans. George Kubler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 49. The word “radiating” appears in André Bazin, “La vie passionée de Vincent van Gogh,” L’Éducation Nationale 6 (February 1957): “mais de nous faire approcher au plus près de ce point d’incandescence spirituelle où la transmutation nous sera rendu sensible par son rayonnement” (Emphasis mine). 50. André Bazin, “Farrebique ou le paradoxe du réalisme,” Esprit 132 (1 April 1947). 51. André Bazin, “André Gide,” France Observateur 96 (13 March 1952): “La première émotion esthétique due au cinéma est bien celle qui faisait s’écrier aux spectateurs du Grand Café ‘les feuilles bougent!’ Gide vit et ce simple spectacle nous comble.” 52. André Bazin, “Les enfants de l’amour,” France Observateur 185 (26 November 1953): “du vent nouveau qu’il fait lever sur le cinéma. Tant que de telles révélations seront possibles, le cinéma sera vivant.” 53. Obituary for André Bazin, Cahiers du Cinéma 90 (December 1958): “Il [Bazin] a été le fil d’Ariane . . . sans lui la dispersion eut été la plus complète.” 54. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 9: “The religion of ancient Egypt, aimed against death [ . . . ] But pyramids and labyrinthine corridors offered no certain guarantee against pillage.” 55. Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 58: “Aussi bien dans l’architecture n’aurons nous garde d’oublier non plus les énigmatiques lanternes des morts et surtout celle de Fénioux qui dresse, au milieu du champ où paissant les moutons, sur un faisceau de colonettes, son petit clocher d’écailles.” 56. André Bazin, “Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou le vent soufflé où il veut,” Parisien Libéré 3791 (11 November 1956); André Bazin, “Un condamné à mort s’est échappé,” Éducation Nationale 32 (November 1956). 57. Bazin’s breathing metaphor is important. On this point, see André Bazin, “La cybernétique d’André Cayatte,” Cahiers du Cinéma 36 (1 June 1954); André Bazin, “Le

Notes  189 toit,” Parisien Libéré 3800 (29 November 1956): “le souffle humain du néoréalisme”; André Bazin, “The Quiet Man,” Parisien Libéré 2536 (8 November,1952): “Le film est gonflé comme une voile au souffle d’une poésie pleine de tendresse et d’humour.” 58. The idea of energy as breathing is pervasive in Régis Debray, Dieu, un itinéraire (Paris:  Odile Jacob, 2001). See also a review by Jean-​ Louis Schlegel, “Régis Debray: Dieu. Un itinéraire,” Esprit (May 2002), http://​www.esprit.presse.fr/​article/​ schlegel-​jean-​louis/​regis-​debray-​dieu-​un-​itineraire-​8649?folder=5. 59. Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 61.

Bibliography Primary Sources: Articles and Essays by André Bazin, cited in each chapter Chapter 1 Introduction: The Soul of Cinema “Ontologie de l’image photographique.” Confluences (1 January 1945). “Sables de mort: Un admirable documentaire.” Écran Français 56 (24 July 1946). “La Dame du Lac.” Parisien Libéré 1120 (21 April 1948). “Première désillusion.” Parisien Libéré 1492 (1 July 1949). “Le journal d’un cure de campagne et la stylistique de Robert Bresson.” Cahiers du Cinéma 3 (1 June 1951). “L’Écran démoniaque.” France Observateur 132 (20 November 1952). “Le 7eme art tel qu’on l’écrit: Avant-​garde et mysticisme au cinéma.” Parisien Libéré 2807 (23 September 1953). “El et Luis.” France Observateur 213 (10 June 1954). “Le petit journal du cinéma.” Cahiers du Cinéma 56 (31 January/​1 February 1956). “Les périls de Perri.” Cahiers du Cinéma 83 (May 1958). “Montage interdit.” In Qu’est-​ ce que le cinéma? I.  Ontologie et langage, 117–​129. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969.

Chapter 2 Art “A Bergsonian Film: The Picasso Mystery.” In Color: The Film Reader, edited by Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price, 57–​62. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006. “À propos de réalisme.” Information Universitaire 1188 (8–​15 April 1944). This is an early version of “Ontologie de l’image photographique.” Confluences (1 January 1945). “Le réalisme cinématographique et l’école italienne de la Libération.” Esprit 141 (1 January 1948). “Tout film est un documentaire social.” Lettres Françaises 166 (25 July 1947). “À la recherche du temps perdu: Paris 1900.” Écran Français 118 (30 September 1947). “Bambi.” Parisien Libéré 1131 (5 May 1948). “L’espace dans la peinture et le cinéma: À propos de van Gogh.” Arts 210 (15 April 1949). “Film d’Art:  Quand Rubens et van Gogh font du cinéma.” Parisien Libéré 1474 (10 June 1949). “Le cinéma et la peinture: Van Gogh.” La Revue du Cinéma 19:20 (Fall 1949). “Sur les films de peinture: Réponse à Bourniquel.” Esprit 161 (1 November 1949). “Le journal d’un curé de campagne et la stylistique de Robert Bresson.” Cahiers du Cinéma 3 (1 June 1951). “Le film d’art est-​il un documentaire comme les autres?” Radio Cinéma Télévision 75 (24 June 1951). “Théâtre et Cinéma, II.” Esprit 180–​181 (July–​August 1951).

192 Bibliography “La nuit est mon royaume.” Parisien Libéré 2228 (12 November 1951). “La peinture vue par un trou de serrure.” Arts 340 (4 January 1952). Reprinted as “Painting and Cinema.” In What Is Cinema? vol. 1, 164–​169. Essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. “In Defense of Mixed Cinema.” In What Is Cinema? vol. 1,  53–​75. “Continent perdu.” France Observateur 296 (12 January 1956). “La vie passionnée de Vincent van Gogh.” Éducation Nationale 6 (2 July 1957). “La vie passionnée de Vincent van Gogh: La peinture à l’huile.” Parisien Libéré 3855 (1 February 1957).

Chapter 3 Science “Sables de mort: Un admirable documentaire.” Écran Français 56 (24 July 1946). “Le nouveau style américain:  Le cinéma est-​ il majeur?” Écran Français 60 (21 August 1946). “Le mythe du cinéma totale et les origines du cinématographe.” Critique 6 (November 1946). Reprinted as “The Myth of Total Cinema.” In What Is Cinema? vol. 1,  17–​22. “Entomologie de la pin-​up girl.” Écran Français 77 (17 December 1946). “On ne meurt pas comme ça.” Écran Français 54 (10 July 1946). “Le cinéma en gondole.” Écran Français 115 (9 September 1947). “Quand les microbes jouent les vedettes.” Parisien Libéré 953 (10 October 1947). “Les secrets d’Orson Welles.” Écran Francais 169 (21 September 1948). “Au carrefour du siècle.” Parisien Libéré 1322 (15 December 1948). “Chasse à l’homme.” Parisien Libéré 1487 (25 June 1949). “La grande horloge.” Parisien Libéré 1489 (21 July 1949). “La police est photogénique.” Parisien Libéré 1509 (28 June 1949). “Portrait d’un assassin: Un bon cadre.” Écran Français 230 (28 November 1949). “Le journal d’un curé de campagne et la stylistique de Robert Bresson.” Cahiers du Cinéma 3 (1 June 1951). “Chronique d’un amour.” Parisien Liberé 2163 (28 August 1951). “Le film policier n’est pas un genre mais obéit à une loi: La logique (1–​2).” Radio Cinéma Télévision 91 (14 October 1951). “Un film miraculeux: Miracle à Milan.” Parisien Libéré 2238 (24 November 1951). “Miracle à Milan:  Cinéma, poésie, justice, et charité.” Radio Cinéma Télévision 498  (2 December 1951). “Un film de De Sica: Miracle à Milan.” France Observateur 82 (6 December 1951). “La peinture vue par un trou de serrure.” Arts 340 (4 January 1952). “‘M’ le maudit ‘Remade’ in Hollywood.” Parisien Libéré 2309 (15 February 1952). “L’amour mène la danse. Il la mène bien.” Parisien Libéré 2341 (24 March 1952). “Le style c’est le genre.” Cahiers du Cinéma 43 (1 January 1955). “Note sur De Sica.” Cahiers du Cinéma 33 (1 March 1954) “Du rififi chez les hommes.” Parisien Libéré 3295 (15 April 1955). “Du réalisme dans les films policiers.” France Observateur 259 (28 April 1955). “Colline 24.” Parisien Libéré 3307 (29 April 1955). “Le monde du silence:  À quoi rêvent les poissons?” Parisien Libéré 3558 (17 February 1956). “Le monde du silence: Icare sous-​marin.” Radio Cinéma Télévision 319 (26 February 1956). “Le monde du silence.” France Observateur 303 (1 March 1956). “Gervaise de René Clément.” Éducation Nationale 25 (4 October 1956).

Bibliography  193 “Cinéma français: Demain la crise?” Carrefour 632 (24 October 1956). “Le salaire du péché.” France Observateur 347 (31 January 1957). “Les bâteaux de l’enfer.” Parisien Libéré 3870 (19 February 1957). “De la politique des auteurs.” Cahiers du Cinéma 70 (1 April 1957) “Les fanatiques.” France Observateur 392 (14 November 1957). “Témoin à charger.” Parisien Libéré 4185 (24 February 1958). “La soif du mal.” France Observateur 422 (4 June 1958).

Chapter 4 Religion “Le troisième homme.” Parisien Libéré 1588 (21 October 1949). “Des cailloux du Petit Poucet au chemin de la vie: L’enfance et le cinema.” Écran Français 233 (19 December 1949). “Cinéma et Théologie.” Esprit 176 (February 1951). “La fille des marais.” Radio Cinéma Télévision 68 (6 May 1951). “Ghetto Terezin.” France Observateur 87 (10 January 1952). “Le ghetto concentrationnaire (Daleka Cesta).” Cahiers du Cinéma 9 (1 February 1952). “Le petit monde de Don Camillo.” Parisien Libéré 2406 (9 June1952). “Si Charlot ne meure  . . . .” Cahiers du Cinéma 17 (November 1952). “Le retour de Don Camillo.” Parisien Libéré 2724 (17 June 1953). “Le 7eme art tel qu’on l’écrit: Avant-​garde et mysticisme au cinéma.” Parisien Libéré 2807 (23 September 1953). “Notes sur Cannes.” Cahiers du Cinéma 34 (1 April 1954). (Published with Jacques Daniel-​Valcroze.) “La Strada: Le chemin de la poésie.” Parisien Libéré 3270 (17 March 1955). “Lourdes et ses miracles.” Parisien Libéré 3483 (22 November 1955). “Lourdes et ses miracles.” France Observateur 289 (24 November 1955). “Lola Montès.” Éducation Nationale 4 (26 January 1956). “Le Vatican: L’Humanité et la censure.” France Observateur 302 (23 February 1956). “Il Bidone après La Strada.” Parisien Libéré 3572 (5 March 1956). “Le metteur-​n-​scène Max Ophuls est mort: Une perte cruelle pour le cinéma.” Parisien Libéré 3901 (27 March 1957). “De la politique des auteurs.” Cahiers du Cinéma 70 (April 1957). “. . . et le dernier Fellini.” France Observateur 366 (16 May 1957). “Le jeu des pronostics a commencé.” Parisien Libéré 3944 (17 May 1957). “Les nuits de Cabiria: Herbe folle de l’espérance.” Parisien Libéré 4073 (16 October 1957).

Chapter 5 Epilogue “Peut-​on s’intéresser au cinéma?” Misc B: Bulletin Intérieur de la Maison des Lettres (1 December 1942). “Farrebique ou le paradoxe du réalisme.” Esprit 132 (1 April 1947). “Bilan d’un festival.” Écran Français 106 (8 July 1947). “Un musée des ombres:  Magie blanche, magie noire.” Écran Français 182 (21 December 1948). “Le Tour de France du cinéma.” Écran Français 209 (27 June 1949). “La France est très bien placée au Festival de Venise.” Parisien Libéré 1543 (30 August 1949). “L’auteur de la Grande Illusion n’a pas perdu confiance dans la liberté de création.” Écran Français 230 (28 November 1949). “Naissance de la couleur.” Parisien Libéré 2262 (21 December 1951).

194 Bibliography “André Gide.” France Observateur 96 (13 March 1952). “L’Homme tranquille (The Quiet Man).” Parisien Libéré 2536 (8 November 1952). “Pour un festival en trois dimensions.” Cahiers du Cinéma 23 (1 May 1953). “Livres de cinéma: Amédée Ayfre, Dieu au cinéma.” Cahiers du Cinéma 25 (1 July 1953). “Les enfants de l’amour.” L’Observateur d’aujourd’hui 185 (26 November 1953). “Le langage de notre temps.” In Regards neufs sur le cinéma, edited by Jacques Chevalier. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1953. “La cybernétique d’André Cayatte.” Cahiers du Cinéma 36 (1 June 1954). “L’Intelligence des objets.” France Observateur 271 (21 July 1955). “Il Bidone après La Strada.” Parisien Libéré 3572 (5 March 1956). “L’homme imaginaire et la fonction magique du cinema.” France Observateur 331 (13 September 1956). “Bus Stop, de Joshua Logan.” France Observateur 338 (1 November 1956). “Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou le vent soufflé où il veut.” Parisien Libéré 3791 (19 November 1956). “Un condamné à mort s’est échappé.” Éducation Nationale 32 (22 November 1956). “Le toit.” Parisien Libéré 3800 (29 November 1956). “Le salaire du péché.” France Observateur 347 (31 January 1957). “La vie passionée de Vincent van Gogh,” Éducation Nationale 6 (7 February 1957) “Les nuits de Cabiria: Herbe folle de l’espérance.” Parisien Libéré 4073 (16 October 1957). “Les églises romanes de Saintonge: Projet de film d’André Bazin.” Cahiers du Cinéma 100 (1 December 1959).

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Index of Names and Films For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Figures are indicated by f following the page number.   “À la recherche du temps perdu” Big Clock, The (Bazin), 70–​71 (Bazin), 170n23 Boileau, Pierre, She Who Is No More, 72 Allegret, Marc, Avec André Gide,  162–​63 Bost, Un recteur de Î’Ile de Sein, 131 “Amédée Ayfre, Dieu aucinéma,” 187n40 Bresson, Robert André Bazin’s New Media (Andrew), 7, Diary of a Country Priest, 5, 50–​51, 66, 147, 148 96, 133, 137–​40 Andreotti, Giulio, 83 “Stylistics of Robert Bresson,The,” Andrew, Dudley, André Bazin’s New 101,  133–​41 Media, 7, 147, 148 Un condamné à mort s’est Antonioni, Michelangelo, Story of a Love échappé,  164–​65 Affair,  73–​74 Bréviaire de la haine (Poliakov), 106 Aristarco, Guido, 83   Aurenche, Un recteur de Î’Ile de Sein, 131 Cameraman, The (Keaton), 19–​20 Avec André Gide (Allegret),  162–​63 Capellani, Albert, 149 Ayfre, Amédée, Dieu au cinéma, Germinal, 149 159, 187n40 Capra, Frank, Why We Fight, 102   Cartier-​Bresson, Henri, 17, 18f Balázs, Béla, 136 Castle, The (Kafka), 99 Bambi (Disney), 24 Cayatte, André, 55, 67–​68 Bedroom in Arles (van Gogh), 40–​41 “La cybernétique d’André Cayatte,” Being and Time (Heidegger), 6 175–​76n28 Bellon, Yannick, Paris 1900,  25–​26 “Certain Tendency of the French Cinema, Benjamin, Walter, 35 A” (Truffaut), 129 Bergman, Ingmar, The Seventh Seal, Chabrol, Claude, 1 178–​79n6 Chandler, Raymond, 12 Bergson, Henri, 6, 36–​37, 55–​56 Chaplin, Charlie, 5 antiteleological sensibility, 62 City Lights,  123–​24 Creative Evolution, 55–​56, 64, 161 De Sica and, 120–​21, 122–​23 Duration and Simultaneity, 65 Gold-​Rush, The, 120 stream of consciousness, 60–​61 Kid, The,  121–​22 Time and Free Will, 66 Pilgrim, The, 121 Berlinguer, Enrico, 108 Tramp character, 119–​20, 121–​22, Bernanos, Georges, Diary of a Country 123, 127 Priest, 50, 66, 138–​39 Chardin, Jean-​Baptiste-​Siméon,  21 Bicycle Thieves (De Sica), 79, 84, 85, 86, 88, Cielo sulla Palude (Genina), 101, 89–​90,  93–​94 109–​12,  127

208  Index of Names and Films Cinema, The (Mortimer), 142–​43, 184n1 “Cinéma et théologie” (Bazin), 179n10, 183n80 Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire (Morin), 142, 184n1 Citizen Kane (Welles), 6 City Lights (Chaplin), 123–​24 Cloche, Maurice, Monsieur Vincent, 101, 112 Clouzot, Henri-​Georges Les diaboliques,  71–​73 Mystery of Picasso, The, 49, 50, 51–​54 Cocteau, Jean, Le sang d’un poète,  38–​39 “Colline 24” (Bazin), 177n43, 177n45 Congar, Yves, 108 Conley, Tom, “Evolution and Event in Qu’est-​ce que le cinéma,” 161 “Continent perdu” (Bazin), 169–​70n11 Cortade, Ludovic, 158 Cousteau, Jacques, The Silent World, 61–​62,  63 Couturier, Père Marie-​Alain, 148 Creative Evolution (Bergson), 55–​56, 64, 161   Darwin, Charles, 55–​57, 58, 60 On the Origin of Species, 58 Dassin, Jules, Du rififi chez les hommes, 75–​77, 177n44, 177n46 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 20, 24 Vitruvian Man, 22, 23f De Baecque, Antoine, 11, 127 Debray, Régis, 165, 187n40 de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard, 108 Delannoy, Jean Dieu a besoin des hommes, 101, 131–​33 La symphonie pastorale, 101, 129–​31 Delannoy, Robert, religious adaptations,  129–​33 De Lubac, Henri, 108 “Des cailloux du Petit Poucet au chemin de la vie: L’enfance et le cinéma” (Bazin), 182n68 De Sica, Vittorio, 81, 83–​85, 86–​90 Bicycle Thieves, 79, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89–​90,  93–​94 Chaplin and, 120–​21, 122–​23 Miracle in Milan,  77–​81

“Note sur De Sica” (Bazin), 177n47 reversals and parallels, 93–​94 Umberto D, 84, 87, 91–​93, 113–​14 “De Sica: Metteur-​en-​scène” (Bazin),  93–​94 De Toth, Andre, House of Wax,  74–​75 Diary of a Country Priest Bernanos’ novel, 50, 66, 138–​39 Bresson’s film, 5, 50–​51, 66, 96, 101, 133–​36,  137–​40 Dieu a besoin des hommes (Delannoy), 101,  131–​33 Dieu au cinéma (Ayfre), 159, 187n40 Doniol-​Valcroze, Jacques, 1 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, Passion of Joan of Arc, The,  136–​37 Duration and Simultaneity (Bergson), 65 “Du réalisme dans les films policiers” (Bazin), 69, 177n42 Du rififi chez les hommes (Dassin), 75–​77, 177n44, 177n46   Einstein, Albert, 65–​66, 175n22 Eisenstein, Sergei, 11 Strike, 80 Emmer, Luciano, 36–​37 Guerrieri, 33 Picasso, 34 Enrie, Giuseppe, Turin Shroud photograph, 16 “Entomology of the Pin-​Up Girl” (Bazin), 62 Epstein, Jean, 184n6 “Evolution and Event in Qu’est-​ce que le cinéma” (Conley), 161 “Evolution of Language in the Western” (Bazin), 161 “Evolution of the Language of Cinema, The” (Bazin), 7, 56–​57, 59, 161   Faraday, Michael, 4 Farrebique (Rouquier), 109, 162 Fellini, Federico, 83 Il Bidone, 101, 113–​16, 117, 180–​81n36,  181n40 I Vitelloni, 124 La Strada, 101, 116, 117–​19, 120, 181n43, 181n45, 181–​82n49

Index of Names and Films  209 Nights of Cabiria, The, 5, 116, 119–​21,  123–​27 symbolism,  116–​17 Flaherty, Robert, 57 Flowers of Saint Francis, The (Rossellini), 125 Focillon, Henri, 148, 160–​62 Life of Forms, The, 161 Freund, Karl, 110–​11 Fuller, Samuel, 11   Gauthier, Christophe, 161 Genina, Augusto, Cielo sulla Palude, 101, 109–​12,  127 Germany Year Zero (Rossellini), 85 “Ghetto Terenzin” (Bazin), 180n22 Gide, André, La symphonie pastorale, 129 Godard, Jean-​Luc, 1 God Needs Men (Delannoy), 101, 131–​33 Goldmann, Lucien, Hidden God, 160 Gold Rush, The (Chaplin), 120 Greenberg, Clement, 35 Guernica (Resnais), 33 Guerrieri (Emmer), 33   Haesaerts, Paul Rubens,  34–​36 Visite à Picasso, 52 Harvest of Hate (Poliakov), 106 Heavenly Play, The (Sjöberg),  159–​60 Heaven Over the Marshes (Genina), 101, 109–​12,  127 Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, 6 Heisenberg, Werner, 65 Heraclitus,  36–​37 Hidden God (Goldmann), 160 Himlaspelet (Sjöberg), 159 House of Wax (De Toth), 74–​75   Il Bidone (Fellini), 101, 113–​16, 117, 180–​81n36,  181n40 “Il Bidone après La Strada” (Bazin), 181n36, 181n40 “Il Bidone ou le salut en question” (Bazin), 180–​81n35,  181n39 Il Fuoco (Patrone), 123–​24 Imaginary Man, The (Mortimer), 142–​43,  184n1

Interior of a Restaurant (Resnais), 46 I Vitelloni (Fellini), 124   Joffé, Alex, Les Fanatiques, 173–​74n4   Kafka, Franz Castle, The, 99 pessimism,  99–​100 Kast, Pierre, Les désastres de la guerre, 33 Keaton, Buster, The Cameraman,  19–​20 Kierkegaard, Søren, 101, 139 Kwinter, Stanford, 68   Lacombe, Georges, La nuit est mon royaume, 25 “La cybernétique d’André Cayatte,” 175–​76n28 Lady in the Lake (Montgomery), 12–​13 “La fille des marais” (Bazin), 179n11 “La grande horloge” (Bazin), 176n30 Lamorisse, Albert, White Mane, 12 L’an 1000, l’art des sculpteurs romans (Mâle), 161 Lang, Fritz, M,  69–​70 La nuit est mon royaume (Lacombe), 25 “La nuit est mon royaume” (Bazin), 170n20 Laocoön (Lessing), 22–​23 “La peinture vue par un trou de serrure” (Bazin), 171n29, 171n34 L’art primitif, l’art médiéval (Réau), 158 La Strada (Fellini), 101, 116, 117–​19, 120, 181n43, 181n45, 181–​82n49 “La Strada: Le chemin de la poésie” (Bazin), 181–​82n48 La symphonie pastorale Delannoy’s film, 101, 129–​31 Gide’s letter, 129 La Terra Trema (Visconti), 109, 168n20 “L’auteur de la Grande Illusion n’a pas perdu confiance dans la liberté de création” (Bazin), 187n39 “La vie passionnée de Vincent van Gogh” (Bazin), 172–​73n58 “Le 7eme’ art tel qu’on l’écrit. Avant-​ garde et mysticism au cinéma” (Bazin), 182n64 Le Brun, Charles, 21

210  Index of Names and Films Le chemin du ciel (Sjöberg),  159–​60 Le cimetière marin (Valéry), 163 “Le cinéma et la peinture” (Bazin), 31, 172n54 “Le ghetto concentrationnaire” (Bazin), 179–​80n21 “Le journal d’un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson” (Bazin), 49 Le monde du silence (Cousteau and Malle), 61–​62,  63 “Le monde du silence” (Bazin), 174n10, 175n19 Le sang d’un poète (Cocteau), 38–​39 Les batueax de l’enfer (Yamamura), 176n29 “Les batueax de l’enfer” (Bazin), 176n29 Les désastres de la guerre (Kast), 33 Les diaboliques (Clouzot), 71–​73 “Les églises romanes de Saintonge” (Bazin), 147–​66, 150f, 186n29, 186n31, 186n35, 187n38, 187–​88n43,  188n55 Les Fanatiques (Joffé), 173–​74n4 “Les secrets d’Orson Welles” (Bazin), 173n1 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Laocoön,  22–​23 “Le style c’est le genre” (Bazin), 176n36 L’hippocampe femelle (Painlevé), 27–​28 “L’homme imaginaire et la fonction magique du cinéma” (Bazin), 184n2 Life of Forms, The (Focillon), 161 Lo Duca, Joseph-​Marie, 1 “Lola Montès” (Bazin), 182n67, 183n70 Lola Montès (Ophuls), 127–​29 Long Journey, The (Radok), 100, 106–​7 Losey, Joseph (M remake), 69–​70 Lourdes et ses miracles (Rouquier), 101,  103–​4 Lumière Brothers, 101–​2 Lust for Life Minnelli film, 44–​45, 46, 47–​49, 50 Stone novel, 45 M (Lang), 69–​70 Mâle, Émile, 160–​61 L’an 1000, l’art des sculpteurs romans, 161

Malle, Louis, The Silent World, 61–​62, 63 Mambo (Rossen), 124 Man Escaped, A (Bresson), 164–​65 Marina, Giulietta, 5 Mauriac, François, 66, 106 “Max Ophuls est mort” (Bazin), 182–​83n69 McLaren, Norman, 26–​27, 28 Melberg, Arne, 139–​40 Méliès, Georges, 101–​2 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice, 6 Michelson, Annette, 11, 168n20 Minnelli, Vincente, Lust for Life, 44–​45, 46, 47–​49,  50 Miracle in Milan (De Sica and Zavattini),  77–​81 Moana (Flaherty), 161 Monsieur Vincent (Cloche), 101, 112 “Montage Interdit” (Bazin), 11–​12 Montgomery, Robert, Lady in the Lake,  12–​13 Morin, Edgar, 5, 142–​43, 165 Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire, 142, 184n1 Mortimer, Lorraine, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, 142–​43, 184n1 Moulin de la Galette (van Gogh), 46–​47 Mounier, Emmanuel, 8, 99–​100, 105–​6 Traité du caractère, 108 M remake (Losey), 69–​70 Murnau, F. W., 57 Sunrise,  110–​11 Mystery of Picasso, The (Clouzot), 49, 50,  51–​54 “Myth of Total Cinema, The” (Bazin), 7, 59–​60,  81   Nanook of the North (Flaherty), 161 Narcejac, Thomas, She Who Is No More, 72 “New American Style: Is the Cinema An Adult?” (Bazin), 62–​63 Nights of Cabiria, The (Fellini), 5, 116, 119–​21,  123–​27 “Note sur De Sica” (Bazin), 177n47   On Christian Doctrine (Saint Augustine, D. W. Robertson, translation), 160–​61 “Ontologie de l’image photographique” (Bazin), 169n2 Ontologie et langage (Bazin), 168n20

Index of Names and Films  211 “Ontology of the Photographic Image, The” (Bazin), 21, 31, 44, 58, 133–​ 41, 147, 161–​62, 176n29, 188n54 Ophuls, Max, 101, 182n67 Lola Montès,  127–​29 Origin of Species (Darwin), 58   Painlevé, Jean, 10, 27–​28 L’hippocampe femelle, 27–​28 marine biology work, 31 “Painting and Cinema” (Bazin), 37 Paisà (Rossellini), 28, 85, 87, 96 Panofsky, Erwin, 161 Papanicolaou, Andrew C., 64–​65 Paris 1900 (Védrès), 25–​26 Pascal, Blaise, 127 Passion of Joan of Arc, The (Dreyer),  136–​37 Patrone, Giovanni, Il Fuoco,  123–​24 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 17 Perri (Disney), 10 Picasso (Emmer), 34 Pichard, Père Raymond, 101–​2 Pierre, Abbé, 125 Pilgrim, The (Chaplin), 121 Pius XII, 105–​6, 107–​8, 111–​12 Plato, on mathematics, 67 Poliakov, Léon, Bréviaire de la haine, 106 “Portrait d’un assassin: Un bon cadre” (Bazin), 175n23 Potato Eaters, The (van Gogh), 40, 50 Proust, Marcel, 26   “Quand Rubens et van Gogh fond du cinéma” (Bazin), 171n40 Queffélec, Henri, Un recteur de Î’Ile de Sein, 131   Racine, Jean, dépouillement, 127 Radok, Alfred, The Long Journey, 100,  106–​7 Réau, Louis, L’art primitif, l’art médiéval, 158 Reed, Carol, The Third Man, 99 Renoir, Claude, 53 Renoir, Jean, 22, 163 depth of field, 57–​58 Resnais, Alain Guernica, 33

Interior of a Restaurant, 46 Paris 1900,  25–​26 Van Gogh, 29, 30, 31, 33, 40–​44, 45–​47,  49 Rififi (Dassin), 69–​77, 177n44, 177n46 Rivette, Jacques, 1 Robertson, D. W., On Christian Doctrine, translation,  160–​61 Rohmer, Eric, 1 Rome: Open City (Rossellini), 85 Rosen, Philip, 16 Rossellini, Roberto, 82, 83–​88 Flowers of Saint Francis, The, 125 Germany Year Zero, 85 Paisà, 28, 85, 87, 96 Rome: Open City, 85 War Trilogy, 84, 85 Rossen, Robert, Mambo, 124 Rouquier, Georges Farrebique, 109, 162 Lourdes et ses miracles, 101, 103–​4 Rubens (Storck and Haesaerts), 34–​36   Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine,  160–​61 Sartre, Jean-​Paul, 6, 113, 115–​16, 162–​63 Schoonover, Karl, 124 Seventh Seal, The (Bergman), 178–​79n6 She Who Is No More (Boileau and Narcejac), 72 Silent World, The (Cousteau and Malle), 61–​62,  63 Sjöberg, Alf, Himlaspelet,  159–​60 Spencer, Herbert, 55–​56 Stone, Irving, Lust for Life, 45 Storck, Henri, Rubens,  34–​36 Story of a Love Affair (Antonioni), 73–​74 Strike (Eisenstein), 80 “Style is the Genre, The” (Bazin), 71 “Stylistics of Robert Bresson, The” (Bazin), 101,  133–​41 Sunrise (Murnau), 110–​11 “Sur les films de peinture: Réponse à Bourniquel” (Bazin), 171n31, 172n51   Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 108 Terrace in the Luxembourg Gardens (van Gogh),  46–​47

212  Index of Names and Films Third Man, The (Reed), 99 Thourez, Maurice, 105 Time and Free Will (Bergson), 66 Tonnellier, Monsieur Le Chanoine (Paul), 155, 186n30 Totò il buono (Zavattini), 79 “Towards Anthropomorphic Cinema” (Visconti), 168n20 Traité du caractère (Mounier), 108 Tramp, The (Chaplin), 119–​20, 121–​22, 123, 127 Truffaut, François, 1, 127, 129–​30, 131, 183n71 “Certain Tendency of the French Cinema, A,” 129   Umberto D (De Sica), 84, 87, 91–​93, 113–​14 Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (Bresson),  164–​65 Un recteur de Î’Ile de Sein (Queffélec), 131 “Un saint ne l’est qu’après” (Bazin), 180n32   Valéry, Paul, 101, 138–​39 on Einstein, 175n22 Le cimetière marin, 163 Vanel, Charles, 72 Van Gogh (Resnais), 29, 30, 31, 33, 40–​44, 45–​47,  49 van Gogh, Vincent Bedroom in Arles,  40–​41 Moulin de la Galette,  46–​47 Potato Eaters, The, 40, 50 Terrace in the Luxembourg Gardens,  46–​47 View of Paris from Vincent’s Room in the Rue Lepic,  46–​47 Védrès, Nicole, Paris 1900,  25–​26 “Vie et mort de la surimpression” (Bazin), 179n9

View of Paris from Vincent’s Room in the Rue Lepic (van Gogh), 46–​47 Viollet-​le-​Duc, Eugène,  156 “Virtues and Limitations of Montage, The” (Bazin),  28–​29 Visconti, Luchino, 83 La Terra Trema, 109, 168n20 “Towards Anthropomorphic Cinema,” 168n20 Visite à Picasso (Haesaerts), 52 Vitruvian Man (Da Vinci), 22, 23f Von Stroheim, Erich, 57   Wagner, Richard, gesamtkunstwerk, 24 Walt Disney animations Bambi, 24 Perri, 10 Watt, Harry, Where No Vultures Fly,  28–​29 Welles, Orson, 22 Citizen Kane, 6 deep focus, 7, 57–​58 What Is Cinema? (Bazin), 26–​27, 162 Where No Vultures Fly (Watt), 28–​29 White Mane (Lamorisse), 12 Why We Fight (Capra), 102 Wilder, Billy, Witness for the Prosecution, 173–​74n4 Wilson, Sarah, 104–​5, 147–​48 Witness for the Prosecution (Wilder), 173–​74n4 Wollen, Peter, 17   Yamamura, Satoru, Les bateaux de l’enfer, 176n29   Zavattini, Cesare, 85 Totò il buono, 79 Umberto D, 84, 87, 91–​93, 113–​14

Subject Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Figures are indicated by f following the page number. 3-​D, 59,  74–​75   algebra, 4, 66–​67, 72, 73 animals, 157 Bazin’s love of, 61–​62 documentaries, editing, 11–​12 animations avant-​garde,  28 Couzot’s stop-​motion, 52 McLaren’s,  26–​27 Walt Disney, 10, 24 anthropocentric (film) with anti-​anthropocentric mind-​machine,  13–​14 definition, 8 Disney animation, Perri, 10 German Caligarism, 9 as negative, 8 objectification via, 14 Otherness,  62–​63 potential, 11 subjectivity in space, 14 anthropocentric humanism, 20, 22 anthropocentrism, 8, 142 cinema as alternative to, 97 élan vital, 60 medieval art, early, 20 traditional arts, 9–​10 anthropocosmomorphism, 5 anti-​anthropocentric,  143–​46 anthropomorphism, 142 egalitarian, 10 egalitarian dialect, individual–​world, 10 ocean life and man, 63 vocabulary,  62–​63 anti-​anthropocentric, 62–​63,  68

cinema as, 30–​31 cinema reorienting art-​making as,  33–​34 egalitarian anthropomorphism, 10 film, 9 love or community, 14–​15 mind-​machine, anthropocentric with,  13–​14 moral stance, 5 motion, destabilizing power, 22 neorealism, 84 from non-​anthropocentric,  9–​10 storytelling, visible world, 10 thinker, 8 anti-​anthropocentric anthropocosmomorphism,  143–4​ 6 anti-​Platonic, 7, 58–​59, 67 art, 3–​4,  16–​54 Christological ontology, 16–​22, 18f, 98, 99 frame and screen, 34–​39 impure cinema, 22–​25, 23f objects of still life and camera lens as object,  39–​49 painting as object, cinema as art, 30–​34 from painting to biology, 49–​54 in perception, self-​expression, and imagination,  3–​4 postwar art documentary, 4, 29–​31, 33–​ 35, 49–​50, 51 pure cinema, 25–​29, 27f art documentary, 29–​30, 32 as avant-​garde,  30–​31 biology, 31 postwar, 4, 29–​31, 33–​35, 49–​50, 51 art history, 31

214  Subject Index art theory, 6 asymptote, 91, 92, 178n68 attractions, 59 auteurist fever, 127–​28 automatic transfer, object to image, 16–​17 automatism, photographic, 8–​9   Bazin, André, 2f biography, Bazin, 1–​2 1950s, mentoring, 1, 2f birth and early life, 1 as Catholic dissident, 98 cinema interest, development, 1 health, poor, 1, 55–​56, 163 media and journal contributions, 1 as Personalist, 98 politics, 2 biology, 4, 55–​56 botany, 157 breathing energy as, 165, 188–​89n57 metaphor, 165, 188–​89n57   Cabiria, 119–​21,  123–​27 cache, 37 Cahiers du Cinéma auteurist fever, 127–​28 Bazin founding, 1 Bazin obituary, 163 Truffaut in, on adaptation équivalence,  127–​30 calculus, 175n20 Bergson on, 64 differential, 4 neorealism,  81–​93 phenomenology, 81 Caligarism, German, 9 camera obscura,  21–​22 Catholicism Communists and, 104–​8 Italian, vs. French secularism and Catholicism, 180n25 Catholics, dissident, Bazin as, 98 censorship, 178–​79n6 centrifugal,  7–​8 anti-​anthropocentrism,  68 Bresson’s Diary, 137 cinema screen, 24, 37, 41, 43, 44

energy, passage of, 135 neorealism,  82–​83 painting, 41 photography’s transformation into cinema, 22 Rossellini’s cinema, 86–​87 centripetal, 7–​8, 24, 37, 41, 44, 122–​23 Charlot, 118, 120–​22 children’s films, editing, 11–​12 Christological ontology, 16–​22, 18f, 98, 99, 135 cinema as art, 30–​34 as asymptote of reality, 91, 92, 178n68 recording in, 17, 169n7 “cinema of reality,” 57–​58 “cinema of the image,” 57–​58 cognition, 7 Combat des Vertus et des Vices, 155 Communists, Catholics and, 104–​8 concave lens, 21–​22 consciousness, 26 stream of, 60–​61 convex lens, 21–​22 cosmology, 15, 36–​37   Danish School of Quantum Physics, 65–​66 Darwin, Charles, 55–​57, 58, 60 Darwinian stance, 7 death, 9, 139–​41 awareness of, 9, 101, 138 Catholic iconophilia, 74 cinema and, 98 Fellini’s characters, 115, 116 life-​in-​death and death-​in-​life,  34 in policier, 69 religion and, 98 in science, 96–​97 screen image, black, 43–​44 time and, 98 Way of Cross and journey to, 137 deductive approach, 47, 83 deep focus, 7 defamiliarization, 5 dépouillement, 127 depth, 35 determinism, technological, 59 dialectic,  7–​8 

subject Index  215 École Normale d’Instituteurs, La Rochelle, 55, 56f École Normale d’Instituteurs, Versailles, 158 École Normale of Saint Cloud, Paris, 31 École Normale Supérieure of Saint Cloud, La Rochelle, 1, 158 editing, 11. See also specific films animal documentaries, 11–​12 children’s films, 11–​12 excessive, rejection, 11 fourth wall, 13 Lady in the Lake (Montgomery), 12 object, primacy, 13 shot-​reverse-​shot,  13 education, secular, 1 École Normale d’Instituteurs, La Rochelle, 55, 56f École Normale d’Instituteurs, Versailles, 158 École Normale of Saint Cloud, Paris, 31 École Normale Supérieure of Saint Cloud, La Rochelle, 1, 158 egalitarian anthropomorphism, 10 cinema, 35, 38, 40 entomology, 63 natural selection, 55 objectifying camera lens, 143–​44 summation, 94 élan vital, 60, 65, 67–​68, 156, 165 electromagnetic energy, 4, 94f,  94–​96 empreinte digitale,  16–​17 end of cinema, 142 entomology, 63 insect-​human overlap, 62 equalizing approach, 8–​9 Euclidean geometry, 4, 55, 58, 64, 69 evocative affinities, 61–​64 eye, cinema’s special, 9–​12   Faraday, Michael, 93–​97, 94f Fenioux, lantern of the dead, 163, 164f film theory, Bazin’s. See also specific films and topics cinema as living organism, 3 criticism and history with, 2 “idea” of cinema, 3

medium and phenomenal world, 3 philosophical depth and moral responsibilities, 3 spectatorship and free will and universalism, 3 texts, 3 What is cinema?, 3 fingerprint,  16–​17 focus, deep, 7 fossilization, 34, 35–​36 fourth wall, 13 breaking, 59, 126–​27 frame, screen and, 34–​39 freedom and necessity, 14 free will, 61   geometry, 64 analytic, 91 Euclidean, 4, 55, 58, 64, 69 snowflake and, 67–​69 German Caligarism, 9 gesamtkunstwerk (Wagner), 24 God. See also religion belief in, 99   hallucination, 7 history of art, 31 humanism, anthropocentric, 20, 22 humanist, 8 humankind, defined, 3   icon, 17 iconophilia, 19 illusionism, 57 lifelike,  19–​20 imagination, art in, 3–​4 immanence, 98, 102 Bazin’s meaning, 102 supernatural and, 101–​4 impure cinema, 7, 22–​25, 23f incandescence, 47 indeterminacy, principle of, 65 indexical status, image, 17, 18f inductive approach, 47 insect-​human overlap, 62 interconnectedness, 118 irrational belief, 16–​17, 101 Italian neorealism, 4–​5, 58, 60–​61, 81–​93 

216  Subject Index jamais vu,  4–​5   key words, conceptual, 7–​9 kitsch, 35   La main-​tendue, 98 lantern of the dead, Fenioux, 163 lens,  9–​10 concave,  21–​22 convex,  21–​22 as object, 39–​49 lens, camera, 9–​10 concave,  21–​22 convex,  21–​22 as object, 39–​49 lifelike illusionism, 19–​20 light as lumen, 21 as lux, 21 long take, 11 lumen, 21 lux, 21   magnetism, 94f,  94–​96 mathematics. See also specific topics love of, 55 as metaphor, 65–​66 miraculous,  77–​81 Plato, 67 policier and, 69–​77 in Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution, 173–​74n4 mind-​machine, cinema as, 13–​15 mineral and mineralogy, 34 mirror, 24 mises-​en-​scène, 9–​10, 24, 40, 57–​58. See also specific films mobile framing, 37 moral judgment, capacity for, 63–​64 moving image, 5–​6 destabilizing power, 22 time passing, as illusory motion, 6 multiplication, 50–​51, 66, 77–​78 mummification, photography as, 142–​43   naturalism, quantitative, 20 natural selection box office and, 173n1 nature based on, 173n2

nature, 31–​32. See also specific topics neorealism anti-​anthropocentric,  84 calculus,  81–​93 calculus and, 81–​93 Italian, 4–​5, 58, 60–​61, 81–​93 phenomenological, 20 non-​anthropocentric anti-​anthropocentric film from, 9–​10 medium, 9 nonfiction films, 32 Nouvelle Théologie, 108   object camera lens as, 39–​49 Capra, Frank, 102 painting as, 30–​34 primacy, 13 still life, 39–​49 in subject, 13 objectif (lens). See lens objectification,  9–​10 object-​image automatic transfer, 16–​17 indexical (physical) link, 17 oneself, looking at from outside, 113–​17 ontology, 83 Bresson’s stylistics, 21, 31, 44, 58,  133–​41 Christological, 16–​22, 18f, 98, 99, 135 photographic image, 142–​43 Ophuls, Max, 127–​29 Other and Otherness anthropomorphism,  62–​63 Bazin’s outreach toward, 67–​68 belief in God, 99 Bergon’s becoming, 36 edited and camera movement for,  14–​15 human consciousness and, 32 insight into, via cinema, 98, 159 in realism, 13 Self and, 66, 101–​2 Sjöberg on, 159 time’s flow, 140 outside, looking at oneself from, 113–​17   paintbrush,  39–​40 painting, as object, 30–​34

subject Index  217 paradox,  7–​8 parallels, 90–​91, 93–​94, 159 parallel world, 15 participant observers, artists as, 21 perception, 7 art in, 3–​4 perceptual rejuvenation, 5 Personalism, 8 Personalist, 98 perspective charts, 20 phenomenological,  4–​5 phenomenological realism, 21 photograph. See also specific topics iconophilia, 19 indexical status, image, 17, 18f as mummification, 142–​43 reality transfer, 17–​19 recording in, 17, 169n7 time at standstill, 17–​19, 18f photographic automatism, 8–​9 platonic heavens, 59, 61, 81 Platonic Idealism (Hollywood’s), 59, 69–​70,  75 Platonic solids, 67, 175n26 policier, 130 mathematics and, 69–​77 politics, 148 postwar art documentary, 4, 29–​31, 33–​35, 49–​50, 51. See also specific documentaries pure,  25–​26 pure cinema, 7, 25–​29, 27f   quantitative naturalism, 20 quantum physics, 4, 65–​66   Radio Cinéma et Télévision, 1 realism,  19–​20 abstracting, 20 definition,  7–​8 external, 20 heuristic, 10 medieval vs. Renaissance, 20, 170n13 phenomenological, 21 spatial, 21 styles, 176n40 temporal, 21 reality transfer, 16–​19

recording, in photograph and cinema, 17, 169n7 redemption, 117 rejuvenation, perceptual, 5 religion, 3–​4, 5, 98–​130 Bazin’s ontology and Bresson’s stylistics,  133–​41 belief in God, 99 Catholic dissident and Personalist, 98 Catholics and Communists, 104–​8 Charlot and Cabiria, 117–​27 Christological ontology, 16–​22, 18f, 98, 99, 135 cinema and, as human need,  100–​1 etymology, 98 hope and compassion, 99–​100 immanence, 98 immanence, supernatural and, 101–​4 Italian Catholicism vs. French secularism and Catholicism, 180n25 looking at oneself from outside,  113–​17 “religious film,” 101 risk taking, 109–​12 Robert Delannoy’s religious adaptations,  129–​33 sacred and profane, 100 Saint Sulpice and Max Ophuls, 127–​29 as sociology of human behavior, 100 resemblance (ressemblance),  16–​17 reversals, 22, 34, 93–​94 Romanesque, Saintonge and, 5–​6, 34, 147–​ 66, 148–50f, 185n18, 185n23 “Les églises romanes de Saintonge” (Bazin), 147–​66, 148–50f, 186n29, 186n31, 186n35, 187n38, 187–​88n43,  188n55   Saintonge, 2, 5–​6 churches, 147–​66, 148–50f “Les églises romanes de Saintonge” (Bazin), 147–​66, 148–50f, 186n29, 186n31, 186n35, 187n38, 187–​88n43,  188n55 Romanesque, 5–​6, 34, 147–​66, 148–50f, 185n18, 185n23 Saint Sulpice, 127–​29

218  Subject Index science, 3–​4, 7, 55–​97 art and, 31–​32 Bergson, Einstein, and Heisenberg, 64–​67 Darwin and Bergson, 55–​61, 56f evocative affinities, 61–​64 Faraday, 93–​97, 94f geometry and snowflake, 67–​69 mathematics,  77–​81 mathematics, policier and, 69–​77 neorealism and calculus, 81–​93 screen, 24–​25, 31. See also specific topics centrifugal, 24, 37, 41, 43, 44 death image, black, 43–​44 frame and, 34–​39 sculpture, 49 Self and Other, 9–​10, 60, 66, 101–​2,  142–​43 self-​consciousness,  63–​64 self-​expression, art in, 3–​4 self-​healing capacity,  55–​56 self-​projection,  8 shot-​reverse-​shot editing,  13 snowflake, geometry and, 68–​69 social document, film as, 19–​20 Soviet montage, 11, 57–​58 space, real vs. filmic, 11 space-​time continuum, 11 still life objects, 39–​49 stillness, photograph, 17–​19, 18f storytelling, manipulation, 10 stream of consciousness, 60–​61 subject, object and, 13, 168–​69n27 subjectivity in space, 14 subject–​object split, 16 summation (sommation),  93–​94

supernatural,  101–​4 effects, dislike for, 102–​3 survival of the fittest, 55–​56 symbiosis, 32   Talmont, 163, 165f teatro di varietà,  124–​25 technological determinism, 59 television criticism, 1 Témoignage Chrétien, 108 Temple, Shirley, 128 texts, 3 time, 98 as cinema’s fundamental preoccupation, 14 in creativity, 9 in human existence, 9 Otherness as flow of, 140 passage, as illusory motion, 6 real vs. filmic, 11 standstill, photographic image, 17–​19,  18f Turin Shroud, 7, 16   universalism, 187n37 universe,  36–​37   virginité réaliste, 107 Vitruvian man, 22, 23f   Walt Disney animations, 10 window, 24 writings, 1, 2   Zeno’s paradox, 178n66