An assesment of Andre Bazin

Bazin

Andre Bazin’s adage in terms of film analysis is basically, if it a’int broke don’t fix it. The difference between that previous sentence and Bazin’s writing is figuratively the distance between two ends of a chasm. Even though his basic premise on film, no matter how brilliant is blunt and to the point, his writing is something completely different. What Bain’s writing did in order to revolutionize general perspective on the art of movies is an historic achievement. What film critic before him came to the conclusion that montage was not as permanent or as important as it was made up to be? What film critic before him created a basic new school of film; one that consisted of young film critics turned directors? (the New Wave) Bazin’s tract record as a writer is something that can appear fairly daunting to a reader reading one of his pieces for the first time. The question becomes: is Bazin as important as he’s made out to be by film historians?

Bazin’s essay entitled The Evolution of the Language of Cinema is an exquisite piece because it becomes apparent to the reader that not only does Bazin believe that the techniques that appeared during the days of silent film should be transposed to modern film, but that there should also be a new synthesis of form, materializing from both old and new conventions. It’s an incredibly rich and illuminating perspective of how art thrives, and Bazin’s mention of the altering forms of film convinces anyone reading the piece that movies are indeed an art form. It’s an important reminder, considering the state that movies are in at the moment. Bazin’s piece is a very hopeful essay.

What Bazin illuminates in his essay is the contrarian view from most film theorists of the time; that being that the so called static camera shot from the silent film period is actually much more realistic and more effective than the process of montage. Bazin writes in his essay that when a viewer is watching a film by Griffith or Murnau, or von Stroheim ect, that particular viewer watching the film experiences a closer perspective on reality than a person watching a film with sound. This doesn’t necessarily have to do with the fact that the film is silent, but rather because the shots that they are watching have more significance than the transitory ones that are only pieces of the final scene in a sound film. By having the camera on a subject longer, the geographic space of the scene is conveyed more than it would be if the shot lasted for only a few seconds. The reason why the older film convention works more, in Bazin’s estimation, is because the viewer is required to think to a great extent if they are watching a particular shot that lasts for a long time on screen. The viewer doesn’t have the option of having the editing process do the work for them. That’s what Bazin means when he says in the last sentence of his essay that, “The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last, the equal of the novelist.”

Bazin’s style of writing is particularly important in regards to this piece, because his aesthetics illuminate meaning and this correlates with the theme of the essay. The one sentence on Renoir, in regards to how he has brought back the conventions of the silent film in a new way, is particularly beautiful. “He alone (Renoir) in his searchings as a director …forced himself to look back beyond the resources provided by montage and so uncovered the secret of a film form that would permit everything to be said without chopping the world up into little fragments,” is an important passage because it’s an example of how Bazin is a humanist, opposed to a film theorist like Kroucher who is too limiting and relies too much on technique. Bazin is interested more in how form can illuminate meaning. He concentrates on how it’s important that aesthetics do not impinge on the content of the work; in other words on the reality of the situation. That’s why the startling line in the essay, that “…one can really say that since 1930 all the technical requirements for the art of cinema have been available,” is not in any way dated when read today. Bazin believes more in the content of the material than he does in how the work was made. Our present day movies are examples of how his theory proved to be ultimately correct.