Opening Bazin This page intentionally left blank Opening Bazin Postwar Film Th eory and Its Aft erlife e dited by Dudley Andrew w ith Hervé Joubert-Laurencin 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Th ailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press 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, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Opening Bazin : postwar fi lm theory and its aft erlife / edited by Dudley Andrew; with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-973388-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-19-973389-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Bazin, Andr?, 1918–1958—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Motion pictures—Philosophy. I. Andrew, Dudley, 1945– II. Joubert-Laurencin, Hervé. PN1998.3.B39O64 2011 791.43092—dc22 [B] 2010019161 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Contents A Binocular Preface Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin i x Acknowledgments xvii p art o ne Lineage 1. A Bazinian Half-Century 3 Th omas Elsaesser 2. Cinema Across Fault Lines: Bazin and the French School of Geography 13 Ludovic Cortade 3. E volution and Event in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? 32 Tom Conley 4. Th e Reality of Hallucination in André Bazin 42 Jean-François Chevrier 5. B eyond the Image in Benjamin and Bazin: Th e Aura of the Event 57 Monica Dall’Asta 6. Bazin as Modernist 66 Colin MacCabe 7. F ilm and Plaster: Th e Mold of History 77 Jean-Michel Frodon 8. F rom Bazin to Deleuze: A Matter of Depth 85 Diane Arnaud 9. Deconstruction avant la lettre : Jacques Derrida Before André Bazin 95 Louis-Georges Schwartz p art t wo Aesthetics 10. Belief in Bazin 107 Philip Rosen 11. Th e World in Its Own Image: Th e Myth of Total Cinema 119 Tom Gunning vi Contents 12. Th e Aft erlife of Superimposition 127 Daniel Morgan 13. Th e Diff erence of Cinema in the System of the Arts 142 Angela Dalle Vacche 14. Malraux, Bazin, and the Gesture of Picasso 153 Dudley Andrew 15. Incoherent Spasms and the Dignity of Signs: Bazin’s Bresson 167 Noa Steimatsky 16. Animals: an Adventure in Bazin’s Ontology 177 Seung-hoon Jeong 17. Bazin’s Exquisite Corpses 186 Ivone Margulies 18. Rewriting the Image: Two Eff ects of the Future-Perfect in André Bazin 200 Hervé Joubert-Laurencin p art t hree Historical Moment 19. Th e Eloquent Image: Th e Postwar Mission of Film and Criticism 215 Philip Watts 20. Bazin in Combat 225 Antoine de Baecque 21. Bazin the Censor? 234 Marc Vernet 22. Waves of Crisis in French Cinema 240 Jeremi Szaniawski 23. Bazin’s Chaplin Myth and the Corrosive Lettrists 246 Rochelle Fack 24. Radical Ambitions in Postwar French Documentary 254 Steven Ungar 25. Bazin on the Margins of the Seventh Art 262 Grant Wiedenfeld 26. Television and the Auteur in the Late ’50s 268 Michael Cramer 27. André Bazin’s Bad Taste 275 James Tweedie p art f our Worldwide Influence 28. Montage Under Suspicion: Bazin’s Russo-Soviet Reception 291 John MacKay 29. From Ripples to Waves: Bazin in Eastern Europe 302 Alice Lovejoy 30. Bazin in Brazil: A Welcome Visitor 308 Ismail Xavier 31. Bazin and the Politics of Realism in Mainland China 316 Cecile Lagesse Contents vii 32. Japanese Readings: Th e Textual Th read 324 Kan Nozaki 33. Japanese Lessons: Bazin’s Cinematic Cosmopolitanism 330 Ryan Cook Notes on Contributors 3 35 Index of Names 339 Index of Films 3 45 Index of Terms 3 49 This page intentionally left blank A Binocular Preface New Haven: Dudley Andrew Th e oeuvre of André Bazin (April 1918–November 1958) goes well beyond the particular genre of its expression, fi lm criticism, reaching out to the full history of the twentieth century and to a variety of theories of art. As a child of the photographic revolution, cinema trans- formed the century it chronicled, a century of artistic modernism of which it has been the most troubling case. Bazin intuited its special place between art and history, positioning himself as a philosophical observer of the world and the world’s inhabitants seen through the screen. Never a fl aneur, he was both systematic surveyor and militant cinephile, a daily critic of the hundreds of fi lms on Paris’ screens during the most crucial period of this art, a man who never let a new fi lm or a new idea escape him. Writing without interruption for fi ft een years (1943–1958) and producing some 2,600 articles, he must be considered the sound fi lm’s master-thinker and the fi rst to register the eff ervescence of a cinematic modernism that began to come to prominence during his professional life. We are fi ft y years beyond Bazin and have entered another century. Yet rather than dreaming about him, we can dream with him, for “each epoch dreams the one to follow,” according to Jules Michelet. But to dream with Bazin we must delve into his oeuvre where the man still lives, opening an archive that needs to be opened out to the questions of concern to us today. O uvrir Bazin! Let us open André Bazin. He has much to tell us. W e should all be ashamed—I more than anyone—that it took the fi ft ieth anniversary of his passing to goad us into genuinely exploring André Bazin. Did we believe that we possessed all we needed in the collection he put together on the eve of his death? Were the fi ft y-two arti- cles (twenty-six in the standard English translation) comprising Q u’est-ce que le cinéma? suffi - cient to fund his brand of fi lm theory, letting us stand him up against Eisenstein in some battle of the titans? For that is eff ectively what we’ve done for four decades. In the modest preface he composed for Q u’est-ce que le cinéma? Bazin consigned most of his writing to ephemera, as he “reviewed” everyday fi lms or ordinary moments few of which merited resurrection. However, each moment did demand that he take a position, and we’ve come to value those positions and learn from many of those moments. His friends and followers eventually gathered additional collections of his writing (on Renoir, on Chaplin, on Welles, on the Occupation and Liberation,