French film critic & theorist (1918-1958)
All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
It was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
But realism in art can only be achieved in one way--through artifice.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
The filmmaker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last, the equal of the novelist.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
The screen uses violence in such a customary fashion that it seems somehow like a devalued currency, which is at one and the same time provoking and conventional.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
attributed, True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity
No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
Reality is not art, but a realist art is one that can create an integral aesthetic of reality.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
It is important to avoid casting the professional in the role for which he is known. The public should not be burdened with any preconceptions.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
In point of fact, now that sound has given proof that it came not to destroy but to fulfill the Old Testament of the cinema, we may most properly ask if the technical revolution created by the sound track was in any sense an aesthetic revolution.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
Painting was forced, as it turned out, to offer us illusion and this illusion was reckoned sufficient unto art. Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
Originality in photography as distinct from originality in painting lies in the essentially objective character of photography. For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
The film of a painting is an aesthetic symbiosis of screen and painting, as is the lichen of the algae and mushroom. To be annoyed by this is as ridiculous as to condemn the opera on behalf of theater and music.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
All films are born free and equal.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
Hence the charm of family albums. Those grey or sepia shadows, phantomlike and almost undecipherable, are no longer traditional family portraits but rather the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their destiny; not, however, by the prestige of art but by the power of an impassive mechanical process.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?