Andre Bazin

Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties
Translated by Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo
Edited by Bert Cardullo, New York and London: Routledge, 1997, ISBN: 0415900182,
256 pp.
Whatever the relative merits or demerits of a particular Proust translation, most readers
agree that the translator would do well not to leave out a chapter here or there. The
tendency to make exactly this type of omission when translating collections of critical
essays has proved to be one of the more frustrating trends in recent publishing history.
For a while it seemed to be accepted practice to translate the exact title of a collection but
to include only an incomplete selection of the original essays. Harry Zohn's translation of
Walter Benjamin's _Illuminations_, Alan Sheridan's translation of Jacques Lacan's
_Ecrits_, and Hugh Gray's two volume translation of _Qu'est-ce que le cinema?_ have all
been vital to the introduction of the original authors to a wide anglophone audience, but,
despite the protestations of their translated titles, they each present the editor's own
selected versions of the originals. [1] This has meant that, although it looks as though
there are readily-available translations, students working in English have not had access
to many of the texts in the original collection.
Although this is deliberately not _What is Cinema? Volume 3_, Cardullo's present edition
aims to go some way towards rectifying the situation of incompleteness vis-a-vis Bazin.
Rather than reach for the French collection and translate half of its untranslated essays
Cardullo chooses to deal with the vast body of fragmentary work left by Bazin (nearly
four hundred newspaper and journal articles) as a continuum that, amongst other work,
includes those essays and reviews collected in _Qu'est-ce que le cinema?_. By working
from this premise Cardullo can present a broad perspective on Bazin's work, collecting
new translations of essays from journals, as well as some of the more canonical texts
from the French collection that Gray chose not to translate. The essays are divided into
two unequal sections whose principles of inclusion are made clear in their titles; 'Bazin
on Directors and on Cinema' and 'Bazin on Individual Films'.
As befits a critic concerned with the establishment of the criteria of style in a new genre,
Bazin is a consummate stylist. These new translations capture the immense readability of
his prose with its simple, everyday diction. The notes about Bazin's contemporary
cultural references are comprehensive, clarifying those remarks of his which only appear
obscure because of the passage of time. Especially useful to the reader who is unused to
early French film and criticism are the brief biographies of those principal and ancillary
players that are mentioned. However, partly due to the editor's commendable rigour in
this regard, this book is hurt by the present inexplicable publishing ukase that bans
footnotes in favour of endnotes. Most of the essays are short and provided with ample
helpful references at their end. The continual need to flick pages to and from the end of
the essay (a destination that changes every few pages as a new essay begins) is annoying

and would be enough to spoil the reading experience of the casual reader who might
otherwise be attracted by Bazin's direct and expressive style. Since many of the notes
were actually provided by Bazin, this constant need to read two pages at once affects
even more serious or seasoned readers and, along with a few annoying typographical
errors, is the only thing that spoils an otherwise pleasant and useful volume.
Bazin's increasing stature over the decades since his death means that there are few
serious scholars of film who have not already encountered the bulk of 'Bazin at Work' in
the original French. As a consequence of this, there are no startling new ideas to be found
in the book, but it does have two important contributions to offer. The first is a
contextualization of (and an addition to) the corpus of work by and about Bazin that is
available in English. The most notable of the previous volumes are Gray's _What is
Cinema?_ and Dudley Andrew's biography _Andre Bazin_, but the introduction,
bibliography and critical apparatus begin to construct a more coherent body from other
smaller pieces that have been written. The second contribution is how, despite the
constraints imposed by the two section titles, the collection spans several concerns. It
bridges Bazin's own personal reactions to films: stylistic analyses of films and general
attitudes to the cinema as an art form, as well as biography (the essay on Leenhardt
especially), general European history, and reflections on other critical approaches to film.
It would be remiss of a reviewer not to mention a vital part of the reading experience of
the book being reviewed however incidental to the book itself. A good review of a
contemporary film, especially by a critic that one admires, draws one to a screening.
Among other things this volume is a collection of reviews by one of the world's great
film critics, and an exposition of style which, as a result, encourages the reader to see
some of the French, Italian neo-realist and classical Hollywood films that are mentioned.
It is not the fault of the editor that an accidental by-product of including twenty-two lucid
reviews of individual films of the forties and fifties is to advertize those films. It is not a
fault at all, except that it could be years or even decades before most readers would have
a chance to see a theatrical screening of some of these films. On top of this, the fifteen or
so film stills sprinkled through the book serve little purpose beyond a further whetting of
the appetite. Cardullo's collection can be dipped into for insights into specific films or for
beautiful early articulations of the relation between the cinematic and the literary.
However, with some exceptions, reading the book from beginning to end tantalizes the
reader with eloquent reports of the unviewable.
One of the obvious exceptions to the films inaccessible to the anglophone readership is
_Citizen Kane_ (a film that is mentioned in several of the pieces). The article specifically
about Welles's cinematic technique in his first film is one of three essays that stand out
from the others in this collection. The 1950 article from _Esprit_ on the development of
the representation of Stalin in Russian cinema, the 1948 essay on Bazin's colleague and
mentor Roger Leenhardt, and the article from _Les Temps Modernes_ on _Citizen Kane_
which closes the book seem of a higher calibre than the others. It is no accident that these
are three of the longer, and consequently more developed, of the pieces in the book.
Against a background of shorter articles making relatively direct observations, these three

use their slightly extended length to make more complicated points about the place of
style in film.
In the second essay of the collection, 'The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema' Bazin
writes a concentrated analysis of the portrayal of Stalin in Soviet cinema. The specific
occasion for the essay was the release of Petrov's _The Battle of Stalingrad Part II_, but
the essay deals with representations of the Soviet leader across more than twenty years of
film. He traces the development of Stalin's film presence from Vertov's newsreel footage
of him, to the historical character portrayed by the actor Gelovani, in films for Vasiliev,
Kuleshov, Chiaureli and Kalatozov, and then finally concludes that in current Soviet
cinema 'identification has now positively been achieved between Stalin and History' (33).
In this essay Bazin describes how the changes in the style of Soviet cinema, shown by its
portrayal of Stalin, bear witness to crucial and dangerous changes in Soviet attitudes, and
allowed himself an 'I told you so' postscript when it was included in _Qu'est-ce que le
cinema?_ after Khrushchev's Special Report to the twentieth congress of the Soviet
Communist Party. Bazin explores the iconography of cinema with its social and political
ramifications far more effectively in this essay than when he directly attempts to discuss
the theological implications of film. [2]
'The Style Is the Man Himself' is a eulogy to Roger Leenhardt, Bazin's mentor and
inspiration. The excuse for the piece is Leenhardt's film _The Last Vacation_, but in the
article, as Bazin himself points out, 'Roger Leenhardt's personality . . . seems more
important than the film itself' (142). As so much of his understanding of the film comes
from his acquaintance with the director Bazin is always consciously teetering on the edge
of simply writing a justification of a film that had met with critical apathy. The essay is
fascinating because it is so close to its subject and could almost be about Bazin himself,
or his film-making disciples from _Cahiers du Cinema_. In yet another attempt to define
the elements of style in film Bazin begins by discarding the film in question in order to
describe the style of its *auteur*. It is only after he has explained the style of the man that
he moves on to discuss its translation into the style of the film. For Bazin one recent
advance of film form had come as stylish individuals bypassed the literary and applied
their direction immediately to film.
Perhaps Bazin's most succinct definition of style in film comes when he discusses the
technique of Orson Welles in his essay on _Citizen Kane_. He acknowledges that many
of the so-called innovations that Welles used were, in fact, appropriations from earlier
directors, but maintains that it was their distinctive use and combination that made the
film an example of genius. For Bazin innovation is necessary for the progress of film, but
it is only the constructive and distinctive combination of mise-en-scene, lens-work,
length of shot, and a hundred other factors in the making of a film, that can actually
establish a style capable of harnessing the power of cinema and its innovations. He
temporarily opposes 'filmmaking' to 'cinema', and 'innovations' to 'ideas', in order to
advocate the second of each of the pairs as the crucial context for direction and criticism
(143). By doing so he highlights the possibility that a production of a film incorporating a
technological innovation does not necessarily produce style. Bazin views style in cinema

as the successful mobilization of filmic techniques to manifest ideas, and insists on a

concept of cinema whose development is dependent upon style.
As with large sections of the book there are resounding contemporary echoes to Bazin's
words. A Hollywood that has recently brought us a glut of poor special effects-driven
films (_Dante's Peak_, _Twister_, and _Independence Day_ to name a few) could learn
much from an eminent critic who notes that innovation is nothing without style. Bazin's
use of cinema as a guide to the mores of a national culture in the essay on Stalin
prefigures the attempts of Film and Cultural Studies to use cinematic praxis as a tool for
social analysis. His observations on the implications of marketing on art are still pertinent
in their methods of analysis. Bazin's subject is the gap between the developments of
CinemaScope, colour, and sound film, and their adoption as industry standard, but the
same reasons pertain to the in-built obsolescence that is de rigeur for the equipment
needed for the distribution of music (CDs, DAT, minidiscs), information (modems,
computers' speed and memory), and pictures (televisions: digital, cable, internet).
Although, reading it now, his analysis spills over into other aspects of mass culture, the
particularity of the medium is a crucial aspect of these reviews. Bazin was hypersensitive
to the fact that he was talking about the texture of film rather than that of literature. In
this collection we read of Bazin's desire for film to attain the status of the novel without
being consumed by the forms of that genre. At the same time as he understands the
influence of mass distribution on the form of the novel he knows that they can exist
independently of their distribution in a way that film cannot. His advocacy of the primacy
of filmicity over plot and of cinematic style over literary development has the urgency of
a parent whose child's sturdy exterior is belied by the frailest of health. For Bazin, film
exists because of a quirk in economic relations that allows money to be made, it is an
entirely contingent art form -- people have to believe in film or it will cease to exist.
A passionate believer in cinema, and founder of _Cahiers du Cinema_, Bazin's main
legacy will perhaps be as the mentor of its younger writers who went on to become the
directors of the Nouvelle Vague, but this book helps to illustrate the reasons why he was
so influential. By encouraging and analyzing each new stumbling expression of the infant
cinema his contribution to the self-consciousness and self-confidence of the medium of
film was incalculable. His example of earnest clarity and impeccable style gave others the
lead and the model of how to write about film. In his defense of Leenhardt's _The Last
Vacation_ we can read an explanation of the pitfalls of film-making that befall an
experienced critic trying to 'cross from the left bank of the Seine to the right' but we never
doubt the sense of trying (237). At its most daring the review could even be a tentative
manifesto for charismatic critics to make stylish films: a speculative hope that was
fleshed out spectacularly by Truffaut and Godard in the years immediately following
Bazin's untimely death.
Style can never be pre-formulated, which means that the priority of filmicity over
ideology is a given for Bazin. Films are made to explore the boundaries of the form, not
as didactic illustrations of pre-existent world views. Running through this collection, as it
does through Bazin's thought in general, is the belief that film theory starts by
commenting on film praxis rather than by applying an ideology already formed from

either a philosophy of film or from a political philosophy. The inclusion of over twenty
articles that develop Bazin's distinctive conception of the nature of film by commenting
on individual films is testament to that belief. As well as providing an important source
for anyone working on the films he discusses, the book acts as an illustration of how
Bazin came to view cinema as he did. For Bazin, style is how film speaks, and, as he
comments in 'The Evolution of the Language of the Cinema', when faced with the
development of new subject matters and new forms, 'as good a way as any towards
understanding what a film is trying to say to us is to know how it is saying it'. [3]
Yale University, USA
Footnotes
1. Jacques Lacan, _Ecrits: A Selection_, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977);
Walter Benjamin, _Illuminations_, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969);
Andre Bazin, _What is Cinema? Volume 1_, translated and selected by Hugh Gray
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Andre Bazin, _What is Cinema?
Volume 2_, translated and selected by Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1971).
2. As in, for example, 'Cinema and Theology' (61-73) or 'A Saint becomes a Saint only
after the Act (_Heaven over the Marshes_)' (205-211).
3. _What is Cinema? Volume 1_, p. 30.
Copyright _Film-Philosophy_ 1999
Dan Friedman, 'Bazin at Last; or, The Style Is the Man Himself', _Film-Philosophy_,
vol. 3 no. 32, August 1999 <http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol3-1999/n32friedman>.