André Bazin, Rhetorician

1942

1. How could we have a film culture? All the usual means are
lacking. This too-young art has no bibliography. The Sorbonne
has produced just one book on cinema. What is one to think of a
mode of expression which, alone among all the arts, has not given
rise to one doctoral dissertation? No manifestos, no schools of
thought defined in writing. We have neither ship nor sail for this
farther ocean.

2. More profoundly, film’s technical and economic constraints

account for the difficulty in acquiring a film culture. Cinema has
its classics, or rather its early forays, but it is impossible to see
them.

1943

3. Intellectuals are people who do not like to be interrupted. When

the movie screen began to talk, they turned silent.

4. The cinema, like every nascent art, should be analysed in its

specific complexity, in the totality of its relations with the social
milieu outside of which it would not exist.

5. In our mechanical civilisation, in which we are consumed by the

technical quality of our labour, a labour standardised by political
and social constraints, cinema, before any artistic concern, is there
to meet our repressed indefeasible collective psychic needs.
 Epigrams 1944  <  7

27. Cinema’s very nature dedicates it to expressing the eternal only

through the detail of an instant.

28. There remain, of course, economic processes. ‘At the same time’,
Malraux said, ‘cinema is an industry’. The second-largest in the
world. It alone of all the arts depends on this monstrous corps,
which compromises its spiritual health.

29. Audiences wanted the screen to be a window, not a mirror. We

are thus witnessing a paradoxical phenomenon: this most social
of the arts, that which best brings people together, the most realist
art by virtue of its means of expression, is also that which least
expresses contemporary French society.

30. People will always be oppressed, if only by life itself. Above all
else, dreams will remain what they expect from the movie screen.

31. It is a mistake to contrast reality and escape. Le Grand

Meaulnes takes its strength from a precise evocation of the French
countryside. This is often what distinguishes valid escape from
phoney estrangement.

32. A cinema of escape does not rule out calling on current affairs.
By this I do not mean events, but rather, first of all, the current
state of spirituality these events determine.

33. In the midst of the blast of grandeur, violence, hatred,

tenderness and hope with which the new American cinema is
about to batter us, we can hold our own only by driving deeper
roots, like it, into the soul of our time.

34. Dubbing is an invention of film merchants who need to bank

on facility.

35. It is better to see a good film twice than to see a bad film.
 Epigrams 1948  <  41

241. It is a given that in a genre which has remained as pure as

the western, originality is measured by the slight changes one
makes to some of the usual elements and by the skill with which
the scriptwriter and the director are able to remain faithful to
the genre’s fundamental rules while providing us with renewed
pleasure.

242. If we call erotic a film capable of stirring and maintaining the

audience’s sexual desire for the heroine, then in The Outlaw the
technique for instigating this desire is taken to its highest level of
perfection, in that we don’t see anything more than the shadow of
a breast.

243. What makes me think that the filmmakers were quite aware
[of the role of censorship in the film’s eroticism] is the dizzying
skill with which they were able to play on the boundaries of the
censorship code in order not to go one millimetre beyond the
authorised span and to make us constantly aware of the moral
prohibition which weighed on their enterprise. Without it, The
Outlaw would only be a bold, violent and realist work. Censorship
alone made it a pornographic film.

244. A film such as Hamlet no longer justifies the usual criticisms

one is obliged to make of dubbing. Subtitles would destroy its
harmony and scatter our attentiveness to the images, whose plastic
and dramatic conception is always marvellously calculated. I even
think that in this case dubbing would be in keeping with the spirit
with which Laurence Olivier established the relations between text
and image.

245. Welles barely shows us these witches [in Macbeth]. Only their
voices, strangely altered by the microphone, suggest their infernal
presence. This is because for Welles sound is no less cinematic
than the image and because, while actor and text are essential, it is
above all the actor’s speech which must be staged.
 52  <  André Bazin, Rhetorician

298. There is only one way to love the audience, and that is by
improving cinema.

299. The serial film is quite dead, and the naïveté and freshness of
audiences with it. Cinema has grown up, and audiences with it. To
attempt periodically to touch the audience with playthings from a
bygone era is pointless.

300. Hellzapoppin’ is the slapstick of slapstick the way Sullivan’s

Travels is the comedy of the American comedy. We know well
enough what such parodic refinements mean in the history of any
art: that the genre they are taking on is already a rotten corpse.

301. Voltaire’s attempts to rewrite Racine were in vain not

necessarily because he had less talent, but because he did not
understand that the age of tragedy had given way to the age of the
story and the novel. La Henriade was tripe, and he took revenge
for it by accusing the French of not having a head for the epic
when his only mistake was, two thousand years too late, to want to
compete with Homer.

302. What is troubling about cinema is that the slow gestation of

the history of the other arts is tremendously accelerated to the
scale of a human life.

303. It is plain [in Boom in the Moon] that Buster Keaton the man
has aged only twenty years since The General, yet for the past fifteen
years his character has already belonged to a kind of cinematic
Middle Ages.

304. It is significant that none of Emmer’s films, nor Le Monde de

Paul Delvaux (by Storck) nor naturally Alain Resnais’ Van Gogh,
shows us at any moment the painting as a whole, meaning in its
frame. Without this precaution, the film would no longer exist.
 88  <  André Bazin, Rhetorician

521. Märta Torén’s sphinx-like face is so beautiful that it is

generously credited with a secret it probably does not have.

522. At least one film genre achieved its full effectiveness before
assembly and still owes it practically nothing today: slapstick.

523. Like farce, slapstick is above all, or also, the dramatic

expression of a terrorism of things. Chaplin, our Molière, was able,
in Modern Times for example, to turn this into a tragedy of the
object.

524. In the wonderful film The Iron Mule, which is sometimes

shown in ciné-clubs, the slapstick mechanism reaches the sublime
and attains that supreme point where the poetry is both conscious
and unintentional. Surrealism did no better. But it was already the
end.

525. It took the Marx Brothers to give slapstick back its youth.
Breaking with its psychological evolution, with the gradual
humanisation of the character of which Chaplin is the best
example, starting over from the kind of delirium in the logic of the
action which characterised Mack Sennett, they took it to a truly
irresistible level of poetic madness. They liberated the gag from
any debt to social, psychological or even physical verisimilitude,
elevating absurd action to metaphysical dignity.

526. Outdoing the absurdity of the Marx Brothers, Hellzapoppin’

was no longer content to take on the logic of the world. It laid into
the logic of the film, calling into question the very existence of the
show.

527. In Hellzapoppin’ the projection booth appears on screen; in

The Sin of Harold Diddlebock the show begins with an old Harold
Lloyd film. Whether in space or time, this is a cinema to the power
of two, a film within the film. Slapstick owes its life today to those
who play with its death.
 110  <  André Bazin, Rhetorician

667. Far from being a condemned field of cinema, and precisely

because of its commercial and utilitarian purpose, advertising is a
minor but privileged form of experimental cinema.

668. Advertising may be the residual field of an avant-garde which

has become impossible within normal film production.

669. Norman McLaren shows us, unfailingly, the animated

drawing’s only possible path to salvation: a return to the graphic
simplicity and individual creation of Émile Cohl.

670. Actors use their face to express feelings, but Carl Dreyer
demanded from his actors something other and more than acting.
Seen so closely in extreme close-up, the mask of acting cracks. As
the Hungarian critic Béla Balázs wrote, ‘[the camera] illuminates
the many layers of the human physiognomy. It exposes the
face beneath the surface. . . . From close-to, the face becomes a
document’.*
* Béla Balázs, ‘The Close-up’, in The Spirit of Film, in Erica Carter,
ed., Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New
York: Berghahn, 2010), 103—Trans.

671. In André Gide, pure duration becomes in a sense the subject of

the image. The emotion we feel cannot arise out of the dramatic
structure of the event, which in itself is amorphous, if not banal.
This duration is added drop by drop, second by second, until it
becomes exquisitely unbearable. It is a summation of time in the
living duration of the subject. Time does not flow; it accumulates
in the image to achieve a charge with formidable potential whose
discharge we await almost in anguish.

672. Let potential viewers be warned: the women [in Third from the
Right] are not as skimpily attired as the photographs ‘of the film’
posted at the entrance to cinemas legitimately lead one to believe.
 Epigrams 1952  <  111

Moralists may say that this is ‘for the best’. But they are speaking
of morality tout court and not commercial morality. When you go
to the Folies Bergère, you know pretty much what you are going to
see.

673. The star’s breasts, which we do not see, would offend morality
much less than the music hall numbers we are shown.

674. It seems to me that cinema has finished exhausting the themes

which might be held to be specific to cinematic expression. Others
will be born, for which a few years will suffice to see them reach
bottom—as happened, for example, with the American comedy.

675. Cinema’s youth potentially takes us back to those early

stages of art history when it was only a question, first of all, of
reproducing a theme by the greatest number of artistic techniques
possible.

676. Let us be glad for Technicolor, so agreeable to the eye, whose

secret is held by the London laboratories. It makes the girls even
prettier, beginning with the charming Vera-Ellen, who sings and
acts in a comic role marvellously.

677. For a long time now in American cinema there have no longer
been real breasts and fake breasts, only identical forms derived
from the same Platonic matrix.

678. Colour in American [Technicolor] films is somehow

translucent and washed out, similar to the added and approximate
colours seen in magazines and in Epinal prints. It is impossible
to truly associate the colour with the material. Only the London
laboratories restore this colouration. The important thing about it
is not so much that it is more accurate, but above all that it adheres
to things rather than interposing itself between us and what we are
looking at, like the pink bathing suits of 1900 nudie pictures.
 Epigrams 1952  <  129

786. Let us hope we soon see Japanese films in colour. These films’
admirable stylisation of the image, the sumptuousness of their
costumes and the printmaking tradition should make Japanese
colour cinema the foremost in the world.

787. Maupassant is one of the rare novelists, if not the only one,
to have written in an aesthetic length of time shorter than the
commercial length of films. By this I mean that cinema’s great
handicap in adapting novels lies in being obliged, for completely
incidental reasons, to ‘force’ the characters and events, which
cannot reach maturity in the ninety minutes allotted to a film
screening. This is often, in response to this, the source of a
paradoxical impression of slowness.

788. André Michel may still lack that je ne sais quoi of which style
is made and which undoubtedly in Three Women is merely a lack
of rigour in his découpage, or rather insufficient attention to the
resources of découpage. The way things unfold on their own in the
work of someone like Renoir in A Day in the Country is in truth
made of constant invention in the framing. It appears to me that
André Michel, rightly concerned with finding the right tone, the
right tempo within his scenes, sometimes sacrifices in these scenes
the expressive contribution which could come from the camera
itself.

789. A play is above all a text, meaning an abstraction, a play of

ideas. It touches you not through the senses but rather through the
intellect.

790. To the extent that parody is ambiguous, it also underscores the

grandeur of the western through the reference one seeks in it. It
may well be that today the western is the sole authentic refuge of
epic and tragedy. In any event, one finds in it the transcendence of
the moral motive which underlies, precisely, tragedy in Corneille.
 Epigrams 1953  <  147

891. Monsieur Hulot’s world is like the lump of marshmallow

hanging from the sweet-seller’s cart, stretching, stretching until
Hulot catches it in extremis and prevents it from falling into
the dirt. Inescapably, however, the dough slowly starts to fall
once more, and Monsieur Hulot plunges anew, a ridiculous and
charming Sisyphus, gracefully gathering up the absurd weight of
the world.

892. It may be Hollywood’s great strength that these B-films,

which in Europe would almost necessarily be silly or vulgar, are
granted an anonymous truth by a typically American science of
storytelling.

893. That TV’s sole superiority over cinema and, even more so, over
every other means of expression, lies in its transmission of the live
image has never been called into doubt.

894. It matters more to viewers that the scenes in House of Wax

would most often lose almost all their emotional value were it not
for the illusion of three dimensions. To be persuaded of this it is
enough to close one eye behind the 3D glasses: the action falls flat,
in the literal and figurative senses of the term alike.

895. Fear, more than any other elementary feeling, is undoubtedly

tied to the perception of space: from the fear of empty space,
known as vertigo, to the fears inspired by the night, when all sorts
of perils rise up. When cinema’s first viewers recoiled before the
train entering the station at La Ciotat, it was because the novelty
of the reproduction of movement on a flat screen already gave an
illusion of relief.

896. I do not believe in impressionistic criticism, which ordinarily

is more concerned with demonstrating one’s own talent than with
analysing that of the authors one is praising or condemning. Yet
there are cases when one can do no better than to start from one’s
own feelings, because they may also be valid as argument.
 158  <  André Bazin, Rhetorician

956. What is valid in Marcel Pagnol’s work is by no means due

to the theatrical style of the dialogue but rather, first of all, to
its human quality, its comic poetry, and above all to the realist
harmony between the characters and the natural setting—
meaning, precisely, the way the dialogue shatters theatre’s
limitations. The author of The Baker’s Wife is not the champion of
canned theatre; he is the precursor to neo-realism.

957. We cannot thank Pagnol enough for having contributed to

demolishing the formalist myth of cinematic Art with a capital A.
Inherited from silent cinema, the all-encompassing idea of a pure,
specific cinema irreducible to its content, an art of moving images
and the rhythmic qualities of assembly, has been quietly and
irrefutably contradicted by Angèle and The Baker’s Wife.

958. Ignorant of the customs and technical methods of professional

filmmaking, Pagnol unconsciously discovered other no less
cinematic values which only the return to realism could bring out.

959. When we speak of filmed theatre, it is almost always

understood in the limited sense of boulevard theatre, or
sometimes—rarely—of classical theatre, forgetting on the one
hand the minor forms found in fairgrounds and music halls and,
above all, the cryptic and indirect influence of contemporary
theatre.

960. Between filmed theatre and the gangster film or western there
stretches the entire spectrum of theatrical cinema which renders
the irrevocable condemnation of filmed theatre in principle quite
illusive.

961. As much as we might lament the passing contaminations of

the western, it would be worthwhile to marvel that it resists them.
Each influence acts on it like a vaccine. On contact, the microbe
loses its deadly virulence.
 168  <  André Bazin, Rhetorician

1,008. Every true work of art contains the entirety of the culture
out of which it arose, just as the geometry of the smallest salt
crystal defines the chemistry of the crystallised substance.

1,009. A painting by Renoir, a sonata by Ravel, a poem by Éluard

infer the magnificent achievement of a culture of which only
coarsely developed elements are found even in French cinema of
quality. Naturally, we may view film’s social dimension as a
coefficient of value in its own right, and hold one as compensating
for the other, but even so this is to admit that Western cinema is
not one with the best of our culture.

1,010. In certain cases, American cinema probably constitutes still

today the best and most complete expression of its society. Of
rather little historical value to be expressed by simple and well-
worn symbols, it is true.

1,011. We should see Gate of Hell at least twice, so that the second
viewing is devoid of any element of surprise. Indeed the film is an
excellent example of a classical work in the sense in which Valéry
set it against the modern work, which relies not on expectation
but rather on surprise. Here, rather, everything is founded on the
expectation of an anticipated event whose beauty lies solely in the
utmost economy of its expression.

1,012. It would be fairly pointless to analyse here Gate of Hell ’s

methods and techniques, as the perfection of this style lies
essentially in its spareness and density of expression, more a matter
of demonstrating than of analysing.

1,013. Sequences are linked in Gate of Hell in a way which eludes

any possible explanation. I am thinking in particular of the
shot of a wave which batters the screen after the murder of the
treacherous monk. This shot is completely gratuitous dramatically,
but afterwards it seems as indisputably necessary as the presence of
a bird or a reflection in a perfect painting.
 Epigrams 1954  <  177

1,052. The ‘pointless’ space around faces is not as pointless as all

that: on the contrary, it highlights them by restoring to them a
natural relation with space. Cézanne said that the task was not
to paint perspective, but rather the air around objects. This is
something like what CinemaScope gives us: the air around faces.

1,053. Nine films out of ten, in a sense, have no author. The names
in the credits, with the exception of the principal actors for whom
the film was made, are barely more than technicians to whom
the film, in practical terms, owes its existence. But the only valid
critique of these ‘works’ would involve an overall analysis of
cinema’s context, taking into account sociology, economics and the
evolution of film’s technics.

1,054. What can fool us about the originality of films is that when
they are released we think we can distinguish differences between
them which are only highly incidental. Usually, these are not the
films we see again in film archives or ciné-clubs. On this point,
however, television, which for various reasons is obliged to resort
to ‘commercial’ films from ten, fifteen or even twenty years ago,
enables us with the passing of time to judge the uniformity of
these films.

1,055. The notion of the author is quite pointless in cinema. This

does not necessarily come at the expense of art, because shifting all
artistic credit for a work of art to its presumed author is without a
doubt a fairly recent phenomenon.

1,056. Many recent films rightly seen as important in film history

merely mark the peak of the curve traced by a genre’s evolution.
This is the case, for example, of Pépé le Moko, attributed to Jean
Duvivier. But if Duvivier were truly the author of Pépé le Moko, by
which I mean if the credit fell to him entirely, he could not at the
same time be the author of films as bad as Panic and On Trial.

1,057. [Attributing the authorship of a film] is a false problem. It

sees the script as the idea and directing as the form.