Prospective Cinema Forms (Greenaway)

New Possibilities: Cinema is Dead Long Live Cinema

Nov 2010 (UC Berkeley) 1h30'

Filmmaker Peter Greenaway looks at cinema language, and his contention that cinema is dead or evolving. He shows many examples from his own avantgarde cinematographic imagery. Series: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities

Peter Greenaway: "Nine Classic Paintings Revisited"
2010 (UC Berkeley) 1h29'

"Nine Classic Paintings Revisited" is the second of two lectures presented by filmmaker Peter Greenaway as the 2010-2011 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley. Best known for such films as The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover (1989), The Pillow Book (1996), The Tulse Luper Suitcases (2003-2004), and Nightwatching (2007), Greenaway has worked more recently on numerous exhibitions and installations in Europe, from Venice's Palazzo Fortuny and Barcelona's Joan Miró Gallery to Rotterdam's Boymans van Beuningen Gallery and Paris' Louvre. Regularly nominated for the film festival competitions of Cannes, Venice, and Berlin, Greenaway has also published books, written opera librettos, and collaborated with composers Michael Nyman, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, Borut Krzisnik, and David Lang, among others.

Related :

• Interesting Panel on Film-Digital Transition (Michael Moore)
• Future of Cinema - Looking Forward After 30 Years (VIFF 2011)

Truffaut on Bazin (1959 & 83)

retrouver ce média sur www.ina.fr

retrouver ce média sur www.ina.fr

Ouvrir Bazin 3 - Marc Vernet

Day 3. Full program here
My notes on the lecture "Un Bazin pro-censure ?" [Bazin pro censorship ?]

• The short answer is : yes.
• About 15-20 articles written on censorship by Bazin.
  
• 1950-1957 : Proud member of the Control of Films Comission. He talks about it openly and with honesty. He exposes the pro and con arguments in public, in the Press.
• 1950 : "Censure et censures au cinéma" (Parisien Libéré, #1918, Dec 11, 1950) first article on self-censorship.
• Bazin promotes integrity, firm principles and open debate (mentality alike to Resnais' in the realm of filmmaking)
• Bazin is a pacifist. He believes censorship is a necessary evil ("servitude honteuse" = shameful servitude) against pro-crime movies. The political censorship is the worst.
• To filmmakers who complain against censorship, he tells them they should blame themselves, they should accomodate and anticipate censorship themselves, with self-censorship.
• In France, the cinema censorship is managed by the government and by the profession (producers) : CNC (Centre National de la Cinematographie) is a consensual censorship.
• "Everybody speaking about censorship is subject to self-censorship"
• Bel Ami (1955/Daquin) is an example of censorship dodge thanks to the litterature argument : "If the novel wasn't censored, then why would an filmic adaptation get censored?"
• There is a context of political "cold war" in France at the time (see previous post), the PCF (French Communist Party) puts on latent pressure in the hope to overthrow the government. Cinema acts as a political leverage for a race to power control.
• It's also the time when France begins to lose grip on colonies. The government raises the severity of film censorship.
• Another mecanism of censorship is to be used by the authority as a publicity stunt : a film gets an obviously unfair censorship in order for the government to get the opportunity to showcase generosity, grace, pardon in the Press and lift censorship.
• "Censeurs, sachez censurer" (Radio Cinéma Télévision, #411, Dec 1, 1957) Bazin's article : The 2 roles of censorship is to protect underaged children and to secure public order.
• "Le Vatican, L'humanité et la censure" (France Observateur, #302, Feb 23, 1956) Bazin's article : he reminds people who apply censorship to reprehensible films opposed to their values, they shouldn't complain when films they like are conversly censored by other people.
• In the USA, censorship is managed by the profession alone: the Hays code (1934-1968).
• Bazin, dandy erotomane, admires the censorship system of the Production Code that develops suggestive eroticism (Pin up girl) in American films.
• 1957-60 : in France, Malraux-De Gaulle administration. Censorship crisis. Malraux restores free circulation of films, without censorship. Which causes the emergence of local partisanship (lobbies) replacing the official censorship. See Bazin's article in Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? (also in Cahiers, #70, Apr 1957): En marge de "L'érotisme au cinéma"
  
• In France, censorship has always been temporary and opportunistic. There is never full and permanent censorship. Films are eventually approved and screened, after a few years.
• Bazin questions censorship of bad movies that aren't worth such attention/publicity. 8 out of 10 films censored are bad films.
• Bazin defends Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953/Resnais) and Nuit et Brouillard (1955/Resnais)
• In the daily Press (Le Parisien Libéré), weekly (Nouvel Observateur), Bazin reacts promptly, on the go, to censorship decisions and comments them openly. In the monthly Press (Cahiers, Esprit) he looks back with more distance on the events.
• Film censorship creates palimpsest films, patchwork with the holes of cut scenes and pieced together in a discontinuous manner. Not only the audience is spoiled, but the film itself, the integrity of the artwork is wasted.
• Bazin promotes the idea of censorship as a public debate, in the open, that both the audience and the filmmaker would know the reasons, the arguments behind censorship decisions. *IF* censorship must be, at least it should take place in public, between intelligent people, instead of petty manipulations of small comities behind closed doors. Bazin breaks the intellectual censorship (taboo) on the censorship system.

Ouvrir Bazin 3 - Antoine De Baecque

Day 3. Full program here
My notes on the lecture "Bazin au combat" by Antoine De Baecque (former Cahiers Chief editor, Book editor) [who will give a lecture at Yale on Sat Dec 6th]

• Dec 1959 : Cahiers du cinéma #90 = special issue on Bazin
• He was considered "un saint laïc" [secular saint] by the cinéphile community. Tolerant, understanding with his detractors, unifying everyone.
  Model from Roger Leenhardt (filmmaker, scholar of 30ies/40ies cinema, godfather of La Nouvelle Vague) who looked for compromise. The French mentality issued from Pascal.
• But he was also impulsive, hot blooded, angry... uneasy/awkward in public at the ciné-clubs, mainly because he had a stutter. With a lack of natural charisma, a deficiant orality, he builds his personality in written words.
  
• 1946-55 : Bazin is always involved in the current controversies (Sadoul, Welles, Lo Duca, les jeunes turcs...)
• He defends Welles' Citizen Kane against the French Communist party and Sartre.
• 1950 : his article "Le mythe de Staline dans les films soviétiques" (in Esprit, Juillet-août 1950, and in Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? tome 1, original edition) fires up a "stalisnist crisis" within the French criticism circles, forcing everyone to position themselves, politically, either pro or con Bazin's critique. Bazin compares Staline to Tarzan! Georges Sadoul (historian of cinema) sends a violent letter of disapproval to his (ex)friend Bazin. This leads to a climate of "cold war" / feeling of McCarthism among French critics.
• François Truffaut is a controversial provocateur, heir of Bazin's battles. Bazin nurses and trains him (like a boxer's coach) to improve and channel his critical energy. He makes Truffaut rewrite his famous manifesto "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" (Cahiers # 31, 1954), again and again, during a year, before final publication.
• Georges Sadoul coins the phrase "Hitchcocko-Hawksien" to describe the "young turcs" at Cahiers who prefer American cinema to "La Qualité Française". Bazin calls them "neo formalists", and defends them in his article "Comment peut-on être Hitchcocko-Hawksien?" (in Cahiers #44, Feb 1955)
• Bazin is at the look-out post, he watches, regulates in the sideline, but always ready to jump in and fight back with a fierce article.
• Bazin accepts his own contradictions, his changes of opinions : "le parti-pris de la contradiction est le plus fécond"

Ouvrir Bazin 3 - Steven Ungar

Ouvrir le passé - Un Bazin d'après-guerre

Day 3 (See full program here). My notes (in broken English) on the lecture (in French!) "Arrêt sur documentaire" by Steven Ungar (University of Iowa) which will have a repeat at the Yale University (Dec. 4th).

• Predisposition of cinema for a documentarian dimension (documentaries, films of exploration, reportage, newsreel...)
  Like Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Franju, Rouquier, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, André Cayatte, Luis Buñuel, Nicole Verdès, Joris Ivens...
• issue of truth in reality : newsreel re-enacted, exotic documentaries
• Van Gogh (1948/Alain Resnais) is a minor masterpiece (for cinema) about a major masterpiece (for painting), which uses it to explicit it, without replacing it.
• "Regard documentarisant" [documentaristic perspective?] of the post war Italian films (in tome 4 of Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?)
  
  
• "Deux documentaires hors série" on Dimanche à Pékin (1956) and Lettre de Sibérie (1957). Two films disowned by Chris Marker, who refused to grant his permission to project them for us at the seminar because he doesn't like them, even if Bazin praised them. He also declined the invitation to the seminar. He is too busy working on his oeuvre, he said.
• The article of Bazin Lettre de Sibérie, un style nouveau "L'Essai documenté" (Radio Cinéma Télévision, 16 Nov. 1958) says it's "a filmic reportage on the soviet reality of the present and the past." The Image gives in to the Speech. Cites the scene when Marker plays three different voice-over commentary track on the same shot of a street car in the Siberian town of Yakutsk :
  
  1. Commentary to the glory of the socialist regime
  2. Neutral description
  3. Diatribe against collectivism

• At the 1998 retrospective Chris Marker at La Cinémathèque Française, he said "Commentary and Image attack each others to give an object called 'film'"
  
  
• He then coins the phrase "Montage horizontal" (or lateral montage): the image echoes laterally what is being said by the narrator, in opposition to Eisenstein's Vertical Montage, in the longitudinal axis of the film reel, plan by plan...
• This reels up a big debate among scholars present, for about 10 minutes, to figure what Bazin meant by "horizontal", and if it has a direct relation with Eisenstein or with the verticality of the editing table at the time (before the flat bed editing table became a standard)
  Hervé Joubert-Laurencin astutely note that the word "horizontal" has no inner meaning in itself, it is just an arbitrary convention to be defined. The words "horizontal" and "vertical" are often used in film theory without referring to the same things. [I'm also a bit wary of topological concepts in general, stating their relative position in an abstract space.]
• This leads Bazin to develop the concept of "film-essai" : a documentarist point of view (like Vigo in 1930: A Propos de Nice). This is a historical and political essay as written by a poet (like Albert Camus in literature). Essay of human and political geography, like Buñuel's Las Hurdes (1933) [YouTube]
  
• Bazin says we are more used to cinema providing a comfort zone for the eye, rather than an intellectual attention. The film-essai disturbs the spectator from this comfort zone.
  The image no longer constitutes the primary matter of cinema, the idea does. Without image the text proves nothing, the text develops a dialectical relation with the image.
• Lateral Montage will influence the 60ies period of Godard's cinema.
• Hôtel des Invalides (1952/Georges Franju) "Legend has heroes, war has victims"
  Bazin calls it a "pacifist film", détournement of its commission by the museum of the State Military Department.
• Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953/Alain Resnais/Chris Marker)
  "Quand les hommes meurent, ils entrent dans l'histoire, quand les œuvres d'art meurent, elles entrent dans l'art. Cette botanique de la mort, c'est ce qu'on appelle la culture" [When men die, they make History, when artworks die, they make art. This botanic of death, is what we call culture] voiceover against a black screen. [YouTube]
• Paris 1900 (1947/Nicole Verdès)
• Les Maitres Fous (1955/Jean Rouch) [YouTube]
  

Post-lecture discussion :

• Someone mentions a german text from 1939 by Hans Richter on essay film that could have influenced Bazin's theory, but no evidence could confirm.
• Later examples of film-essai : J-L Godard, Pier Pasolini, Chris Marker, Luc Moullet, Marcel Ophüls, Federico Fellini, Agnès Varda, Jean-Daniel Pollet, Wim Wenders...
• Book on Film-essai [in French] : "L'essai et le cinéma" (Éd. Champ-vallon, May 2004) Edited by Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues & Murielle Gagnebien. With articles by Diane Arnaud, Christa Blümlinger, Fabienne Costa, Didier Coureau, Christophe Deshoulières, Jean Durançon, Guy Fihman, Murielle Gagnebin, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Denis Lévy, Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, Alain Ménil, Claire Mercier, José Moure, Cyril Neyrat, Sylvie Rollet.

Ouvrir Bazin - Day 2

Avez-vous lu Bazin? / Have you read Bazin?

Day 2 (see full program here): My notes from a panel discussion on the availability of his oeuvre, and the project(s) of a complete edition in the future, with :

André-S. Labarthe (Ed. Cahiers), Olivier Faivre (Switzerland), Raymond Bellour (Trafic), Antoine De Baecque (Ramsay editor), Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (U. Paris), Dudley Andrew (U. Yale)

An estimation of over 2600 of Bazin's articles have been archived to date. Of which only 6% are published and accessible to the public today. So we know a tiny fraction of his thought on cinema.

The first anthology was edited by Janine Bazin, but was abandoned by frustration of not being able to publish a complete oeuvre. Were missing 150 texts on television, and the pedagogical dimension of his oral speeches at ciné-clubs.

Tout Bazin : la pensée de Bazin au travail

A new project finally comes together now, with Claudine Paquot (Ed. de l'Etoile), Emmanuel Burdeau (Cahiers), André-S Labarthe and Olivier Faivre (a guy who has been collecting and typing every articles for the past 5 years).

A collection of volumes, year by year, with an introductory presentation for the yearly context, and the television-related texts at the end for each year.

More a few unpublished manuscripts : his first found article "Enseignement primaire national" for Peuple et Culture (1941), his first ciné-club conference (1943), the original manuscript for his book on Welles, which is different from the edited version we know today.

It's interesting to note Bazin admitted when he changed opinion on a film. After dismissing Europa 51 at Venice, he revised his judgement later when it was released in France, in its Director's cut. Same for Les Dames du bois de Boulogne.

Thought is always in motion. Bazin writes on the same film in various venues... 10 lines in a daily, 20 lines in another, 3 pages for Esprit, 10 pages for Cahiers. Cinema is always present because we can always rewatch a film and make it present.

It was also necessary to correct the errors of Bazin when referencing films or names or citation attributions. Or the ones of Truffaut who edited his anthology. Also, errors in recent publications, that altered the original meaning, have been spotted, to be fixed. Like in his review of Malraux' L'Espoir.

In the article "Comment présenter et discuter un film !" (Ciné-club, April 1954), Bazin says the Theatre spectator is the precursor of the metteur-en-scène of cinéma, because with spectacles it is possible to re-frame the whole stage and elect details in the "wide shot". Montage stole this privilege from the movie goer. And Deep-focus/Forbidden Montage restores the power and liberty for the audience.

In the 3 months leading up to this seminar, Jean-François Rauger at La Cinémathèque Française organised a cycled of 160 films reviewed by Bazin, and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin used Bazin quotes to introduce each film in the program. (Check out each title on this list for the quotes)

Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? (1958-1962)

• tome 1 (1958): Bazin's own edition. He rewrote selected and merged the articles himself. He approved it as is before he died.
  
• tome 2 (1959): (7 texts) prepared by Bazin. Truffaut finalized it after Bazin died. Truffaut's own patchwork, he added sentences when needed...
  
• tome 3 (1961): edited by Rivette, more respectful, he left all Bazin's text as they were.
  

But for instance the verb "bander" [to get a hard on] disappears in the review of Kon Tiki [YouTube], and in the essay "En marge de l'érotisme au cinéma", replaced by "excité" [excited]. In this same essay, "démonétisation" is replaced by "démonstration" in the sentence : "la démonétisation des jambes de Marlène Dietrich".

Fifty years later, still no comprehensive anthology of Bazin's complete work is available to the public. And still no deadline given by Labarthe & Faivre... the hopes are slim given the recent crisis of the Cahiers corporation, bought by the British publisher, Phaidon. The greatest film critic has been ignored in France! No wonder we only have a partial, superficial, approximated, vulgarised idea of Bazin's theories and thought in popular culture, or in academic circles...

For instance, Godard made up the citation he attributes to Bazin in the opening of Le Mépris / Contempt, which appears to have been lifted from an article by Michel Mourlet.

Bazin used pseudonymes (André Basselin, Florent Kirsch) mainly to write negative reviews (!) He was also an angry man, with mean disapproval and harsh criticism.

Hervé Joubert-Laurencin and Dudley Andrew present the searchable database of all Bazin articles on the website of Yale University. A cooperative project between Yale and INHA. Currently a work in progress, hopefully soon made available to the public.

• 1962 : Positif publishes a ferocious critique of Bazin and La Nouvelle Vague: "Les Délices de l'ambiguïté - Éloge d'André Bazin" #46/#47, June-July 1962
  
• 1983: "Le plus funeste des critiques : 'Bazaine'" by Claude Autant-Lara
  
• 1991 : Cahiers article on Bazin by Rivette, Comolli, Daney and Narboni.
  

In Fernand Deligny, à propos d'un film à faire (1989/Renaud Victor), Fernand Deligny reads the letter Malraux wrote to Bazin (to thank him for his insightful review of L'Espoir), and feels like-minded with Bazin's theory. "La Sémiologie c'est de la crotte!"

---

Tentative Bibliography
(please correct/amend when needed)

FRENCH :

• Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? Tome 1 : Ontologie et langage, Ed. Cerf, 1958 -OUT OF PRINT
  
• Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? Tome 2 : Le cinéma et les autres arts, Ed. Cerf, 1959 -OUT OF PRINT-
  
• Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? Tome 3 : cinéma et sociologie, Ed. Cerf, 1961 -OUT OF PRINT-
  
• Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? Tome 4 : Une esthétique de la réalité : le néo-réalisme, Ed. Cerf, 1962 -OUT OF PRINT-
  
• Orson Welles, Ed. Cerf, 1972, Ed. Ramsay, 1986, Ed. Cahiers, 1998
  
• Charlie Chaplin, Ed. Cerf, 1973, Ed. Ramsay, 1985, Ed. Cahiers, 2000
  
• Cinéma de la Cruauté, Ed. Flammarion, 1975, 1987 -OUT OF PRINT-
  
• Le cinéma de l'occupation à la Résistance, Ed. 10/18, 1975 -OUT OF PRINT-
  
• Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? Ed. Cerf, 1975 (abridged edition, 4 volumes into 1)
  
• Jean Renoir, Ed. G. Lebovici, 1989
  
• Le cinéma français de la Libération à la Nouvelle Vague, Ed. de l'Etoile, 1983, Ed. Cahiers, 1998
  

ENGLISH:

• What is cinema? Vol.1, Trad. Hugh Gray, Ed. 1967
  
• What is cinema? Vol.2, Trad. Hugh Gray, Ed. 1971
  
• Jean Renoir, 1973
  
• Orson Welles: A critical view, Transl. Rosenbaum, Ed. Harper&Row, 1978
  
• The Cinema of Cruelty, 1982
  
• French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance: Birth of a Critical Esthetic, Trad. Ed. HarperCollins, 1984
  
• Bazin at Work : major essays and reviews from the forties and fifties, Trans. Alain Piette & Bert Cardullo, Ed. Routledge, 1997.

SPANISH:

• Charlie Chaplin, Ed. S.A., 2002
  
• Buñuel, Dreyer, Welles, Ed. Fundamentos, 1991

ITALIAN:

• Vittorio De Sica, Ed. Ganda, 1953

GERMAN

• Was ist film?, Ed. Alexander Verlag Berlin, 2004
  

Selected bibliography here

Ouvrir Bazin - Day 1

I'm back in college! It feels like it. The bilateral, Franco-American Bazin Seminar has started on November 25. See program in my previous post for detailed program.

The anniversary of his death was November 11, but they opened this event on the day that coincides with when the famous "Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?" (the original one, in 4 volumes, out of print now) was first printed, 2 weeks after he passed away. His first book, posthumous also.

A few notes on Dudley Andrew's introducing lecture (in French! ironically retranslated back into broken English by me) : "Vie et seconde vie d'André Bazin. Diffusion et réception d'un critique de cinéma" [Life and second life of André Bazin. Circulation and reception of a cinema critic]

• He suggests "What will be cinema?" as a new subtitle to the anthology to better characterise Bazin's prospective definition of the medium, the chromophotographique action of cinema.
• Regarding the iconic essay "Ontologie de l'image photographique", he reminds us that Martin Heidegger opposes ontologic (meaningful structure of existence) to ontic (plain facts of everyday life).
• Bazin is both philosopher and Art historian.
• To Bazin, Cinema is a vast ecological system (distinct from the circumscribed world of auteurism)
• Serge Daney (1984) : "Bad filmmakers don't have any idea. Good filmmakers have too many. And great filmmakers only have one. One fixed idea, one obsession. For the critics it's the same, only that there is no great critic... except for Bazin"
• To Henri Bergson, the "idea" is a stream, an "intermittent presence".
• There are 2 Bazins :
  1) Ontology - Realism (Rosselini, Welles). In the 40ies : Realism and Nature.
  2) Impure cinema (Bresson, Cocteau, Nouvelle Vague). In the 50ies : Adaptation and Culture.
• Note the ambiguous position of Mizoguchi on the map of world cinema in the 60ies, when New Waves spawned everywhere (Japan, Czech, Quebec, Latina America...). In France, La Nouvelle Vague opposed the old establishment (La Qualité Française), but embraced the academic establishment rejected by the Japanese New Wave, in the person of Mizoguchi.
• 1948 : Bazin has a radio show "Profile Perdu"
  
• 1963 : big controversy in the USA over the Auteur theory, between Sarris and Kael. (Pauline Kael audio : 1 - 2 - 3)
• 1966-67 : Andrew Sarris publishes the English version of Cahiers du cinéma, for about a year. Bazin's articles among others. [AntiQbook]
  
• 1967 : Hugh Gray's translation of "What is cinema?"
• 1968 : Bazin falls in disgrace for 15 years in France, perceived as reactionary by the new culture. While he becomes a good figure in the USA.
  
• 1968 : Annette Michaelson's article on "Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?" (in Artforum, 6, 10) criticism of Bazin's theory from the point of view of Semiology, Structuralism and Constructivism.
• 1976 : era of Realism & Formalism
• 1978 : Dudley Andrew publishes in the USA the first biography of André Bazin (book praised by Serge Daney when it was published in French).
• Christian Metz : militant theory of cinema
• 1988 : "Philosophical problems of classical film theory", Noël Carroll, Ed. Princeton University Press, 1988. Criticism of Bazin's theory.
  
• 1995 : Sylvia Harvey's article "What is cinema? The Sensuous, the Abstract, and the Political"
• 1997 : David Bordwell : "On the History of Film Style"

Elsewhere :

• China was isolated until the 1978 cultural revolution, then discovers the New Wave spirit.
• 1984 : "River without buoys" chinese film influenced by Renoir and Bazin
• Shanghai 2008 : Seminar Bazin (June 13-14 2008) with Xie Fei, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhang-ke, Ann Hui
• André Bazin makes the cover of the Chinese journal "Contemporary cinema", August 2008 issue, dedicated to the seminar and Bazin's writing.

Then mademoiselle Jeanne Moreau read a couple texts of Bazin and Truffaut:

• André Bazin, "Psychologie de la plage", Esprit, 1947
  on the desillusionned fantasy of the poor critic on the luxurious beach in Cannes full of glamorous beauties.
• André Bazin, "Les deux Jean Renoir", Esprit, march 1952
• André Bazin, "J'ai vu Bonjour Tristesse", L'Education Nationale, 20 March 1954
  on his reversal of opinion on second viewing, after a prior dismissal in Cannes of Otto Preminger's adaptation of Françoise Sagan's novel.
• François Truffaut's homage to André Bazin, Venice 1959.
  

Cycle Bazin 2008-09

Plusieurs rendez-vous autour d'André Bazin (1918-1958) pour les mois à venir, en hommage au cinquantenaire de sa disparition (mort il y a cinquante ans jour pour jour aujourd'hui).
Tout d'abord, Ouvrir Bazin, un colloque franco-américain à Paris organisé par le nouveau campus de l'Université Diderot (site des Grands Moulins dans le quartier de la Bibliothèque Mitterrand), en collaboration avec l'université de Yale. (25-29 nov 2008)

• 25 nov (Grands Moulins) : Ouverture
• 26 nov (Grands Moulins) : Avez-vous lu Bazin? (Dudley Andrew, André S. Labarthe, Olivier Faivre, Michel Mourlet, Raymond Bellour, Antoine de Baecque, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin)
• 27 nov (Grands Moulins) : Un Bazin d'après-guerre (Steven Ungar, Antoine de Baecque, Marc Vernet)
• 27 nov (Grands Moulins) : Un Bazin moderne (Angella Dalle Vacche, Dudley Andrew, Marc Cerisuelo, Rochelle Fack)
• 28 nov (Grands Moulins) : Un Bazin impur (Jean-François Chevrier, Bruno Tackels, Diane Arnaud, Florence B. de Courville)
• 28 nov (Cinémathèque Française) : Un Bazin écrivain (Dudley Andrew, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Jean Narboni, Philip Watts)
  projection de Van Gogh et Guernica d'Alain Resnais, Les Désastres de la guerre de Pierre Kast
• 29 nov (Grands Moulins) : Bilan critique, Recherches en cours (Seugnhoon Jeong, Diana Lemberg, Grant Wiedenfield, Nicolas Thys, Ryan Cook, Jeremi Szaniawski, Michael Cramer)

voir détails du programme sur le site Paris Diderot

Et, Opening Bazin, le pendant américain de ce colloque à l'université de Yale, NY, USA (voir détails sur leur site) PDF schedule

Screening: Toute la mémoire du monde (1956/Resnais)

• Bazin in the 50s (Steven Ungar, Angela Dalle Vacche, Philip Watts, Dominque Bluher)
  
  Bazin and the Disciplines
• The Transmission of Bazin (Hervé Joubert-Laurencin)
• Bazin’s Religious Discourse (Philip Rosen)
• Evolutions of Bazin (Tom Conley)
• Geography: the fault lines of Bazin’s education (Ludovic Cortade)
  
  The Aura of the Image
• Myth in the ontology of early cinema according to Bazin (Tom Gunning)
• Superimposition from Bazin to Greenaway (Daniel Morgan)
• From Bazin to Deleuze (Diane Arnaud)
• The Tense of the Shot (Raymond Bellour, Daniel Stern)
  Screening : Nights of Cabiria (1957/Fellini); Flowers of St. Francis
  (1950/Rossellini)
  Bazin in History
• Bazin in the USSR and Russia (John MacKay)
• Bazin and the journals (Antoine De Baecque)
• Bazin and Walter Benjamin (Monica Dall’Asta)
• Translator of Walter Benjamin: impossible task (Bruno Tackels)
  
  Bazin in Hiding
• Bazin’s bad taste (James Tweedie)
• A Moustache in flight: Bazin on masks and men (Ivone Margulies)
• Bazin’s Chaplin (Prakash Younger)
  
  Bazin Today
• Bazin as Modernist (Colin MacCabe)
• Ontology Aside (Jean-Michel Frodon)
  Screening: Nothing but a Man (1964/Michael Roemer)
  
  Grasping the Opening
• The Future of an Archive, The Future of Bazin (Dudley Andrew, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin)

Autres événements sur Paris jusqu'à mars 2009 :

• 24 nov 2008 : Redefining the Neorealist Image (Angela Dalle Vacche, University of Columbia de Paris, VIe)
• 25 nov 2008 : Vie et seconde vie d'André Bazin (Dudley Andrew, Grands Moulins, XIIIe)
• 2 déc 2008 : Cézanne et les frères Lumières (Angela Dalle Vacche, Grands Moulins, XIIIe)
• 12 Jan 2009 : Remnants of Tragedy (Philip Watts, rue Charles V, IVe)
• 13 jan 2009 : Guerre et Mémoire Chez Godard (Philip Watts, Grands Moulins, XIIIe)
• 16 jan 2009 : De Bazin à Jacques Rancière : critique et théorie du cinéma (Philip Watts, Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art, IIe)
• 27 fév 2009 : De Bazin à Flaubert, suite : Madame Bovary selon Renoir (Jean-françois Chevrier, Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art, IIe)
• 10 mars 2009 : Les films renaissent aussi. Resnais, Marker, Rouch (Steven Ungar, Grands Moulins, XIIIe)
• 13 mars 2009 : Scènes dans une bibliothèque. réflexions sur un film d’Alain Resnais (Steven Ungar, Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art, IIe)
• 16 mars 2009 : Visual Remains and the Poetics of Culture (Steven Ungar &
• Dudley Andrew, University of Columbia de Paris, VIe)
• 20 mars 2009 : Renoir et le réalisme (Dudley Andrew, Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art, IIe)
  téléchargez le programme en PDF sur le site de l'université Diderot
  

Cycle de projections de quelques 70 films sur lesquels Bazin a construit ses théories critiques. (27 aout-1er décembre 2008)
Voir détails sur le site de La Cinémathèque Française

My reports :

1. Ouvrir Bazin - Day 1
2. Ouvrir Bazin - Day 2
3. Ouvrir Bazin 3 - Steven Ungar
4. Ouvrir Bazin 3 - Antoine De Baecque
5. Ouvrir Bazin 3 - Marc Vernet
   
6. Ouvrir Bazin 3 - Angela Dalle Vacche
7. Ouvrir Bazin 3 - Dudley Andrew
8. Ouvrir Bazin 3 - Marc Cerisuelo
9. Ouvrir Bazin 3 - Rochelle Fack
   

Deep focus and realism

In his latest blogpost, Do filmmakers deserve the last word? (October 10th, 2007), David Bordwell uncovers fascinating insights about the relationship between filmmaker's talking points and what the audience and critics make of them. In particular, the contextualization for the birth of the deep-focus critical concept, coming from Welles and Wyler's cinematographer, Gregg Toland, is incontestable, as Bazin appropriates the same talking points almost word for word. Gregg Toland lays out the principle of his revolutionary technique, "pan-focus", in a 1941 article. And Bazin re-uses it, under the name "profondeur de champ", in his essay "L'évolution du Langage" which dates from 1955, where Toland is never mentioned.

But I'm not sure Bazin would accept all Bordwell's implications as is :

1. Bazin is a "plagiarist"
2. Bazin's critical theory is shaped by publicity talking points
3. Some "deep-focus" scenes from Citizen Kane were actually forged, thus disproves Bazin's theory of realism
4. "Deep-focus" existed before Toland in pre-1920 cinema

I'm not arguing with (1), the precedence closes the case, and Bazin should have at least cited the article, as his duty of journalist would command. It's unlikely he would have phrased it exactly the same way without knowledge of Toland's speech. It's really odd though that Bazin would intentionally resist to mention the cinematographer's name at the origin of this invention...

(2) However, I would like to moderate the interpretation of this case as critics being subject to plagiarism and influence. Critics never invent technical or aesthetical devices themselves. Their job is to spot them, analyse them, understand them, trace their genealogy and explain them to the public. Conversely, it's not enough for a filmmaker to spell out a theory to earn a landmark in history.
Critics either find out by themselves by looking at the pictures alone, or talk with the filmmakers to learn from their practice. But in the end, the critics make the decision to validate or to dismiss whatever is purported by filmmakers' or publicity's talking points. I mean great critics there, more precisely, theoreticians and historians, not the reviewers of course.

So Bazin cherry picked one of many claims championed by their auteurs out there, found it credible and fruitful, and added his credential to it by publishing it under a more elaborate theory. Like Bordwell says, we can't listen to everything filmmakers claim they do if the screen disproves it.
Toland could not make history by himself if nobody out there was listening. He couldn't trumpet his own glory alone either.
By the way I would like to know what were the repercussions of his article in the USA. Did American critics understand it like Bazin did, 14 years later? Did the public opinion receive Welles and Wyler as geniuses like they were after Cahiers celebrated them, once these films made it across the Atlantic after WW2? I think the appropriation of a cinematographic device by a critic is what makes all the difference. It took Bazin to transform a publicity stunt into a critical landmark. Inventors of form could go unnoticed if they are not endorsed by a critical authority. Sometimes the filmmakers aren't even aware what they do unconsciously is truly revolutionary.
Like Bordwell reminds us, Greengrass claims he revolutionized cinema language... but it's the critics job to validate or invalidate this talking point.
Bazin's theory of deep-focus and realism goes well beyond whatever Toland proposed, which was mainly practical issues.

"That's why deep focus is not a cinematographer's fad like the use of filters or lighting, but a capital gain for mise-en-scene : a dialectical progress in the history of filmic language.
And it's not just a formal progress! Well mastered deep focus is not only a mere economical way, simpler, subtler to emphasize the event; it affects, with the structures of filmic language, the intellectual relation of the spectator with the image, and thus modifies the meaning of the spectacle."
Bazin (L'évolution du langage)

(3) André Bazin (L'évolution du langage) :

"It's obvious, to whoever can see it, that Welles' plan-sequences in The Magnificent Ambersons are not at all mere passive "recording" of a photographic action within a single frame, but to the contrary, that the refusal to break up the event in bits, to analyse over time the dramaturgic space is a positive operation which effect is superior to one produced by traditional cutting."
"(...) deep focus places the spectator in a relation to the image closer to the one (s)he experiences in reality. It is thus right to say, that independently from the very content of the image, its structure is more realistic."

In a footnote of his essay "Montage interdit", he describes the scene from Where No Vultures Fly (1951) where, after a parallel montage, a little boy with a lion cub in his arms and the mother lioness meet in the same frame, which constitutes the recreation of reality for the spectator. But he acknowledges that the lion is obviously tamed and that the boy's life is never threatened unlike the shot suggests. So to Bazin, it's not so much that whatever happens on the set should be the reality handed over to the spectator, but that the mise-en-scene should recreate the conditions of reality (which would be otherwise negated by heavy editing), that the filmic language, with its technical devices and tricks, should not betray our perception of the time-space continuum on screen. We know cinema is an illusion, in so many ways. But the mise-en-scene may choose to betray reality or to reinforce it, which determines the realistic approach of the filmmaker.

Thus the post-production tricks of transparency for Citizen Kane doesn't negate the theory of realism, as long as the frame gives the impression of something inherently plausible on screen. Besides the foreground and background added (for aesthetical composition purpose) into the shots described by Bordwell, do not alter the main dramatic action within the frame. There is no direct interaction between the drama unfolding in each separate shot of the double exposure. Which is very different from the deceiving interaction suggested by CGI tricks where the actor actually interacts with a green vacuum on set. The green screen superimposition pretends two characters talk to each other while they never had a lifelike experience together on set.

"It's not that Welles refuses to resort to the expresionnistic devices of montage, but precisely their episodic use, between "plan-sequences" with deep focus, gives them a new meaning. (...) In Citizen Kane, a succession of superimpositions contrasts with the continuity of a single-take scene, it is a different modus operandi, explicitly abstract, of the narration. Accelerated montage cheats with time and space, but Welles doesn't attempt to fool us (...) Thus the "quick editing", "Attraction Montage", superimpositions that talky cinema hadn't used in 10 years, acquire again a possible use in relation to the temporal realism of a cinema sans montage."
Bazin (L'évolution du langage)

(4) Bazin acknowledges that the wide shot with deep focus existed since the origins of cinema. The focus of early cinema lenses was designed to capture pretty much everything in front of the camera (like the cheap disposable cameras today).

"Agreed, like in the case of Griffith's close up, Orson Welles didn't "invent" deep focus; everyone in primitive cinema used it, logically so. Image blur only appeared with editing."
Bazin (L'évolution du langage)

Bazin on criticism - 1958

Reflexions sur la critique / Reflections on criticism

Following to my previous post on his preliminary essay on criticism, Pour une critique cinématographique (1943) -- which didn't provoke much commentary, sadly -- here is an essay he wrote shortly before dying, aged 40, at the end of 1958 -- 48 years ago -- and published in Cinéma 58 n°32, which concludes his career of film critic. He animated Ciné-Clubs (which he considered to be a form of criticism), and worked for big circulation daily newspapers, weeklies or specialized magazines (Cahiers du Cinéma) during 15 years, a decisive period for film criticism in France and in history. He looks back on how print criticism has evolved since he started, the state of criticism and its practice, with an extraordinary lucidity.

(my rough paraphrased translation. The titles are Bazin's)

I - De l'inefficacité de la critique / About criticism inefficiency

Cinematographic criticism is almost useless to the commercial success of a film.

"More and more, advertising uses criticism, although one couldn't say this borrowing and citation pays homage to its efficiency. Firstly because these skilfully truncated quotes are always favourable to the film, even when the article was harrowing, secondly because they prove by contrast the direct impotency of criticism, which becomes efficient when promoted by advertisement."

The impact of criticism on the total commercial run of a film is quasi-null. Even an unanimous critical acclaim, at festival for instance, cannot attract enough audience to extend its run.
However Bazin confesses his satisfaction of criticism powerlessness because the disproportionate and arguable responsibility on the success/failure of a film (like it is most common with an almighty theatre criticism) frightens him.

"I don't see what moral authority, or what intellectual grace would grant to the critic the monstrous privilege to decide the fate of artworks he doesn't like. Ideally we could help efficiently the ones we like, and we would have little influence on the others; but since the two are linked, I still prefer quasi-inefficiency to an abusive power."

II - Inutile mais nécessaire / Useless but necessary

However cinema cannot do without criticism, in spite of its uselessness.

"Chaplin, Griffith, Murnau, Stroheim, Dreyer would have existed anyway, with or without criticism : they wouldn't have changed a single plan in their films. (...)

This parasite vegetation [criticism] on the majestic tree [creation] maintains a symbiotic relationship, with hindsight, not necessarily meaningful to growth but to blissful ageing"

"Criticism is two-faced : one toward the film, which is worthless commercially, the other toward the audience, which justifies its existence. (...)

Had I revealed the cinematographic truth to 10 stray readers only, one even, my duty of critic would be justified. Back in the thrilling days when I could practice oral criticism of workshops and ciné-clubs, the superior delight it gave me over the print criticism laid in this immediate sentiment, physical, directly human, that intellectual analysis resulted on a genuine conversion. How many times have I been approached on my way out by spectators (usually over 40 years old) who meant to tell me they were unable to judge the validity of my analysis of the film, but that it revealed to them that cinema existed, was truly an art, and they believed in it now. (...)

Believe me if you like, these results matter much more than a 10% increase of the influence of print criticism on weekend gross"

Bazin wishes quality would become quantity too on the long run... nearly 50 years ago! The spread of arthouses, replacing the ciné-clubs. Post-war criticism of a greater quality, the actions of La cinémathèque and ciné-clubs, the popular cultural movements are the factors of a complex phenomenon leading to form a specialized cinema audience for a decade (then).

"If criticism is the conscience of cinema, cinema owes to criticism its self-consciousness."

"The concern for style, shaping up thoughts, promote film criticism as a literary genre, which wasn't true before WW2. (...)

We know concerns for effect and style lead sometimes French criticism to disputable excess (often caused by juvenility). But these are the flaws of a new and fundamental quality, which for the first time places film criticism on par with traditional criticism."

III - La critique et la création / Criticism and creation

If criticism is unable to influence a film commercially, then does it influence filmmakers who read it?

"The presumption would be even more intolerable to teach the maker how to do his job (only the like of Baudelaire or Valéry could). The creator expects little from criticism, due to the profound psychology of creation. The critic commences from the result, from the finished work. His mission isn't so much to "explain" it but to illuminate its significance (or meanings more exactly) in the conscience and mind of the reader.

Some bring forth the silly objection that critics find thousands wonderful intentions that the auteur never contemplated. For instance one "sublime" mise-en-scène idea that was in fact originated by a technical incident. If the final work was limited to the sum of the artist's conscious intentions it wouldn't worth much. The quality and depth of an artwork can be measured by the gap between what the auteur meant to put in it and what it actually contains. (Of all arts, cinema is the one that by nature leaves the largest part to chance). Besides, the purpose of criticism isn't to track back the psychological process of creation (operation more uncertain than the most arbitrary aesthetic sketch), but to help nurture its reader intellectually, morally and in his/her sensibility in relationship with the artwork.

Whichever critical method is worthless if not controlled, limited, corrected by this specific quality judging the critic ultimately : taste. A quality, obviously hard to define, that only could distinguish a theoretical hallucination from an acceptable elaboration. Those who lack critical sense and distance, the bad impressionistic criticism, which facile irony only equals its incompetence, make up the free-for-all of criticism. (...)

Nonetheless, after defining the independence of creation from criticism, a new phenomenon should be mentioned, the growing dependency of criticism from creation.The birth of criticism at the silent era was tightly bound to creation : Canudo, Delluc, L'Herbier, Dulac, Gance, Epstein, Tedesco... are both filmmakers and theoreticians. Critical reflection and creation were interdependent.
French critics of the talky era, from 1930 to 1950, mark however a quasi-absence of mix between the industry and what is written about it. A counter-example in the UK (Gavin Lambert, Lindsay Anderson and the team of Sight & Sound) or in Italy (the Experimental Centre from the fascist era) proves critics often cross the line between criticism and filmmaking. Meanwhile, non-critic filmmakers always dialogue with critics. [See: critique/creation mix]
However I'm rather sceptical about the fertility of such exchanges.

In France, this new generation of young intellectuals with a conscious vocation and envy to make cinema, believe knowledge and reflection of cinema is no longer at the studio or internship on set, but at the Cinémathèque and by the practice of film criticism. Thus the partiality, the polemic and militant character of these young critics. Naturally, this is a passionate criticism made of virtual creators. Objectivity is not a goal. Taking side in art is legitimate when backed up by intelligence, taste and talent. Of course these critics are narrow-minded, unjust... but the narrow angle of reflection often penetrates deeper in the intelligence of its object than objective criticism.
Hitchcockism or Bergmanism will remain strategical operations of criticism that nurtured the history of cinematographic reflection. Even though I don't believe in "La Politique des Auteurs" personally. But there is no absolute error in Art. Truth of criticism isn't defined by whatever objective and measurable exactitude, but by the intellectual excitation triggered inside the reader : its quality and amplitude.

The function of the critic isn't to bring an inexistent truth on a silver plater, but to further as far as possible, through intelligence and sensibility of readers, the impact of a work of art."

What do you think about Bazin's analysis and its relevance in today's critical debate?

Bazin on Criticism - 1943

Pour une critique cinématographique
Toward a Cinematic Criticism

First published in L'Echo des étudiants (11 Dec. 1943); in Le Cinema de l'Occupation et de la Résistance; and in an anthology published by Cahiers, André Bazin : Le Cinéma français de la Libération à la Nouvelle Vague (1983).
Also available in English in French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance: The Birth of a Critical Aesthetic (1994)

This is an early essay André Bazin wrote in a student journal, giving a remarkably clear-sighted and provocative understanding of the conservative French Film Criticism at the time during WW2. A lose and complacent trade about to be freshened up and thought out, to finally consider Cinema as a proper and honourable art alongside with Theatre and Literature. Therefore requiring an insightful and pertinent criticism, which Bazin will re-invent completely.
At 25 years old, André Bazin boldly calls into question the cinema press, considering the momentum of popular taste, the complacency of film critics, their arguable following among readers and audience, and the snobbism required for a militant critical judgement. He asks for a "criticism of criticism". Reviewing the trends of his contemporary fellow critics, the prominence of popular movies and popular reviewers.
This article is surprisingly still valid today, as if film criticism didn't learn anything and never evolved since the Golden Age. At least the questions raised in 1943 are the same questions coming up among cinephiles and critic circles, by Bordwell recently (Against Insight), or by various bloggers striving to claim the online conversion of print criticism.

It's difficult to quote Bazin out of context, as his texts weave a logic train of thought in a solid construction. However I'll just post snippets that have an uncanny resonance to today's state of film criticism (my titles added in all caps, quotes rearranged thematically, not necessarily chronologically):

POPULAR TASTE

"The film market is still controlled by laws of social psychology similar to those that before the war influenced the sale of printed matter."
(...)
"Because it is not, like the other arts, aimed at an elite but at several million passive spectators in search of a couple of hours of escape, the cinema cannot realistically be controlled by anything other than production."
(...)
"The historical and sociological conditions under which the cinema operates make it vitally important for the movies to address themselves to all public simultaneously"
(...)
"The public will always prefer -- if one respects certain psychological conditions -- a good film to a bad one; by this we simply mean that the quality of films cannot be modified by first educating the taste of the public, but that on the contrary it is necessary to first modify the quality of films so that they can educate the public. Everything we know about the social restrictions under which cinema
operates proves that though the other arts are inconceivable without aesthetic liberalism, cinema is absolutely incapable of existing without managerial direction. Indeed, the conditions that allow it to live are not yet those of an art but simply of an image-industry under a liberal capitalist regime."
(...)
"Let nobody say that all tastes have to be provided for in a field in which, alas, we are well below any taste. The truth is, on the contrary, that the crisis of cinema is less of an aesthetic than an intellectual order. What film production basically suffers from is stupidity, a stupidity so overwhelming that aesthetic quarrels are relegated to a secondary level. This is no longer a value judgement but a question of positive evidence."

CRITICS

"We are confronted by an art that is popular and a criticism that is not, and face the temptation of raising that art to the social and intellectual level of its criticism."
(...)
"Any elite aesthetic is radically incompatible with the basic laws of cinema. Cinema has need of an elite, but that elite will be influential only to the extent that it realistically understands the sociological demands of the Seventh Art."
(...)
"We will not only ask of the critic that in his way he be a sociologist of art, but also that he have a minimal technical competence."
"But one sometimes angrily wonders if those who undertake to write of the cinema have even an elementary notion of its means of expression, because if they do, they give no hint of it."
"If these basics were not lost sight of, nine times out of ten we would have critical unanimity at least about the workmanship of a film."
"An indisputable competence in other domains is, therefore, not license enough to write impressionistic criticism of the Seventh Art, no matter how witty and amusing this criticism may be to read. We want a little more respect, first for the cinema and then for the reader. "
(...)
"In this universe without grandeur, simple honesty has assumed the proportions of genius in their eyes. When they come across real grandeur, however, they run out of steam and are completely happy and content, after that momentary flood, to get back to the reassuring level of weekly production. Criticism respectful of its art should not lose sight of certain scales of value and should cling to them, perhaps ascending to higher echelons only two or three times a year. But they would have to cling to their severity with a little more perseverance."
(...)
"Now, many of our critics are afraid of being severe, and when they cease to be severe they simultaneously cease to be just."
(...)
"A good number of pre-war serious critics have therefore given up the struggle and ceded their place to inoffensive and amusing chroniclers."

WRITING

"Now we don't ask all that much of a film before qualifying it as "good." We ask that it not be stupid and that it be skilfully shot by making opportune use of the means of expression proper to the cinema. The first judgement is intellectual -- we have said what we think of that -- and the second is technical. After all, two carpenters would agree about the solidity of a table, and we don't really see why our critics, if they knew their profession, couldn't also agree about perfectly objective facts."
(...)
"There is no art that is not supported by a culture, and there is no culture without historical judgement. No doubt where cinema is concerned, we are faced with an art whose past productions are still for all practical purposes inaccessible; but this is only another reason for criticism to make every effort to assume the responsibility for the cinematic culture of its readers. As it happens, more than one of these readers has witnessed the development of cinema; in the absence of documents, he would need only to have his memory refreshed. Cinema already has its primitives and its classics, but where most criticism is concerned, it is useless to look for an allusion to this history, for a rapprochement in time or in space, for the recognition of an influence. One would think that, like the intangible shadows on the screen, this unusual art has no past, leaves no traces, has no depth. It is more than time to invent a criticism in relief."
(...)
" what it necessary is an aesthetic judgement on the style of a work. But I don't forbid my critic to make such judgements -- I merely doubt his authority when he has been unable to condemn as he should, for its stupidity and bad workmanship, this week's hit. An indisputable competence in other domains is, therefore, not license enough to write impressionistic criticism of the Seventh Art, no matter how witty and amusing this criticism may be to read. We want a little more respect, first for the cinema and then for the reader."
(...)
"We are ashamed to have to remind readers of such basic verities, because at bottom we ask nothing more than what is naturally expected of all other criticism: a minimum of intelligence, of culture, and of honesty. But isn't this simply to remind readers that cinema is an art, if only potentially? Though they occasionally proclaim this, some critics feel free to treat it as though it weren't, and they no longer respect the basic laws of criticism. Do they really think they are helping cinema with this philandering or with this somewhat condescending insiders' complicity which presides over the witty reports, the poetic observations, or the kind of accounts of what's going on around town that takes the place of cinematic criticism in a would-be literary press?"
(...)
"But this topicality should have a beneficial influence on criticism by emphasizing its militant character. "
(...)
"The daily press could provide a synopsis of the film and give a succinct opinion about its technical and artistic merits. In delivering this opinion it could make known the director, the dialoguist, etc, recalling as necessary their previous works. Even as it supplies what the popular public expects above all -- an account of the plot -- it would work to gain acceptance for the idea that a film's worth items from its auteurs and that it is much safer to put one's faith in the director than in the leading man."

CINE-CLUB

"Let us begin by distinguishing -- we will return to this point -- between oral criticism and written criticism. The first is, in any case, more effective than the second because it is more competent, more abundant, tougher and more sincere; but the one cannot do without the other. The press assures a certain flurry of notoriety to the judgments that competent circles have made about a film. These debates must not take place behind closed doors."

HIERARCHY

"Because the cinema does not have specialized theaters or public, because films necessarily address themselves to the entire public, cinematic works are treated as though they too did not have their genres and their hierarchies. As a result, films that have nothing in common have similar labels applied to them."
(...)
"The first hierarchy must therefore initially be established among the genres themselves."

SNOBBISM

"A film should not only be judged on its absolute value but for the effort that it represents under given production conditions, and for the progress in that production that it makes possible. That is why snobbism must be utilized by the critic."
(...)
"There is no longer any need to make an apologia for snobbism. In the modern corporate world, snobbism is initially the patronage of imbeciles. Since the mass of these unconscious Maecenas have no reasons for their opinions, the problem becomes one of an effective politic of snobbism within the more general framework of a politic of cinema."
(...)
"lower-grade snobbism: the depraved cult of the star."
(...)
"Snobbism is a militant form of taste."

POPULAR CRITICISM

"We don't ask of weekly criticism that it be a comparative history of cinema, we ask only that the critic not be unaware of this history and not limit it to the current season."
(...)
"Sacrifices will have to be made to current importance, mundanity, and style. There is something even sadder than a bad critic -- criticism which isn't read."
(...)
"This criticism which appears in the weekly press is important: it is the criticism that can recruit a cultivated public for the cinema; it is the criticism that creates movements of opinion. That is why it must be strongly militant; that is also why its lack of rigour strikes us as a betrayal, a squandering of a wonderful opportunity."
(...)
" Without ceasing to be militant, this criticism could exactly reflect the oral criticism mentioned above. Comparable on all points to literary, musical, or art criticism, it would cede nothing to them in terms of technical and historical erudition."

p.s. Thanks to Doug cummings for providing the English version of this article.

Continue reading the final essay of Bazin on film criticism : Reflexion sur la Critique (1958)