Angela Dalle Vacche Andre Bazin Film Theory

André Bazin’s Film Theory
André Bazin’s
Film Theory
Art, Science, Religion
A N G E L A DA L L E   VAC C H E
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2020
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, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–0–19–006730–4  (pbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–006729–8  (hbk.)
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
Illustrations
1.1 André Bazin with cat. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. This file is
licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
International license. 2
2.1 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. Place de l’Europe. Gare Saint Lazare. 1932.
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos. 18
2.2 Vitruvian Man. Leonardo Da Vinci, Artist, and Ludwig Heinrich
Heydenreich. Study of Proportions. 1949. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/
item/00650441/. 23
2.3 Jean Painlevé, L’hippocampe femelle (Female Seahorse), 1931. © 2019
Archives Jean Painlevé/LDC, Paris. 27
3.1 École Normale d’Instituteurs de La Rochelle. Courtesy Angela Dalle Vacche. 56
3.2 Magnetic field of bar magnets attracting. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 94
5.1–5.7 Views of Saintonge churches, photographed by André Bazin. Courtesy
Janine Bazin and Dudley Andrew. 150
5.8 12th-century lantern of the dead at Fenioux, Charente-Maritime,
France. Classed as a historic monument since 1862. Courtesy Wikimedia
Commons: licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 3.0 Unported license. 164
5.9 Église Sainte-Radegonde de Talmont-sur-Gironde. Fortified church (11th,
12th, and 16th century) as seen from east with renewed ramparts and bedrock.
Talmont-sur-Gironde, Charente-Maritime, France. Photo: JLPC /Wikimedia
Commons /CC BY-SA 3.0. 165
Preface
On December 16, 2018, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin presented his edition of

two elegant and weighty volumes (2,848 pages) titled André Bazin: Ecrits
complets. Before this event, the André Bazin Archive consisted of photocopies
of some 2,600 essays and reviews written by the French film critic between
1941 and 1958, copies of which are still located at Yale University in New
Haven, Connecticut (YABA), and at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art
(INHA) in Paris. In the preface to the anthology Opening Bazin: Postwar Film
Theory and Its Afterlife, this archive is described as an “explorer service” for
anyone who wishes to “riffle” through the titles of Bazin’s articles in French,
“locating every instance where he analyzed or mentioned a director or film.”
Access to this archive at Yale offered me an incredible research opportu-
nity, since only approximately 15 percent of Bazin’s work is published and
translated into English. When I first began my exploration, this collection of
photocopies of reviews and articles was a treasure trove, which I read from
top to bottom during five years of note-taking. Simultaneously, I created my
own mini-archive of index cards based on every direct or implied reference
to art, science, and religion I could find. On the basis of this research, I de-
voted five more years of writing on Bazin’s thought.
Little by little, I formulated my own ideas on Bazin, theater, and painting,
because Yale professor Dudley Andrew, who edited Opening Bazin, in-
cluded me in all sorts of debates in the United States and France as early as
2008. That particular year, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Bazin’s death
in 1958, Professor Andrew cosponsored a transoceanic conference with the
Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7, in which I participated.
In 2014, Dudley Andrew organized a symposium, “Tracking
Specificity: The Fluctuations of Cinema,” at the Yale Whitney Humanities
Center in New Haven. During this event, I presented my paper “André Bazin’s
Idea of Cinema’s Unique Ontology,” where I discussed his lack of interest in
the concept of medium specificity and his passion for impure cinema, with
numerous exceptions of pure cinema variously defined.
During the summer of 2016, my colleague Weihong Bao, invited me
to Shanghai University in China, where I presented a paper on Bazin and
xii Preface
science. That very same summer, Linda Bertelli hired me to teach a class on
Bazin, cinema, painting, and the museum at IMT (Institutions, Markets, and
Technologies) in Lucca, Italy. In November 2018, I was the recipient of the
Goggio Visiting Professorship at the University of Toronto, which allowed
me time to fine-tune my book draft.
The relationship between cinema and the other arts has always been a
major interest of mine. In addition, I have always thought of all religions
in anthropological terms, as did Bazin. Moreover, teaching at the Georgia
Institute of Technology for twenty years has helped to educate me in the his-
tory of science. My general purpose is to offer a film theory book where each
chapter stands on its own, while the three sections on art, science, and reli-
gion also relate to each other. I have also paid close attention to Bazin’s way of
handling specific films, so that the reader can count on broad overviews next
to close analyses.
Since I was working with photocopies at the Yale André Bazin Archive,
in many cases the page numbers were incomplete or missing. Alternatively,
every single piece of writing was clearly filed with the name of a newspaper
or journal, the year, and information concerning volume or number. For all
these reasons, in my bibliography I have not included page numbers in citing
a piece of film criticism from a newspaper or magazine.
Additionally, French newspapers carry their own spelling mistakes.
From time to time, I have encountered a word that could not be found in
any French dictionary. In these instances, I concluded that a printing error
had taken place, and I did my best with the translation. Every effort has been
made to be as accurate as possible throughout the book, but I accept respon-
sibility for any errors or omissions.
In comparison to my previous books, this particular project has brought
me much closer to the cinema as a technology, even though Bazin always
privileged the question “What is a human?” over technological determinism
or innovation. Precisely because the technological terminology of film-
making changes from one language to another, in the most unpredictable
ways, I have included in the Notes the original text of any citation translated
for this book. Translations are mine, unless noted.
Acknowledgments
Innumerable colleagues and friends offered their insights and support to

this project. Besides the always thoughtful, patient, and enthusiastic Dudley
Andrew, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin has been an invaluable colleague. He and
Dudley Andrew developed the Bazin archive together. Thanks to a memo-
rable travel grant from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2011, Hervé
and I drove all over the Saintonge region to better understand Bazin’s fasci-
nation with the humble, little Romanesque churches of this region. Thanks
to his generous hospitality in Paris during my research at the Bibliothèque
Nationale François Mitterand, Hervé’s own ideas and his detailed 2014 book
on Bazin, Le sommeil paradoxal, have helped me to clarify my own position
on our shared topic.
Besides Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, I am also grateful
to Véronique Godard, who introduced me to Eric Le Roy, director of the
Centre National du Cinéma (CNC) in Bois d’Arcy, France. There, I was able
to see many films discussed by the famous critic which are not available in
the United States. These screenings enabled me to make sense of sentences
and arguments which would have otherwise remained most difficult to
summarize.
My project also benefited from two residencies in France. In 2013, thanks
to the support of the Brown Foundation, linked to the Museum of Fine
Arts in Houston, I was a Fellow at Dora Maar House in the beautiful vil-
lage of Ménerbes in Provence. In 2016, I became the recipient of a Camargo
Fellowship in Cassis, a lovely little town on the Mediterranean, not far from
Marseille. These two experiences in France were very helpful for writing,
thinking, and exchanging ideas on French culture in the fifties.
Throughout this endeavor, I have been assisted by the copyeditor Nadine
Covert, who also helped with translations. In addition, I benefited from the
editing assistance of Dana Benelli, who patiently removed my Italian accent
from the writing and helped me with crucial insights.
My home institution, the Georgia Institute of Technology, was always
behind me, every step of the way. I am especially grateful for Jay Telotte’s
xiv Acknowledgments
probing questions and calming influence, and to all my colleagues in the

School of Literature, Media, and Communication.
In the context of my teaching, I presented three seminars related to this
book: Film Color: Between Art and Science; Art, Film, and the History
of Science; and Classical Film Theory: Science and Technology. Dean
Jacqueline Jones Royster, Dean Janet Murray, and Chair Richard Utz repeat-
edly approved time for research and summer funding. Also at Georgia Tech,
Kenneth Knoespel, Vinicius Navarro, Qi Wang, Lisa Yaszek, and Gregory
Zinman offered timely words of support.
Beyond Atlanta, Georgia, there are many other colleagues I wish to ac-
knowledge for their reactions and suggestions: Richard Allen, Paula Amad,
Nico Baumbach, Linda Bertelli, Ivo Blom, Marta Braun, Keith Bresnahan,
Colin Burnett, James Cahill, Walter Cahn, Julie Chenot, Michele Cone,
Tom Conley, Ludovic Cortade, Marianne Dautray, Antoine De Baecque,
Susan Delson, Patrizia Di Bello, Rima Djanine, Thomas Elsaesser, Jane
Gaines, Romy Golan, Marco Grosoli, Tom Gunning, Rula Halawani, Feroz
Hassan, Simon Hodgkinson, Steven Jacobs, Blandine Joret, Dimitrios
Latsis, Mélisande Leventopoulos, Ivone Margulies, Brian Molanphy, Daniel
Morgan, Rafik Ouadi, Marie Pascal, Richard Peña, Tony Pipolo, Dana
Polan, Philip Rosen, Karl Schoonover, Louis-Georges Schwartz, Antonio
Somaini, Noa Steimatsky, Gwen Strauss, Christophe Wall- Romana,
Raymond Watkins, Philip Watts, Jennifer Wild, Sarah Wilson, Prakash
Younger, and Alberto Zambenedetti. My apologies to anyone whose name
I’ve omitted among those who assisted me through ten years of research
and writing.
As always, I am indebted to personal friends who offered support over
the years: Zette Emmons, Charo Garaigorta, Sandra Gibson, Liz Helfgott,
Martha Hollander, Jerry Kearns and the late Nora York, Lucy Kostelanetz
and Steve Schrader, Corrado Levi, Sara Levi, Ellen Levy and David Levy,
Susan Madden, Jake Perlin, Luis Recoder, Cindi Rowell, Andrea Simon,
Amresh Sinha, Esteban Torres Ayastuy, Karole Vail and Andrew Houston,
Silvia Vega-Llona, and Silvia Venier.
Finally, now that Hervé Joubert-Laurencin’s French edition of André
Bazin’s entire opus has been published, one can only hope that, in the near
future, an American publisher will take on an English edition of the com-
plete collected works of André Bazin. The more the discipline of film and
media studies fine-tunes translations and editions of key texts in different
Acknowledgments xv
languages, the more this field will deepen itself and contribute to the land-
scape of the humanities in a vital and indispensable way.
Angela Dalle Vacche
January 2019
Early versions of some chapters of this book have appeared in the following
publications:
Dalle Vacche, Angela.“The Art Documentary in the Postwar Period.” Aniki: Portuguese
Journal of the Moving Image 1:2 (2014): 292–313.
Dalle Vacche, Angela. “Miraculous Mathematics: André Bazin’s Film Theory.” Discourse
38:2 (Spring 2016): 117–141.
Dalle Vacche, Angela. “André Bazin’s Film Theory and the History of Ideas.”
In Film as Philosophy, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath, 132– 160. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Dalle Vacche, Angela. “André Bazin and the Romanesque Churches of Saintonge.” In
The Golden Age of the Art Documentary: Cultural Identities, Historiography, and
Experimental Film, edited by Steven Jacobs and Dimitrios Latsis. London: Bloomsbury,
forthcoming 2020.
1
Introduction
The Soul of Cinema
André Bazin was born in 1918 in Angers, a city in western France, and re-
ceived a Catholic education as a child. From 1934 to 1937, he attended the
École Normale d’Instituteurs in the Protestant city of La Rochelle, located
on the western coast of France in the department of Charente-Maritime.
There Bazin experienced the French secular education system and proved
to be a brilliant student in the sciences. His academic achievements enabled
him to gain admission to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure de
Saint-Cloud, near Paris, where he continued his education in literature and
the arts.
Bazin’s interest in cinema developed during his military service in
Bordeaux, where he was assigned. He frequently attended the cinema with a
friend whose family owned a chain of theaters. After returning to Paris to re-
sume his studies, Bazin became involved with the Maison des Lettres, where
he started a film club. Bazin perceived the need for a new kind of film criti-
cism, and for a serious journal devoted to the art and craft of cinema, leading
eventually to his founding of Cahiers du Cinéma in 1951, with Jacques
Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca.
During the fifties Bazin (Figure 1.1) mentored the filmmakers who rose to
the forefront of the French New Wave in the sixties: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc
Godard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette. They all started out
their careers as cinéphiles and all were Bazin’s colleagues in film journalism.
Besides Cahiers, Bazin was a regular contributor for the conservative Parisien
Libéré, the socialist France Observateur, and the communist Écran Français. He
also published in prestigious journals such as Temps Modernes and Esprit.
Due to Bazin’s chronic bad health, he eventually became unable to go to
the movies and turned to television criticism, writing for Radio Cinéma et
Télévision. He also wrote about radio. He died of leukemia in 1958, leaving
behind a groundbreaking body of work that influenced the cinemas of
Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
André Bazin’s Film Theory. Angela Dalle Vacche, Oxford University Press (2020) © Oxford
University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190067298.001.0001
2 André Bazin’s Film Theory
Figure 1.1 André Bazin with cat. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. This

file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
International license.
Bazin was not involved in the French Resistance and never became a reg-
istered member of any political party. He was an independent, left-wing
social activist throughout his life, and an advocate of dissidence, inclusion,
and nonviolence. Bazin’s writings are intensely original, and they continue
to surpass in scope and insight all the film theorists who preceded him,
such as Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916), Jean Epstein (1897–1953), Sergei
Eisenstein (1898–1948), and Rudolph Arnheim (1904–2007).
In comparison to his predecessors, Bazin was the first to systematically bring
together theory, criticism, and history in regard to film. In contrast to Epstein
and Eisenstein, who were both filmmakers as well as theorists, it was only to-
ward the end of his life that Bazin planned to shoot a documentary about the tiny
rural churches of the Saintonge region of western France where he had grown
up. Unfortunately, time ran out on him and the film was never completed.1
Introduction 3
To speak of Bazin’s film “theory” means that this thinker developed an

open-ended “idea” of the cinema with the same degree of attention to all the
components of the filmmaking process. For Bazin, the cinema is comparable
to a living organism in a state of evolution. It is a medium gifted with an on-
tological status, or a photographically genetic way of being grounded in both
irrational belief and the physical world. Bazin is the first critic to associate
spectatorship with free will and universalism simultaneously. Bazin’s “idea”
of the cinema is comparable to a school of life or a general education to think
through the complexities of today’s world.
More interested in the interface of the medium and the phenomenal world
than in rhetorical flourishes, Bazin is the very first theorist to understand
that popular cinema is the best way of objectifying human behavior for a
mass audience. Bazin’s “idea” of the cinema is as a medium that calls atten-
tion to philosophical depth and moral responsibilities.
To this day, fewer than three hundred texts written by Bazin have
been translated and published in English. Although his work used to be
fragmented and dispersed, Bazin’s thought is systematic and compre-
hensive. By dealing with approximately eighty untranslated texts, I focus
mostly here on French and Italian fictional films of the forties and fifties,
while also paying attention to some documentaries and Hollywood films.
To be sure, Bazin’s famous question—What is cinema?—probes what
a human is and why cinema is indispensable for humankind. Thus, the in-
terrogation of human ethics is this thinker’s most urgent topic, to the point
that it overrides his commitment to aesthetics. Bazin believes that a human
is simultaneously an irrational being and a rational animal.2 He argues that
unless human irrationality becomes creativity through art, or spirituality
through religion, it can result in cruelty and madness. Likewise, an excess
of scientific rationality can reduce human beings to unfeeling machines or
to exploitable objects. Due to Bazin’s double-sided definition of humankind,
one must deal with his metaphors from art, science, and religion to fully ap-
preciate his film theory.
The Structure of the Book
Art is relevant to perception, self-expression, and the imagination, while sci-

ence strives for cognition and proof in the course of studying life, change, and
contingency. Religions deal with origins and the afterlife. For Bazin, religion
is more important than art, while science is at the bottom of his tripartite par-
adigm. Nevertheless, my book sequences art, science, and religion to create
a maximum of momentum for readers. Placing science in the middle shows
that logic and knowledge fight against superstition and fanaticism; likewise,
putting art at the beginning calls attention to the differences between human
and natural creativity.
In line with this critic’s openness toward the irrational, contingency or
grace may bring hope to the universal realities of human sin and suffering.
Bazin was passionate about quantum physics; there, wave and particle co-
exist through the medium of light. Bazin’s essays allude repeatedly to Michael
Faraday’s (1791–1867) discovery of electromagnetic energy. In this exper-
iment, a single magnet attracts many iron filings by making them all move
together at the same time. Each thin piece of metal, however, finds its own
special position in relation to the magnet which, for the critic, is comparable
to the screen of cinema. This combination of a collective draw and many in-
dividual responses subtends Bazin’s preferred model of independent specta-
torship in his idea of the cinema.
My chapter on art begins with Bazin’s groundbreaking claim that a pho-
tograph is an incarnational exception, the one and only example of a natural
image in the history of Western image-making. By calling attention to the
activity of recording as an artistic choice, various examples of “pure” cinema
precede a section on the postwar art documentary. This discussion clarifies
why the medium is mostly impure. The “Art” chapter concludes with the on-
tological differences between fictional literary adaptations and nonfictional
mobilizations of the static canvas on the screen of cinema.
The chapter on science argues that biology is the most important disci-
pline for this thinker. In contrast to mathematics, biology allows Bazin to
place life and contingency above the self-contained, static equations of al-
gebra and the interchangeable solids of Euclidean geometry.
The climax of my “Science” chapter amounts to a redefinition of Italian
neorealism, which reveals Bazin’s familiarity with differential calculus.
Significantly, the phenomenological realism of postwar Italian cinema stands
for what this theorist hopes the cinema can achieve with its future.3
Here, “phenomenological” refers to the unfolding of a perceptual, subjec-
tive process based on change, displacement, and discovery in regard to one’s
own relations with others. In comparison to other realisms perpetuating the
so-called déjà vu or a quantitative naturalism based on details,4 Italian ne-
orealism proposes the jamais vu of a perceptual displacement, namely the
Introduction 5
objectification of human behavior onto a self-conscious and altruistic moral

choice.
Finally, in my chapter on religion, through close readings of Catholic and
Protestant films, I maintain that Bazin disapproves of religious hypocrisy,
which detracts from spirituality in human life. As a Catholic dissident, Bazin
dislikes dogmatic and rule-bound positions in all camps. Thus, he does ac-
knowledge that miracles can happen—incredibly rare as they may be—and
that the irrational is indispensable for humankind. As inexplicable events,
miracles call attention to the limitations of human science. Sensitive to the
unknown and searching for an inner transformation, Giulietta Masina in
Federico Fellini’s The Nights of Cabiria (1957) and the nameless protagonist
(Claude Laydu) in Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951) open
themselves to risk and adventure. In contrast to Charlie Chaplin, whose vir-
tuosic acting skills depend on subtle mathematical precision, Masina’s acting
and Bresson’s performer suggest a leap of faith into irrational belief.
While Bazin relies on cinema’s parallel universe to interrogate human be-
havior through art, science, and religion, my chapters intentionally overlap
with each other in such a way as to highlight a thematic continuity based on
Bazin’s anti-anthropocentric moral stance in his film theory. Unsurprisingly,
my Epilogue starts with Bazin’s anti-anthropocentric compatibility with
Edgar Morin’s (1921–) “anthropo-cosmomorphism,” according to which
memory and imagination thrive in the cinema to interrogate nature and the
cosmos.5
Despite some significant differences between their respective understandings
of the cinema, Bazin’s approval of Morin’s work confirms that perceptual rejuve-
nation through the cinema is necessary for humankind. It enables us to pre-
serve emotional resources in a world that is becoming less and less creative
and increasingly more regimented. By expanding our range of emotions and
insights, the cinema can generate alternative perceptions. In contrast to the con-
cept of defamiliarization, from Russian formalism, these occasional moments
of epiphany do not make things look strange. On the contrary, they disrupt our
own stale ways of seeing by making us “see” in an objectifying and revealing
way, as if it were happening for the very first time.
In the cinema, the interrogation of the world’s origin is intertwined with
the illusion of an afterlife or parallel universe on screen. Thus I have devoted
most of my Epilogue to Bazin’s very last essay on the region of Saintonge,
near La Rochelle. This location marks where he grew up and where his mind
transports him before he dies. In this lyrical piece, the metaphor of the wind
takes on positive and negative connotations. On one hand, it refers to the

mobilizing energy of spiritual encounters, as well as to the transformative
power of time. Just as the wind turns seeds into wild grass, cinema’s moving
image carries inside itself and across the world the record of the twentieth
century. On the other hand, the wind also has a destructive impact on the
walls of the little Romanesque churches. There, sculptures of skeletons and
skulls decay into porous surfaces that are abstract enough to rekindle our
imagination toward a lost past and a transformative future. Written while he
was dying, Bazin’s essay speaks to how the cinema as a mass medium enables
humankind to reflect on time and space.
In line with Henri Bergson’s (1859–1941) insight that we can control space
but are helpless in front of time, Bazin’s film theory confronts us with how
cinema’s illusory motion can suggest the internal and external passing of
time, with personal as well as social implications. Bazin’s work acquires even
more originality when compared to other intellectual voices speaking during
his own epoch.
To begin with, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) dominates the intellectual
landscape of Bazin’s youth. They meet each other in Bazin’s ciné-club on
Rue Soufflot, near the Sorbonne, during the German Occupation.6 While
they both write on the cinema, the famous philosopher and the young
critic share a passion for American literature, until they politely disagree
on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). Most importantly, Bazin’s tragic
optimism is antithetical to Sartre’s atheist nihilism. Neither a materialist
nor an idealist, Bazin is aware of the world’s energy and cinema’s materi-
ality. To be sure, he appropriates a famous phrase from Sartre: “existence
precedes essence,” a concept Sartre lifts from Heidegger’s Being and Time
(1927).7
Besides Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) is the other intel-
lectual celebrity of Bazin’s generation, when film theory does not yet exist
as a serious area of inquiry. Art theory, instead, differentiates Bazin from
Merleau-Ponty, for whom painting is more of a conduit toward philosophy
than literature or the cinema. Involved with ciné-clubs in factories, Bazin
is a cultural activist who operates outside the Sorbonne and the Collège de
France. Thus, the pioneering film theorist and the academic Merleau-Ponty
never enjoy the opportunity to meet in person. Only, after the critic’s death,
does Merleau-Ponty begin to signal an interest in cinema’s ontology, with an
explicit reference to André Bazin.8
Introduction 7
In film studies, recent books have addressed the relationship between

cinema and science.9 In our current age of genetic engineering and religious
fundamentalism, classes on art and science, as well as on religion and science,
have emerged in the teaching curriculum. Based on these developments,
Bazin’s legacy is especially timely since his film theory establishes an explicit
dialectic of art with science, on one hand, and science with religion, on the
other, not to mention overlaps between art and religion through the use of
the Turin Shroud to explain photographic ontology.
In addition to art, science, and religion, Bazin pays steady attention to
technological history in famous essays such as “The Myth of Total Cinema”
(1946) and “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” (1951), which
I discuss in my chapter on science to emphasize this critic’s Darwinian and
anti-Platonic stance. The reader may wonder why I do not devote a sepa-
rate chapter to technology alone, given its undeniable role in Bazin’s film
theory. However, Bazin’s approach to technology—and to photography in
particular—is subordinate to his views on the life sciences. Furthermore,
Dudley Andrew’s André Bazin’s New Media deals with Cinerama, cinema-
scope, color, 3-D, and television. Likewise, Bazin’s views of deep focus and
depth of field in the films of Orson Welles and Jean Renoir have already
been discussed in Dudley Andrew’s critical biography.10
Conceptual Key Words
Perception, cognition, and hallucination are not only part of cinematic spec-
tatorship, but they also point back to art, science, and religion as unavoidable
frames of reference for the cinema. Bazin is the first film theorist to grasp all
these intersections so deeply and thoroughly. His writings coalesce around
conceptual “key words.” Besides “pure” and “impure” cinema, some of these
words are “realism,” “centripetal,” “centrifugal,” “paradox,” “dialectic,” and
“anthropocentric.”
“Realism” refers to cinema’s photographic origin and to how this kind of
mechanical and automatic reproduction is based on recording. By outlining
an inward and an outward orientation, “centripetal” and “centrifugal” allow
Bazin to address the off-screen. Besides elucidating photography’s absent
presence, “paradox” refers to how an irrational side can be intertwined with
a rational one. The term “dialectic” rejects all binary oppositions; it upholds
symbiotic relationships; it describes dialogical exchange, but it does so out-

side of any Hegelian synthesis.
“Anthropocentric” is the most negative word in the young theorist’s crit-
ical vocabulary: “Today the making of images no longer shares an anthropo-
centric, utilitarian purpose.”11 In contrast to powerful rulers immortalized in
expensive portraits for a few, cinema, instead, is the bastard child of modern
life: it dabbles in the ephemeral, it entertains a popular audience, and it can
also become an art form. Anthropocentrism stands for the self-centered
and humanist culture of the Renaissance, which Bazin’s mentor Emmanuel
Mounier (1905–1950) criticizes and dares to reinvent in the light of his anti-
utilitarian Personalist philosophy.12 In this sense, the term “humanist” does
not quite apply, because Bazin is a Personalist anti-anthropocentric thinker.
Wary of American individualism, French capitalism, and Soviet collectivism,
Mounier advocates for a radically new political and spiritual philosophy. The
latter should bypass bourgeois liberalism and communism. Instead of money
as the measure of all things, Mounier’s society of the future will cherish basic
human rights, including ordinary creativity as self-expression outside any
market value.13
According to Personalism, human rights must be not only individual
but also broadly social and grounded in a universal acknowledgment of
everybody’s human dignity, regardless of religious affiliations. Most likely,
Bazin is aware that Mounier’s Personalism is a utopian, albeit indispensable,
educational project. Yet he still hopes that the cinema, and especially the
legacy of a few neorealist films from Italy, might inspire future generations
away from revenge and toward reciprocity.
Bazin’s use of the term “anthropocentrism” is always negative, not only
for ethical but also for aesthetic reasons, due to its roots in the mercantile,
humanist Renaissance. Furthermore, anthropocentrism runs up against
the nonmanual ontology of photography. This nineteenth-century medium
challenges a physiological nexus. Thanks to the nervous system, the eye
and the human hand cooperate in drawing, painting, and sculpting. Since
this cooperation allows only for subjective perceptions and expressions,
the plastic arts always depend on some degree of self-projection. On the
contrary, photographic automatism is an objectifying source of fresh
perceptions:
Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it,
those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my
Introduction 9
eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my atten-
tion and consequently to my love.14
Here Bazin celebrates photography’s equalizing approach. Whether they are

artistic or accidental images, any photograph, even the most blurred snap-
shot, freezes the here and now of only a moment in such a way that its unique
temporality displays itself; its place in time stands out.
The visualizing of an instant is not a redemption of a “stubborn,”15 phys-
ical reality, hopelessly mired in decay, but an acknowledgment that frozen
time can rejuvenate our perceptual habits. If photography is, by definition, a
nonanthropocentric medium, Bazin considers German Caligarism to be the
most negative example of anthropocentric cinemas. This is due to its heavily
painted sets striving to elevate a low, popular medium to the prestige of tra-
ditional art forms.16 In Bazin’s discussion of photography, there is no embar-
rassment, no nostalgia, and no fear of modernity. Due to its nonmanual way
of being otherwise, photography is so ontologically different from traditional
plastic or mimetic arts that it becomes comparable to the natural gift of a
flower or a snowflake. Each flower or snowflake is unique, because each mo-
ment in time is full of promise and is unrepeatable as well.
Significantly in tune with its automatic and mechanical photographic or-
igin, Bazin’s film theory is anti-anthropocentric: “Man himself is just one
fact among others, to whom no pride of place should be given a priori.”17 As
unique as each one of us is, none of us is special within a much larger pro-
cess of birth and death. Consequently, Bazin’s film theory argues that cinema
questions the status of the human element in relation to the animal, the plant,
the object, and the machine. All of these nonhuman Others share one fea-
ture: they are not consciously aware of time and death, as living humans in-
evitably are.18 Time is intrinsic to human existence. By the same token, time
is what sustains human creativity, while it opens up the promise of significant
change, in contrast to the repetitive cycles of nature. Through time, the possi-
bility of self-reinvention is always alive.
Cinema’s Special Eye
Comparable to, but different from human sight, the glass lens of the camera
enjoys an equalizing perspective on everything it encounters. Through
the French word objectif (lens), Bazin underlines the affinity between
the photographic camera’s nonanthropocentric eye, objectification, and

objects on screen. Cinema’s objectifying process takes place at the level of
recording, before a director’s style de-emphasizes or underlines the mise-
en-scène with changes through cuts, focal lengths, angle, distance, duration,
framing. Generally speaking, Bazin supports filmmaking where the camera’s
nonanthropocentric, passive recording turns into a self-consciously anti-
anthropocentric (my own original term) or nonintrusive, attentive narrative
stance. Only such an ethical orientation of mutual respect between Self and
Other can challenge the utilitarian,19 profit-oriented goals of contemporary
life and the self-centered anthropocentrism of the traditional arts.
Bazin’s anti-anthropocentric aspiration for the cinema accommodates and
encourages an egalitarian anthropomorphism based on a respectful coex-
istence with Others. Rather than evidencing a bias for human superiority,
in his work on Jean Painlevé (1863–1933), Bazin considers anthropomor-
phism to be an automatic manifestation of an egalitarian dialectic between
individual and world, which psychological investigation can neither explain
nor refute: “Its domain extends from morality (the fables of La Fontaine) to
the highest forms of religious symbolism, by way of every region of magic
and poetry”20
In contrast to Painlevé’s scientific documentaries, with Walt Disney’s
animations, however, anti-anthropocentric anthropomorphism is not pos-
sible, because this kind of cinema is based on manual drawing, first, and
mechanical photography, later, through the use of the multiplane camera.
Although he is intrigued by Walt Disney’s nature documentary Perri (1957),
with pseudo-documentary sequences shot in the forest, the anthropocentric
staging of three squirrels in the very same shot makes Bazin wonder whether
nature itself is trying to imitate the designers of an anthropomorphic Disney
animation!21
Since photographic imprinting involves direct contact with the material
world, cinema’s vocation is a heuristic kind of realism sensitive to chance
and epiphanies. Cinema’s storytelling, however, can be used in manipula-
tive ways. The more cinema is used in an anti-anthropocentric way—open
to change, discovery, risk, or improvisation—the more this medium enables
the visible world to tell its own stories, without or beyond human control.
Granted that the human element—in front of or behind the camera—always
participates in these anti-anthropocentric narratives, it can do so without
faking chance, as happens in Walt Disney’s Perri and in today’s digital cinema
of special effects and CGI (computer-generated imagery).
Introduction 11
Bazin’s enthusiasm for cinema’s anti-anthropocentric potential has been

erroneously associated with his alleged partisanship for the long take over
montage. On the contrary, the long take’s duration does not require an a
priori rejection of editing. Both techniques are important for Bazin, who
believes in his viewers’ ability to freely engage with the narrative. Since reality
is always dense, the long take does convey its elusive and voluminous quality;
by contrast, editing does justice to the intellectual and abstract complexity
that the cinema can achieve.
As far as editing is concerned, film theorist Annette Michelson (1922–
2018) argues against Bazin’s reservations on Sergei Eisenstein’s so-called
Soviet montage. She feels that Bazin’s respect for the world’s spatial integ-
rity is based on an intransigent religious belief in a primal unity.22 In Soviet
film theory, nature is nonindifferent, hence plastic and transformable.23
Eisenstein’s montage assumes that the spectator needs a filmmaker who can
reinvent the world anew through editing. Yet, this revolutionary director
fragments and reconstructs the pro-filmic event in agreement with an ide-
ological thesis he has formulated in advance as an ideological abstraction.
Similarly, in the causal and linear editing of Manichean Hollywood, the loose
ends of daily life become preprocessed into an industrial formula adjustable
to what we think we already know and what we are sure of.
Sensitive to Bazin’s respect for a space-time continuum that can become
an autonomous narrative, film specialist Antoine de Baecque discusses the
impromptu footage that Samuel Fuller shot near the Falkenau Nazi camp in
1945.24 To prove that the inhabitants of this small town lie when they de-
cline any knowledge of the Holocaust, Fuller instinctively relies on the long
take. Without superimposing disjunctive cuts, he allows the camera to dem-
onstrate indisputably the geographic proximity of village and camp.25 This
matching of real space and real time with filmic space and filmic time, re-
spectively, functions as an undeniable proof of moral complicity in the gen-
ocide of the Jews.
Bazin’s rejection of excessive editing is no a priori stance. It applies ex-
clusively to those situations where a cut would efface a link that is materi-
ally or emotionally already present between two elements.26 However, in
his essay “Montage Interdit” (1956), the critic does acknowledge that there
are occasions, in children’s films and in documentaries with animals, when
editing is absolutely necessary and sometimes even acceptably combined
with trickery. The reason for Bazin’s attention to these minor genres is that
the directors of these films routinely encounter situations in which the
manipulations of editing are unavoidable and therefore justified for the sake
of storytelling.
These films deal with restless children or uncontrollable animals,
subjects whose performances are notoriously difficult to control and direct.
Filmmakers may be obliged to actively edit sequences, in order to convey the
interaction between two animals, or one child and one animal, in motion.
Bazin mentions specifically White Mane (1953), by Albert Lamorisse, a fairy
tale about a kid and a horse presented in a documentary fashion. Lamorisse
frequently fools spectators by stitching together shots of different horses. Yet
Bazin approves of the results, including the deception of Lamorisse using six
similar white horses to play the protagonist of White Mane. Instead of crit-
icizing this kind of editing, Bazin accepts it, because it is limited to optical
trickery that does not distort reality, or to visual manipulation achieved
through lenses inside the camera.
Lady in the Lake
Keen on dialectical relations and wary of formalisms, Bazin argues for the ne-
cessity of cutting in one of his untranslated reviews of Robert Montgomery’s
Lady in the Lake (1947),27 based on a detective story by Raymond Chandler
(1888–1959). For Bazin, this film is a failed, yet instructive experiment in
which excessive camera movement results in an example of dead-end an-
thropocentric and overly subjective cinema.
Although this film includes scene shift cuts from one location to another,
the story is predominantly told from the exclusive visual and auditory point
of view of the detective, Philip Marlowe (Robert Montgomery). Marlowe
effectively becomes the camera, and the spectator’s one and only source
of identification. We see Marlowe himself only when his image is partially
objectified by the reflections of mirrors, and on a few occasions when he di-
rectly addresses the camera (viewer) from his desk.
A mystery tale of absent bodies, the plot of Lady in the Lake makes the
point that nothing is what it seems, through its persistent lack of an objecti-
fying point of view. To start with a brief example: on-screen, Marlowe’s finger
rings a doorbell, visually doing so as the extension of an arm cut off by the
frame. His hand is not seen connected to a full body because we can see only
the immediate area of the bell, a restriction necessitated by the limits of his
optical point of view. Thus, the camera is unable to objectify Marlowe in full
Introduction 13
figure as he is performing this action. Bazin speaks of this moment as “ampu-

tation”28—the body is missing.
Needless to say, shot-reverse-shot editing is absent in all of the film’s
conversations. What results is a narration lacking enough cuts. Lady in the
Lake teems with people who react to Marlowe, but we only hear him be-
cause he is always the (invisible) camera in charge of looking at the other
characters. The detective is simultaneously present and distractingly absent.
Thus, Lady in the Lake becomes a filmic narrative difficult to follow and find
credible.
Furthermore, the coincidence of camera, protagonist, and spectator’s
point of view results in situating the so-called fourth wall in the very same
place from shot to shot. According to the logic of Hollywood’s analytical ed-
iting, the spatial location of an implied fourth wall can change significantly
from shot to shot: for example, in reverse angle framing or due to cuts from
one character’s point of view to another’s, as long as the framing of shots
respects the 180-degree rule with the necessary eye-line matches. In fact, as
the fourth wall shifts from shot to shot in this fashion, a cumulative implied
reality of 360-degree space is created within the viewer’s mind. Bazin points
out that Lady in the Lake fails to achieve any believable intersubjective re-
alism because the absence of editing inadequately creates realism of space for
the film’s fictional world.
In the end, Bazin’s theorizing of the “primacy of the object”29 clarifies and
emphasizes that realism requires Otherness, namely the unraveling of the
physical world on both sides of the axis of action through editing, because
the cut marks the shift from the subject of the gaze to the object of the gaze.
Without a subject, the object does not exist, since nobody is looking at it.
Likewise, without an object, the subject cannot come to terms with the sub-
jectivity of its own perceptions.
Cinema as Mind-Machine
Before cinema’s invention and its dynamic engagement with the world, static
media had always conveyed an author’s subjectivity, even when the painter or
the writer was striving to describe an object realistically. Literature, theater,
and painting posit a reader, a spectator, and a viewer addressed by a work
and its author. Although they can fulfill an anthropocentric need, as mate-
rial objects, the book, the stage, and the canvas are tools that cannot become
anthropomorphic; they cannot independently look at an object or hear a

sound. Whereas the cinema, as a first and revolutionary example of audi-
ovisual and kinetic perception distributed across a technological apparatus
(projector, seats, screen), can be simultaneously an anthropomorphic and an
anti-anthropocentric mind-machine. It can look and hear by showing to its
audience the effects of sound and image on the characters on the screen. The
projector in front of which we all sit together is a shared eye, comparable to
Faraday’s magnet.
To objectify oneself in an anti-anthropocentric way so as to see and hear
the world through another human being’s subjectivity is what characterizes
the empathy or spirituality of humankind. At the cinema, we objectify our-
selves, thanks to the eye of an invisible camera looking at the world by it-
self or aligning its point of view with a character on screen. Thanks to this
displacement onto the Other’s point of view, we can never see the camera
as a movable machine and ourselves as motionless viewers looking into the
screen.
Just like the hidden filmstrip running through the projector inside a
booth, the camera and the sound recorder always combine into a material
ghost whose effects are visible (and audible) for the audience as a commu-
nity of believers. In arguing that time is cinema’s fundamental preoccupa-
tion, Bazin asserts that this photographic medium makes visible objectivity
in time through editing and camera movement. By contrast, the literary and
fine arts are based on the human hand and fall under the anthropocentric
rubric of “subjectivity in space,”30 through which all artists seek eternity.
Cinema contents itself with duration and simultaneity.
Bazin understands that the cinema-machine can produce the illusion of
a parallel universe of beings and things. Yet cinema’s energizing charge is
grounded in immanent traces from the actual material world. The evolution
of cinema’s narrative spark requires the original vision put forth by a film-
maker working with a team. Within Bazin’s idea of the cinema, the emotional
and intellectual electrification of the audience should derive from a mix
of “freedom and necessity.”31 While a filmic narrative necessarily impacts
viewers as a group, it should allow for freedom of interpretation.
In experiencing a shared narrative, viewers interrogate themselves in
relation to their own way of being, as they respond to the characters on
screen. By projecting recorded traces of the world onto a brain-like screen,
and by stimulating the viewers’ minds, the cinema can generate imaginary
alter egos, or states of receptivity capable of self-interrogation and empathy
Introduction 15
toward Others. Significantly, Bazin states that, at its best, cinema is a form of
anti-anthropocentric love or community, in the sense of sharing a source of
inspirational, quasi-spiritual energy.32 On one hand, we need basic recording
to preserve the appearances of the world. On the other, we rely on cinema’s
editing and camera movement to make us expand outward in such a way that
we encounter Otherness. We sit together in the cinema and look at the world
projected on the screen, but we perceive it in individual ways.
Precisely because it envisions a parallel world, Bazin’s film theory has cos-
mological implications. Through editing and camera movement, cinema
explores our belonging to a vast universe that extends from the microbes of
the microscope to the stars of the telescope. The microscope and the tele-
scope are, of course, two precursors of the cinema because they enlarge the
small and reach out toward the far away. Bazin’s cinema is a sensitive and ex-
ploratory medium. This is the magic and the soul of twentieth-century pho-
tographic cinema, with its indispensable role in our lives on the earth.
2
Art
In his essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” mostly written be-
tween 1943 and 1945,1 Bazin published only one illustration: Giuseppe
Enrie’s (1886–1961) photograph of the Turin Shroud (1931).2 Once it is
stretched out, this burial cloth offers a back and a front view of a tortured
man from head to toe. Enrie’s image is a photograph raised to the power of
two. In fact, the Shroud’s genesis is comparable to the photographic pro-
cess of imprinting a trace. Although the Shroud proves empirically that
someone’s body was there, only its legendary status as a religious relic claims
that the man in the Shroud is Christ. Based on this case study, what especially
interests Bazin is how any photograph of anything appeals to irrational belief
the way a religious relic does.
A Christological Ontology
Both the automatic record produced by Enrie and the irrational relic in-
vite a leap of faith. Irrational belief is central in Bazin’s photographic on-
tology because this natural image is utterly unique as far as eliciting an
attitude of trust. Yet, all by itself, irrational belief is not enough to ex-
plain the nature of photography. Film theorist Philip Rosen argues that
photography offers Bazin a way out of the split between subjective and
objective.3 Indeed, photography is the very first medium to have ever
been invented with simultaneous implications in science and religion.
Its origin belongs to physics and chemistry, while its address engages
hallucination.
Photography’s call for irrational belief, Bazin argues, stems from its
“reality-transfer,” namely a direct contact between an object and its image
that occurs absolutely independently of the human hand (sine manu factu).
This process is comparable to the archeiropoietic or parthenogenetic status
that applies to self-made religious images and incarnational births in cel-
lular biology.4 To describe the automatic transfer from object to image,
University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190067298.001.0001
Art 17
Bazin uses words such as empreinte digitale (fingerprint), and ressemblance

(resemblance).5
To further explicate photography’s ontology, British theorist Peter Wollen
appropriates the terms “index” and “icon” from the American philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). The latter maintains that the “index-
ical” status of an image involves verifiable direct contact between object and
sign, and no resemblance. By contrast, the “iconic” aspect of a sign derives
from its recognizable resemblance to its object without contact.6 Peirce’s in-
dexical or physical link between object and image and his visual definition
of icon as likeness are consistent with Bazin’s awareness that a photograph is
an analogical sign based on a mix of fact and hallucination. Analogy, here,
underlines the paradox of a copy that brings together nature and technology
without a direct manual intervention.
Bound to the moment, every photograph adds something new to the order
of things. Yet a photographic image cannot become a full narrative, due to the
absence of motion; time is at a standstill. A photograph can only make visible
a moment in space by interrupting the flow of time. A frozen moment never
tells a fully articulated story, the way any narrative does through change.
Significantly, Bazin concludes the final version of his “Ontology” essay with
a reminder that cinema, in comparison to photography, is a language-like
medium. By contrast, the static photograph is a nonlinguistic visual record
of arrested flow or energy, a “fragment of the universe,”7 delivered automat-
ically by a machine that harnesses light, time, physics, and chemistry. In this
respect, Bazin’s photography enjoys a cosmological dimension, with nature
taking over the role of artist.8
Unlike the painter who depends on the active cooperation of mind, eye,
and hand to make images, the photographic machine passively receives on its
sensitive plate the light-based tracings reflected by an object. The latter’s po-
sition in space can be transformed into a unique and visible moment, once its
negative imprint has been transferred to a new positive surface.
A photograph can range from a blurry, quasi-abstract trace to a figurative
image (Figure 2.1). In any photograph, the iconic likeness of its image never
tells the truth. Only through its indexical status, from the direct contact be-
tween object and image, does a photograph derive the authority of analogical
record. As such, even when it is most accidental, a photograph proves only
that a physiochemical automatic transfer has taken place.
A photograph may lie, but it does always document the reality of a mo-
ment taken out of time. Thanks to this “reality transfer,” the object looks
Figure 2.1 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. Place de l’Europe. Gare Saint Lazare.

1932. © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos.
like the image and the image looks like the object. This process, Bazin
explains, is comparable to that of casting a mold (moulage) or to an auto-
matic printing technique called décalcomanie (decal). According to Bazin,
photography’s aesthetic power derives from how it halts the fleeting instant.
Stillness in photography becomes embalming of time through space. Each
negative feels like a one-time only, virginal birth disrupting the routine of
our perceptions: “The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in
its power to lay bare the realities.”9 Each photograph makes us see time, no
Art 19
matter what it shows. Seeing time at a standstill equals how this medium can
“lay bare the realities.” A photograph is an absent presence. One can sense,
here, Bazin’s enthusiasm for the invention of photography. This new medium
does not seek eternity, as portraiture in painting does.
A photograph is an incarnational and exceptional image. Likewise, Christ
is both a human and a divine being whose advent is unprecedented, revolu-
tionary, and unrepeatable. Without a doubt, Bazin’s photographic ontology is
disruptive and Christological. Although Bazin never explicitly refers to pagan
idolatry and religious images, his incarnational definition of photography fits
within Christianity’s long tradition of iconophilia. This attitude dates back
to the Seventh and last Ecumenical Council of Nicea (787). At that point,
all images are religious icons and all of them are considered incarnational,
for they are all believed to be comparable to the concept (logos) of Christ’s
becoming an image through his taking on of human flesh. Even the differ-
ence between two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects is not an issue
during this period.10 In contrast to the iconoclasm of the Byzantine period,
the Council of Nicea legislates that paintings and sculptures modeling the
human figure do not foster idolatry. They can be kept in churches and be-
come objects of veneration.
For Bazin, photography’s invention looks back at this period of iconophilia,
while this unprecedented kind of incarnational medium sets into relief the
humble plastic arts in contrast to portraiture’s vanity with its precious oil
pigments. In the wake of the Council of Nicea’s approval of the human figure
and mimetic representation, photography’s invention makes the figurative re-
alism of the other arts look less believable. Although capable of aesthetic ab-
straction, photography becomes synonymous with copying the world, thus
paving the way for the development of different cinematic realisms. A dissi-
dent Catholic and a Darwinian at the very same time, Bazin upholds evo-
lution in nature and in media. Since the origin of cinema is in photography,
the moving image of mainstream, popular cinema settles into realism due to
ontogenetic reasons.
Realism in cinema can take on many different forms and genres. With
their special degree of lifelike illusionism, the language-like narratives of
the cinema help us to experience vicariously and to project mentally. They
move us to feel, think, and imagine. Whereas a photograph can happen by
itself, thanks to an accidental click of the camera shutter, a narrative film al-
ways requires a creative team behind the camera.11 The monkey who uses the
camera in Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928) cannot push a film beyond
the basic level of recording. Keaton’s film calls attention to the analogy be-
tween the camera and the human mind, and to the fact that a monkey has
only a brain and no mind. Inasmuch as a photograph does not necessarily
tell the truth, Bazin still declares that “every film is a social document.” This is
due to how a film incorporates an individual point of view or a general world-
view in its narrative. Instead of pointing toward an abstract ideal of universal
truth, the word “social” next to “document” recognizes cinema’s inextricable
grounding in a mental universe and social context that moving images artic-
ulate through a space-time continuum.12
Bazin’s idea of realism is a double-edged concept combining figurative
and spiritual qualities. The external features of realism depend on histor-
ical standards of imitation and expression. Yet, this kind of external realism
or quantitative naturalism of details is not enough for Bazin. He seeks an
abstracting realism that makes visible the invisible, namely inner changes in
the characters’ ways of thinking and behaving.
To this end, Bazin discusses the contrast between the perfect, three-
dimensional realism of perspective painting and the much more primitive
realism of church sculptures in the early Middle Ages.13 In his view, this latter
kind of religious art highlights spiritual struggles and ethical dilemmas.
Within a roller coaster of emotions and forms, the medieval artist represents
humans who become animals, plants, and objects. As soon as one moves
from medieval allegories to the screen of cinema, the psychological transfor-
mation of human beings into objects or animals is a possible way to describe
the horrors of all wars any time.
In the wake of early medieval art, which is simultaneously abstract and
realist, Bazin promotes a comparable “phenomenological” neorealism that
gives priority to self-displacement, human frailty, ambiguity, and receptivity.
His preference for early medieval art embraces the emotional dimensions
ruled out by the geometrical and logical foundations of one-point perspec-
tive. For Bazin, the compositional grid of perspective charts the “original
sin”14 of anthropocentrism. Furthermore, this kind of realist imitation turns
into a form of psychological addiction. Rooted in the rise of individualism
out of the Renaissance, the mathematical realism of perspective meets the
full approval of Leonardo Da Vinci. Eager to celebrate the end of a theocen-
tric, medieval worldview, the scientific Leonardo does not hesitate to stress
the mathematical skills of painters in order to establish painting, sculpture,
and architecture as the new and secular media of his own time.
Art 21
In opposition to Leonardo’s anthropocentric humanism, the twentieth-

century thinker Bazin defends the light-based, nonmanual automatism of
the camera obscura as the true precursor of photographic recording. The
peephole of this wooden box allows the natural light to enter and, all by it-
self, to “draw” the contours of nearby external objects. Thanks to an internal
mirror, neighboring shapes reappear on top of the same box, like proto-
photographic shadows in reverse.15 Yet to set up the camera obscura in op-
position to Leonardo’s perspective is not enough of a commentary on Bazin’s
stance. These two different ways of achieving realism—the mathematical and
the phenomenological—warrant further examination. Keen as he is on the
changing appearances of the visible world, Bazin implicitly structures his
“Ontology” essay around two methods of painting.
In the first method, thanks to the mathematical system of perspective, the
artist can master the space of the canvas from the outside in, as if it were a
concave and measurable surface. Light in this kind of painting is an idealized
kind of lux, or ideal illumination.
Exemplified by Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), this first kind of spatial
realism is limited to the modeling of the human figure and the celebration
of eternal features. Eager to side with a second method of painting, Bazin
mentions Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779), who often worked
with still lifes of objects and animals. This shift from Le Brun to Chardin is
due to how Bazin prefers artists who use the camera obscura to paint an elu-
sive moment by studying shifts in natural light.
Within this alternative tradition, light is called lumen, because it stands
for real time passing. This phenomenological realism stems from the nature
of beings and things, thus revealing their finitude. By working with natural
light, these artists reject perspective’s timeless and spatial realism, while they
prefer to focus on the convex and time-bound space that surrounds and
contains them. Thus, they become participant observers in a transitional
world whose various phases and moments they paint, without trying to ide-
alize them through fixed measurements. This temporal realism not only
challenges human vanity but also can celebrate how one may wish to subor-
dinate human artistry to the world’s phenomena of birth and decay.
Eventually, through the use of concave and convex lenses producing a
range of focal lengths, the two systems of Renaissance perspective and the
camera obscura converge in the development of the film camera.16 Yet these
two systems continue to imply two competing moral positions. On one hand,
the concave lens sustains the highly individualistic, anthropocentric, and

formulaic narratives of classical Hollywood cinema. By contrast, the camera’s
convex lens is a progenitor of the outward-oriented wide angle and the anti-
anthropocentric deep focus of Orson Welles’s cinematography, not to men-
tion Jean Renoir’s panoramic, leveling, and introspective view of human
imperfections.
Thanks to the destabilizing power of motion, Bazin’s anti-anthropocentric
film theory implies that photography’s transformation into cinema brings
about a centrifugal whirlwind that destroys forever the static and humanist
ideal of the Renaissance. This out-of-date model is embodied in Leonardo’s
drawing of Vitruvian Man (1487), an icon with perfect bodily proportions
first proposed by Vitruvius, a Roman architect (Figure 2.2). Needless to say,
cinema’s introduction of movement inside the frame of painting shatters this
mathematically determined figure. Its arms and legs stretch out to claim as
much space, property, control, and power as possible. The authority of the
Vitruvian body resides in its functioning as a unit of measure for city pla-
nning during the Renaissance. All of a sudden, however, not only does the
external world seem to move for any traveler on a train but also the Vitruvian
statue crumbles and disintegrates into a million pieces by 1895.
During the early years of the cinema the spectator’s eyes learn to move
and think from one shot to the next, thanks to an increasingly more sophis-
ticated system of cuts and camera work. Meanwhile, the values of anthro-
pocentric humanism enter into a state of crisis. The possibility of a static
center is forever lost. Change, point-of-view, simultaneity, duration, the
orchestration of looking, identification, camera movement, editing, inter-
section, suspense and surprise, contingency, ambiguity, reversals, risk and
discovery: these are the new protagonists of a modern world filled with
speeding trains, telegraphs, telephones, airplanes, luminous screens, and
moving cars.
Impure Cinema
Like a cultural anthropologist, Bazin pushes the arts of literature, theater,

and painting well outside the library and the museum into the ever-changing
world of mundane activity. Thus, he can study these arts’ interaction with
film within social milieus and living nature. From the very beginning,
cinema’s origins are multiple and impure. This bastard child finds its footing
Art 23
Figure 2.2 Vitruvian Man. Leonardo Da Vinci, Artist, and Ludwig Heinrich

Heydenreich. Study of Proportions. 1949. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/
item/00650441/.
in space through theater and painting. Photography is its embryo, but the
baby achieves maturity through literature as the midwife of thought. In
Bazin’s film theory, the temporality of the written page ranks over the world
as a stage. The three-dimensional space of theater, in turn, is more impor-
tant than painting’s flat but sensual surface. One can say that Bazin aligns the
word with time and the canvas with space, thus bringing to mind Lessing’s
Laocoon (1766).17
In contrast to this German aesthetician, however, the French film theo-

rist never advocates for the strict separation of the arts, since all sorts of dif-
ferent media dialogue with the cinema. Besides avoiding Lessing’s call for
medium specificity,18 Bazin rejects Richard Wagner’s gesamtkunstwerk as
an explanatory model. To fulfill his theory of the total work of art, Wagner
gathers many media under a single dramaturgical impulse. Yet Bazin deeply
dislikes Wagner’s celebration of a primal unity. The Wagnerian model is re-
gressive and self-imploding. In 1948, after seeing Disney’s Bambi (1942),
Bazin dismisses this animation because of its gesamtkunstwerk approach,
pointing out that the film’s mise-en-scène looks like “a pseudo-Wagnerian
forest theater.”19
The relationship between cinema and the other arts dominates so many of
Bazin’s essays that the present discussion focuses on the relationships among
the screen, the canvas, and the stage. Regarding the screen, Bazin rejects the
explanatory dichotomy created by the metaphors of an empowering window
and of a passive mirror as alternatives for handling the screen. By contrast,
Leonardo uses this opposition to address the difference between the imagi-
nary window of perspective and the mirror inside the box of the camera ob-
scura. In clear opposition to this model from art theory, Bazin painstakingly
conceptualizes the screen in a way that does justice to cinema’s two consti-
tutive functions: the display of motion and the projection of recording. The
window and the mirror are static objects that cannot accommodate cinema’s
constant changes of angle, scale, and framing onto an invisible fixed surface.
The key point, here, is that Bazin’s screen is penetrable and elastic, because
it has to look as if the “real world” beyond the screen of cinema exists in a rela-
tionship of continuity with whatever the eye of the camera focuses on. Mobile
framing demonstrates why the screen’s two sides are unlike the stable wings
of the stage. Theatrical wings isolate the dramatic action on stage away from
the rest of the world nearby, and keep the staged performance from bumping
into the off-stage nails and scaffolding behind the scene. Everything on a lim-
ited stage is, in principle, under control and contained within a centripetal
space, whereas cinema’s screen centrifugally opens onto what is beyond it-
self. The unstable border between on-screen and off-screen contributes to
cinema’s anti-anthropocentric orientation, granted that the material contin-
gencies of the real world can always compete with artistic planning.
In contrast to the anthropocentric nature of theatrical space, the screen is
an alien, inorganic being that, free of gravity, depends only on light. At the
same time, its psychological impact comes from absolute size and internal
Art 25
use of scale. In contrast to cinema’s fluctuating boundaries, traditional the-

ater needs footlights—as small as they may be—to mark a separation be-
tween the performers and the audience with whom they physically share the
theater space.
In the theater the audience attends to the primacy of the words spoken
by the performers, in their assumed roles, here and now. However, in the
movie theater the spectator’s body is totally absent from the place of per-
formance and, therefore, implies a much more disconnected relationship
to the shadowy traces of bodies imprinted on the film stock and projected
on screen. Needless to say, the more camera movement becomes an inde-
pendent force without any connection to a character’s point of view, the more
a spectator can sense that its disembodied wanderings suggest a mental, spir-
itual, or ghostly presence.
Pure Cinema
In his review of Georges Lacombe’s La nuit est mon royaume (1951), a film
on blindness starring Jean Gabin, Bazin dwells on the indifferent objec-
tivity of the camera eye. Bazin compares the eye of the camera to the gaze of
blindness:
Filmmakers have always been drawn to blind people, for both good and
bad reasons. [ . . . ] The gaze without object of the blind person is more pen-
etrating than ours which is obscured by the world we look at. This is the
case because the blind person’s way of looking seems to be able to see well
beyond appearances, through beings and things. It is comparable to our
consciousness outside of ourselves.20
The obvious point here is that the blind person depends heavily on alterna-
tive sensorial cues to interact with the world. Despite the absence of sight,
the blind gaze seems to know more. This nonvisual way of seeing is pure,
because it is comparable to the objectifying impact of the camera’s recording
function.
In Bazin’s vocabulary, pure does not mean innocent or virginal, since
these two words describe either lack of experience or the first time an en-
counter takes place. Rather, pure refers to different kinds of situations when
indifferent recording seems to prevail. Purity can happen when a director’s
personal vision becomes invisible, or when the film seems to emerge out of
sheer archival footage. An example is Paris 1900 (1948), a montage of fic-
tional and nonfictional footage selected by Nicole Védrès (1911–1965) from
the archives of Pathé and Gaumont, and edited by Yannick Bellon, with Alain
Resnais as an assistant. In commenting on this film, Bazin underlines that
the director does not direct an original mise-en-scène. She has no unprece-
dented pro-filmic event in front of her own camera to record for the very first
time. Consequently, only the editing of footage found in archives takes place.
Chunks of filmstrips tell their own stories, regardless of who was standing
behind the camera at the time these events were taking place. Védrès’s ap-
proach is pure. Bazin observes that Védrès’s film “realizes the paradox of an
objective past, of a memory outside of our consciousness.”21
The word “consciousness,” here, means subjective memories. Only 1 per-
cent of the footage chosen by Védrès includes celebrities from the politics of
the period and the intellectual circles of the Belle Epoque.22 This small de-
gree of attention to elite segments of the population is telling. Such a strategy
highlights how Paris 1900 privileges the slow-moving events of the anon-
ymous and dense everyday, rather than the fast-changing historical record
one may find easier to remember.
In discussing Védrès’s compilation, Bazin also develops an opposition be-
tween cinema as objective, inclusive public memory and Marcel Proust’s ex-
clusive and private stream of consciousness. Through a modernist approach
based on freewheeling associations and involuntary memories, the writer
focuses on his very private recollections. After underlining the writer’s use
of the first person, Bazin writes: “Proust found his reward of time regained in
the inexpressible joy of being engulfed by his memory. Here, on the contrary,
the esthetic delight derives from something else, because these memories do
not belong to us.”23 In contrast to Proust’s mental universe, the objective re-
cording of Parisian street life in Paris 1900 is the public Other that the cinema
preserves. Unlike Proust’s introspective recovery of subjective time through a
madeleine, Paris 1900 is cinema’s objective time showing itself as anonymous
duration. Its purity resides in the fact that this kind of public time belongs to
everybody, rather than to one single creative consciousness.
In What Is Cinema? there are additional references to “pure cinema,” all
of them strikingly different, but all grounded in different uses or elements
of the cinema, a medium with a composite technology of recording and ed-
iting with lenses, filmstrip, camera, and screen, to name a few components.
In 1955, for example, Bazin aligns the Canadian Norman McLaren with pure
Art 27
cinema. This is the case because some of McLaren’s animations are hand-
made, in contrast to Disney’s industrial approach. So taken is Bazin with
McLaren’s manual method, which points back to the beginnings of anima-
tion, that he encourages the filmmaker to go even further toward pictorial
abstraction. McLaren’s purity stems from how fully the medium can convey
an artist’s unique vision, while manual skills prevail over recording. Purity,
here, becomes a matter of historical fidelity to the drawings used for early
animation.
As early as 1947, Bazin’s pure cinema category includes the quasi-surrealist
scientific films of Jean Painlevé. Painlevé’s cinema is pure because the eye
of the camera, through micro-cinematography, can penetrate the body of
a seahorse and show us its skeleton (Figure 2.3). Here, purity stems from
how “cinema reveals that which no other procedure of investigation, not
even the [human] eye can perceive.”24 In another example, made possible by
Figure 2.3 Jean Painlevé, L’hippocampe femelle (Female Seahorse), 1931. ©

2019 Archives Jean Painlevé/LDC, Paris.
high-speed projection, Painlevé discovers that “yeast did not reproduce ex-
actly as we thought . . . the process is too slow for the eye . . . to be able to sum
up its successive phases.”25
Generally speaking, for Bazin avant-garde animation and distinctive sci-
entific documentaries deserve the label of “pure cinema,” as long as there is
no mixing of human and nonhuman eyes. The hand cannot get confused
with the machine. With McLaren, pure cinema implies an artisanal film-
making. With Painlevé, pure cinema highlights how the camera can see in
a nonhuman way, and in so doing it penetrates the appearances that normal
vision is restricted to, by accelerating, slowing down, or reversing temporal
processes.
Occasionally, Bazin forgets to claim purity. At the same time, his prose
seems to invoke this concept whenever eye-level shooting takes place in a
steady manner. For example, in Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946), in dealing
with the Po Valley episode:
In the admirable final episode of the partisans surrounded in the

marshlands, the muddy waters of the Po Delta, the reeds stretching away to
the horizon, just sufficiently tall to hide the man crouching down in the little
flat-bottomed boat, the lapping of the waves against the wood, all occupy a
place of equal importance with the men. This dramatic role played by the
marsh is due in great measure to deliberately intended qualities in the pho-
tography. This is why the horizon is always at the same height. Maintaining
the same proportions between water and sky in every shot brings out one of
the basic characteristics of this landscape. It is the exact equivalent, under
conditions imposed by the screen, of the inner feeling men experience who
are living between the sky and the water and whose lives are at the mercy
of an infinitesimal shift of angle in relation to the horizon. This shows how
much subtlety of expression can be got on exteriors from a camera in the
hands of the man who photographed Paisà.26
Here Bazin underlines how Rossellini uses the screen to give priority to land-
scape and posture over the dialogue among nonprofessional actors. In this
Po Valley episode, Rossellini’s filmmaking sheds all stylistic aestheticisms to
reinvent itself in the light of a photographic ontology of equalization.
Another possible example of “pure cinema” emerges from Bazin’s essay
“The Virtues and Limitations of Montage” (1951).27 There the film critic
praises a sequence from Harry Watt’s Where No Vultures Fly (1951). In this
Art 29
case, a child and a lioness are shown together “in the same full shot,” after the
child kidnaps the lion’s cub. Bazin does acknowledge that some trickery is
involved. In fact, the lioness is not only tamed, but it has been living in close
contact with the kidnapper’s family. Even if this English film is mediocre, the
integrity of space deployed for the cub’s return to its mother “carries us at
once to heights of cinematographic emotion” (p. 49). Once again, just as in
the case of Rossellini’s filming in the Po Valley, Bazin does not explicitly use
the word “pure,” but his enthusiasm seems to call for it.
This brief survey of examples dealing with “pure” cinema makes clear one
important conclusion: Bazin’s purity does not involve “cinematic specificity”
in any way. To be sure, the concept of medium specificity belongs to the his-
tory of art, and precedes the invention of the moving image.
The Postwar Art Documentary
Since the development of cinema has a destabilizing impact on the aestheti-

cizing function of the pictorial frame, the postwar art documentary becomes
one of Bazin’s most celebrated examples of cinematic impurity. One should
not, therefore, be surprised that Alain Resnais’s Van Gogh (1948) earns the
critic’s enthusiastic approval. In a way reminiscent of the distinction between
photographic rupture and film’s language, this art documentary explores the
difference between painting as static object and cinema as temporal event. At
the same time, Resnais’s short film brilliantly articulates the affinity between
the camera lens as object and the objects from still lifes in Van Gogh’s work.
After the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, the healing impact of cre-
ativity stands out as an ethical imperative for reestablishing universal soli-
darity. The postwar process of democratizing the fine arts fuels the rebirth of
the postwar documentary, while it also reinforces Bazin’s dream of film as art
accessible to all.
In 1951 André Bazin enthusiastically reports that the film on art has
“snowballed since the war . . . becoming the most important development
in the past twenty years in the history of documentary, maybe in the his-
tory of cinema itself.”28 Despite the critic’s enthusiastic declaration, among
painters and art historians the same encounters of painting and film trigger
a wave of hostility, due to the invasive nature of film technology. As the critic
himself acknowledges, “in order to make use of painting, cinema betrays it
in all regards. The dramatic unity and logic of the film sets up chronologies
or fictive links between works that are sometimes very distant in time and
spirit.”29 How can the nonhuman lens of the camera have any respect for the
touch of the painter’s hand? And how can the hand of the film editor be so
presumptuous as to cut up and rearrange works of art that have an internal
logic of their own?
For the art world, film recording and the disruptions of editing during
postproduction are two disrespectful procedures. The first is mechanical,
too passive, while the second is manual, manipulative, and too invasive.
Combined, these two filmic interventions can shatter an artist’s style. How
to deal with the ontological differences of cinema and painting and how to
find some symbiotic ground between these two media? These become Bazin’s
theoretical challenges.30
Cinema can investigate the nature of artistic self-expression through dif-
ferent genres of paintings, whether they are abstract or figurative. In the shift
from frame to screen, the painter’s inspiration evolves into a source of life and
movement in the film. The unstable boundaries of creative energy invite film
viewers to shed their previous views on art and learn something new about
how the moving image is born. But many postwar art documentaries fail to
establish a dialectical and creative interaction between cinema and painting,
one that is respectful of each medium’s way of being or ontology. In contrast
to these failures or partial successes, Alain Resnais’s Van Gogh (1948) is one
of the best examples in the genre.
Painting as Object, Cinema as Event
Unlike painting, which tells us more about the painter and less about the
world, cinema, for Bazin, is an anti- anthropocentric medium because
it brings the world to the lens in ways much more unpredictable than the
human eye can perceive by itself. By associating the art documentary with
an avant-garde sensibility, Bazin theorizes a relationship between cinema
and painting, hopefully capable of encouraging a sensibility more open to
the value of creativity as free will and as spirituality in daily life. Few pairings
could be less compatible than these two media, because painting is a hand-
made object whereas cinema is based on events in process, subject to staging
as well as contingency. The postwar art documentary looks like a paradoxical
genre for its combining of these incompatible forms of creativity. In the case
of the documentary film exploring the history of painting, art’s subjectivity
Art 31
meets the allegedly most “objective” of nonfictional genres. Art and subjec-
tivity go together, because the value of art lies in its power to produce the
most unique forms.
Despite his Pascalian condemnation of classical academic painting as
vanity in his “Ontology” essay, Bazin has great respect for the history of art in
general and understands its value in education. Bazin sees the artist as a spe-
cial kind of person who functions outside utilitarian, pragmatic concerns.
In 1949, in the journal Esprit, Bazin takes issue with fellow critic Camille
Bourniquel, who faults Resnais’s Van Gogh for its emphasis on the drama of
the artist’s life and the “moroseness” of the black-and-white imagery:
it’s obvious that the screen will always distort the balance of the composi-
tion, the relationship of values and that it is moreover unavoidably weak on
colors. But rather than focusing on these weaknesses, why not marvel in-
stead that, beginning with a material radically modified in its specific struc-
ture, the film nevertheless returns to us a work that undoubtedly exists with
its logic and unity? Can you imagine smashing a clock into tiny pieces, then
putting it back together in another way? If the film, however bad one thinks
it, exists nevertheless, it’s because the work of art cannot be compared to a
precision instrument and it will not cease to exist even when attacked in its
elements and its structure.31
Although he is primarily trained in the sciences from 1934 to 1937, once

Bazin enters the prestigious École Normale of Saint Cloud in Paris, he
educates himself in art history and philosophy. In 1949, to celebrate the
postwar flourishing of the art documentary, the critic devotes a whole essay
to cinema and painting, originally published in La Revue du Cinéma as “Le
cinéma et la peinture.”32 So interested is he in nature and in the sciences that
he advocates for the “biology” of the art documentary. Concurrently Bazin
is also a staunch admirer of the scientific film genre. Especially when he
discusses Jean Painlevé’s creative work with marine biology, Bazin enthuses
about natural living forms displaying an unexpected degree of so-called ac-
cidental beauty. The scientific documentary can become a form of surreal
poetry.
For Bazin, nature is filled with wonder and mystery; art is based on human
creativity, subjective perception, and the resilience of spirituality before
the unknown. Next to art, science, too, is a necessary human endeavor; it
is an unavoidable and all-important search for knowledge based on logic,
measurement, recording, and experiment. Its importance lies in its heuristic

power to produce new knowledge. In contrast to science, art can reinvent
perception and fuel the imagination to such a degree that it can even point
scientific research toward new ideas. Bazin’s fascination with nature helps ex-
plain why he relies on metaphors from and analogies to mineralogy, physics,
and chemistry to discuss the encounter between film as biology or lifelike
motion and painting as art in the art documentary.
Precisely because the cinema—as a photographic technology—is sus-
pended between art and science, the critic hopes that a much-needed new
kind of independent and experimental genre might be born through the art
documentary. Concerned with the postwar atrophy of documentary after the
great advances of Étienne-Jules Marey, Robert Flaherty, Alberto Cavalcanti,
Jean Vigo, Joris Ivens, and Luis Buñuel,33 Bazin regularly reviews or mentions
screenings devoted to nonfiction films. These programs often mix films about
the sciences and the arts. Disagreeing with other critics who dismiss the art
documentary as derivative or subordinate, Bazin’s hope is that this new film
genre might reposition human consciousness in relation to Otherness. By
recasting the old humanist framework of classical painting onto the screen of
a dynamic, yet shared, world could one’s own awareness of interdependence
on the earth grow in terms of moral responsibility?
Any director can succeed or fail with an art documentary, regardless of
the style of painting championed and independently of the artist’s notoriety.
A good art documentary should stand on its own, rather than depending on
the greatness of its art and the artist’s subject matter. “One must not judge
them solely in regard to the painting they use, but in regard to the anatomy
and the biology of a new being—one born out of the coupling of painting and
cinema.”34 Bazin treats each new art documentary with a nurturing yet eval-
uative eye, the way a parent watches over a young child whose upbringing
requires loving guidance. Dismissive of individual celebrity and art histor-
ical canons, Bazin is more interested in cross-media adaptations that cause
two ontologically different practices to become mutually fulfilled through
each other: “The film of a painting is an aesthetic symbiosis of screen and
painting, as is the lichen of the algae and mushroom.”35 Symbiosis, here, does
not mean fusion. Rather it describes a dialectic of independent and creative
reciprocities.
Whether it deals with sculpture or architecture, Bazin views the art doc-
umentary as a new aesthetic symbiosis that helps the educational ecology
of the world we live in. In the particular case of the art documentary about
Art 33
painting, cinema’s challenge is to bypass painting’s “objecthood,” the fact that

a painting is a thing to be hung on a wall, or a canvas that sits on an easel.
Although the filmic reel is also an object, one can say that cinema itself hides
within it because its true ontology is based on recording, projection, and per-
ception. The cinema is more than a thing; it is a series of events unfolding in
time and space. Granted that galleries, museums, and collectors are involved,
painting and sculpture perform their wonders by themselves as objects. The
film reel, instead, requires a projectionist, acting as a midwife, for its coming
to life.
Bazin does not hesitate to either praise or condemn different art doc
umentaries made by the very same director. He admires Resnais’s Van Gogh
(1948). But he is quick to criticize Alain Resnais’s Guernica (1951), despite the
beautiful text written by Paul Éluard and read in voice-over by actress Maria
Casarès. The problem is that Guernica mixes together different periods and
media from the artist’s career. He notes a similar flaw in Pierre Kast’s film on
Goya: Les désastres de la guerre (1951). In this case his negative assessment is due
to the montage of Kast’s film, which introduces fragments from Goya’s Caprices,
a series of works whose lighter subject matter is in conflict with Goya’s graphic
depiction of the disasters of war. Likewise, Bazin considers Luciano Emmer’s
Guerrieri (Warriors, 1942) to be a failure because the director edits together
details from battle scenes executed by different painters from completely un-
related historical periods. Acknowledging such occasions of incompetence as
these, Bazin empathizes with the art historians’ fears about cinema’s treatment of
their discipline. He knows all too well that in these cases the screen is destroying
the integrity of pictorial space for the sake of a superficial visual potpourri.36
Bazin is interested in how the cinema can reorient art-making in an anti-
anthropocentric and popular direction. Whereas the mechanical recording
of cinema becomes an event of “objectivity in time,”37 a painting’s frame
forever locks the artist’s subjectivity in a static space. In addition, Bazin’s
interest is fueled by one question: why does the postwar art documentary
suggest an analogy between human artistry and natural creativity? Closer
to an erratic lichen proliferating all over the place, or to a symbiosis between
an ever-floating alga and a firmly rooted mushroom, the art documentary’s
paramount topic seems to be the endless energy of the world. Furthermore,
whenever this documentary genre is most successful, it becomes lifelike.
Its moving images shift from an art historical to a scientific look. Finally,
in moving from consciousness to action, and from action to existence,
the postwar art documentary can specialize in an exploration of mental
processes—an anthropology of behavior—or into an unexpected display of

biological developments.
In one example after another, the postwar art documentary demonstrates
that it can reverse the Darwinian hierarchical arrangement of living species, ac-
cording to which lichens are at the bottom and human beings on top. In contrast
to this evolutionary trajectory organized on the basis of increasing complexity,
Bazin’s perspective on this genre gives metaphors for human conscious-
ness, animal behavior, and botanical existence an equal degree of importance.
Accompanying this leveling approach, Bazin believes that cinema also thrives
on reversals. It can negotiate the depths of the most undecipherable painting,
turn it inside out, and deliver its secrets to the largest audience possible.
From this encounter between two media, what can be learned on a broader
level regarding the techniques of art-making in general and the sources of cre-
ativity in particular? Bazin’s project on the art documentary is comparable to a
chapter in a brand new, natural history of media, where painting and film exist
within a diversified continuum of quasi-beings. Painting can help cinema by
stimulating the documentary genre, while the cinema can help painting by
“chemically” preserving the painted image—one as self-evident and ponderous
as a “mineral specimen.”38 This is indeed what happens during the filming of
Luciano Emmer’s Picasso (1954), a section of which unfolds in the Romanesque
chapel of Vallauris, in Provence. There, on the chapel walls, the artist improvises
preparatory work for a fresco on war and peace. Accidentally erased later on,
these images now survive only inside the Italian filmmaker’s footage.
For Bazin, in the gray zone between culture and nature, mineralogy always
wins because a photograph is comparable to a fossil. Fossilization, the remains
of an animal or a plant preserved through a process of mineralization, is a way
of documenting the history of life. Cinema provides a corresponding service
for artistic expression. The mineral record is based primarily on how fossils
have accumulated in sedimentary rock layers called strata. Since his childhood,
Bazin has been familiar with various kinds of fossils, such as insects preserved
in amber.39 Fossil, photography, biology, art: this is the red thread or metonymic
chain of life-in-death and death-in-life that interests the naturalist Bazin.
Frame and Screen
The Belgian film Rubens (1948), made by Henri Storck and Paul Haesaerts,
is one of the first postwar art documentaries Bazin writes about. And it is
Art 35
one of the best examples of its time of the educational film. It achieves an un-
precedented level of insightfulness through superimposed circular diagrams
explaining the painter’s kinetic compositions. Bazin praises “a virtual move-
ment, a space of rotation suspended in the immobility of the painting and
which awaits the sensibility of the person contemplating the canvas, for an
imaginary deliverance.”40
But in spite of these static graphic diagrams dealing with Rubens’s implicit
motion, one major limitation remains: the eye of the camera does not reveal
the innermost core of Rubens’s work. Everything at the surface of the work
may have been explained, but nothing is shared in depth between the film
spectator and the artwork. Depth is crucial for Bazin, because immanence
and complexity are at the very heart of human creativity. Furthermore, the
art documentary can be responsible for activating a feeling of spiritual en-
ergy connecting artist and filmmaker, and in so doing passing this very same
energy from the film to a general audience.
After 1945, in an atmosphere of lingering echoes, mistakes, and loose ends
from the past, the hope and need for human community mandates a global
effort to achieve good will, in order to avoid a world paralyzed by pessi-
mism and endless revenge. In such circumstances, previous aesthetic models
can also be abandoned. In the case of the art documentary, for example,
in contrast to Walter Benjamin, Bazin sees no irrecoverable loss of aura.41
Furthermore, the dimension of kitsch theorized by Clement Greenberg42
in 1939 is not relevant to any art documentary that Bazin examines. Unlike
Benjamin and Greenberg, Bazin does not formulate an overarching theory
built on the tension between politics and aesthetics, popular culture and
the elite. Well aware of social struggles, religious divisions, and cultural
boundaries, he emphasizes cinema’s universal and egalitarian address. Bazin
handles each film as an individual case, a new plant to be cultivated and
protected. His hope is that the power of cinema can inspire audiences with
anti-anthropocentric values that might bring about a more tolerant, less con-
sumerist, and self-conscious mass culture.
Bazin believes in the living and spiritually contagious energy of art. Thus,
the achievement of depth and art in filmmaking is possible, albeit chal-
lenging. Relatedly, bridging the gap between mass culture and an avant-
garde sensibility becomes the special vocation of the art documentary.
The humanity of humankind is in question in the aftermath of the horrors
of World War II. Only a broad sharing of artistic creativity seems to offer
an effective antidote for recovering from recent evils. The fossilization
of Rubens’s energetic art through a graphic solution is not good enough.

Although useful in illustrating the artist’s free will at the level of style, Storck
and Haesaerts’s circular diagram is too explanatory, hence superficial. In line
with photography’s specialization in likenesses and its blurring of differences
between object and model, Bazin looks for an art documentary that would
bring to the surface of the screen a mutual process of exchange, rather than a
drawn superimposition.
After Rubens, the question is: what can be the next step in the evolution of
the art documentary? What can a filmmaker do in order to tap the depth of
artistic inspiration, while also conveying the ways in which cinema exceeds
the human sphere through its evocation of an autonomous world off-screen?
Bazin begins to find a viable answer thanks to a stylistic choice executed by
the Italian Luciano Emmer. Emmer is the first to eliminate the frame around
the canvas, making it disappear into the screen. In subatomic physics, it is an
accepted principle that two objects (particles) cannot occupy the same space
at the same time. Yet, in Emmer’s case, the canvas has lost its objecthood and
melts into the screen as if a chemical transubstantiation were taking place.
Emmer bypasses the solids of physics by turning to the fluids of chemistry.
Bazin concludes that, in reaction to the cinema, the spatial structures of
painting have become “soluble”43 into the duration form or the frequentative
tense of “happening.” In this case, the film critic describes a metamorphosis,
drawing on Henri Bergson’s philosophy of becoming, where becoming,
flow, duration, and intuition are a kind of Otherness contrasting with being,
meaning, and intellect.
Bergson’s philosophy builds on Heraclitus’s ancient dictum that every-
thing is in constant flux, a state of perpetual motion. According to Bazin,
Emmer’s new chemical compound of canvas and screen gives birth to an in-
dependent entity “to the second degree,” or a third new being with its own
frail life.44 Most importantly, Emmer’s successful symbiosis of canvas and
screen involves cosmological implications; Bazin reminds his readers that
“photography and, a fortiori, the cinema always show us a fragment of the
universe.”45 With his use of the term “universe,” the film critic refers to the
interrelated system in which the earth is subject to gravity and a broader
astronomical framework in charge of tides and lunar phases. Due to his
emphasis on immanence, Bazin’s cosmology is not a biblical creationist
fantasy, but a scientific awareness that light is a circulating force writing it-
self into photographic traces. Thus the word “fragment” acknowledges that
Art 37
there is always a broader universe with metonymic as well as metaphorical

implications beyond the immediate photographic record.
Notwithstanding the amount of motion and contingency a painting may
suggest on its surface, the canvas is a self-contained, centripetal object in a
relation of discontinuity with the ever-changing and complex world that
surrounds it. The barrier of the frame (cadre) prevents its merging into daily
life and the natural world. In regard to the tension between frame and screen,
and according to a late revision of his thoughts in “Painting and Cinema,”
Bazin explains:
The outer edges of the screen are not . . . the frame of the film image. They
are the edges of a piece of masking that shows only a portion of reality. The
picture frame polarizes space inwards. On the contrary, what the screen
shows us seems to be part of something prolonged indefinitely into the uni-
verse. A frame is centripetal, the screen centrifugal. Whence it follows that
if we reverse the pictorial process and place the screen within the picture
frame, that is if we show a section of a painting on a screen, the space of the
painting loses its orientation and its limits and is presented to the imagina-
tion as without any boundaries.46
With a frame around it, even an unfinished painting can claim to be com-
plete as an object. So dependent on motion and time is the cinema that its
unfolding is constantly relational and open-ended. Even a Hollywood film
with a happy ending never ends in exactly the same way, because viewers
change over time and relate to the narrative in different ways. For Bazin, the
cinema screen’s edges, instead of being a cadre, are a cache, a masking whose
boundaries constantly alter according to editing and camera movement.
Cinema’s requirement of realism is intertwined with Bazin’s conception of
the screen. Bazin’s use of the term cache emphasizes that the world we see
on screen is only an intersection. In order to be persuasively believable, and
therefore “real” enough, this very same world continues to exist off-screen.
In the wake of Emmer’s elimination of the fixed pictorial frame, Bazin
has even more to tell us about mobile framing. In fact, the screen becomes
constantly Other in relation to itself. Whereas the canvas is characterized
by plasticity, display, depth, and stasis, the screen can be boundaryless, se-
cretive, and transformative, because it has to accommodate chance, choice,
change, desire, attention, distraction, and illusion.
Bazin appropriates Jean Cocteau’s comparison of the screen to a rectan-

gular keyhole from Le sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet, 1930). The shape
of the film’s keyhole mirrors the shape of the standard screen for a public
screening, without eliminating the basic desire to “see” associated with vo-
yeurism. Cocteau’s poet is constantly on the move along the corridor of the
Hôtel Folie Dramatique. He is comparable to a film spectator viewing bits
and pieces of many different films, as Surrealist artists enjoyed doing during
their ambulatory nights in Paris. Since different narratives are associated
with the keyholes for each room along the corridor, Cocteau, the cinéphile,
effectively calls attention to the short films of early cinema as separate per-
formance acts. Deprived of a lit, rectangular keyhole harnessing attention, a
painting’s surface only changes if viewers change their position in front of it.
In the cinema, the viewer sits still. In the meantime, near and far spaces may
shift screen positions, just like large and small, darkness and light can mingle
into shadows or change in scale.
Because the pictorial frame works like a barrier, nothing within it can
move off-screen. This threshold focuses the viewer’s attention, but it does
not allow for the experiences of contingency, waiting, suspense, and sur-
prise that filmic motion can create. As Jean Cocteau knew well, the viewers
of a painting cannot radically transfigure the object of their attention into a
shadow, nor can they observe it as if they were so detached that all pictorial
details acquire exactly the same level of importance.
By contrast, in the darkness of the movie theater, these two options—the
temporal and the egalitarian, separately or together—characterize the dy-
namics of cinema spectatorship, thanks to the camera lens and the fixed du-
ration of the screening. This is also the case because, in cinema, there is more
than just human vision operating by itself, as happens with a viewer in front
of a canvas. Inside the movie theater, the human eye can align itself with the
camera lens or with a character’s point of view, so that the orchestration of
looking, at the level of the single spectator, interacts with the changing ways
in which the world shows itself on screen.
Given this state of affairs, it is not surprising that Cocteau’s cinéphile
poet moves from one keyhole to the next, while the film viewer turns si-
multaneously into a voyeur and a visionary being. He wants to see more
and better, but what he sees is so irrational or unbelievable that he begins
to wonder if he is watching a film, experiencing a personal hallucination, or
witnessing a live performance. The moving images of Cocteau’s early cinema
become kinetic extensions of ourselves, while they invoke the short acts of
Art 39
the circus. Eventually, these short acts, these attractions characterized by a

multisensorial overload, will evolve into the language of cinema: close-ups
and aerial views, dissolves and superimpositions, freeze frames and long
takes, montage and optical trickery. These technical resources morph into
film style and a director’s personal vision.
Film language can take us beyond gravity, into depths and heights, or show
us the very small and the very large. We have magically become ubiquitous in
the living world itself. The human point of view can exchange itself with that
of a bird, an insect, an airplane, or a microbe, since the machine of cinema
performs changes in scale, size, and angle by means of editing, camera move-
ment, and focal lengths.
The Objects of Still Life and the

Camera Lens as Object
After Emmer’s dissolution of the frame into the screen and Cocteau’s surre-
alist definition of the rectangular screen as a keyhole, Bazin resolves the con-
flict between painting’s static objecthood and cinema’s temporal becoming,
thanks to the objects of still life. He does not spell out his intention, but, based
on all the essays he writes on this topic, this seems to be the most plausible
explanation. By eliminating altogether the human figure, still life is the hum-
blest and the most anti-anthropocentric of all genres in painting.47
It is only in the genre of the still life that the brush controlled by the painter’s
hand and the lens of the camera can become compatible. This is the case be-
cause in this genre the brush and the camera both effect a decentering impact
on what they see and depict. In Bazin’s argument, the still life of painting
becomes the equivalent of the humble lichen in biology. The cinema makes
the objects of still life as important as human events whose duration is filled
with sharing and discovery, but also adventure and anxiety.
The paintbrush behaves like an “animistic” magic tool.48 It can enter into
the hidden life of objects, in the same way that the film camera may get in-
side a canvas and flip it inside out, like a “glove.”49 This turning inside out of
the glove—one of the most analogical and, therefore, photographic pieces of
clothing—amounts to the birth of a new creation: the art documentary—out
of an older origin, painting. What Bazin is after is not a respectful commen-
tary by a young medium about an old one. He believes in the radical trans-
formation that the cinema can stimulate inside painting, at its core. In the
wake of the still life, the art documentary can displace the human corporeal
figure from the image’s center. Meanwhile, the objects represented still imply
a human element behind their choice, arrangement, and function.
Cinema presents the world in a new, egalitarian light, with an objecti-
fying eye that transforms the canvas into a mise-en-scène of equally weighted
and engaging interaction between bodies and things, objects and words,
objects and events, in stark contrast to the centrality of the human figure
in academic historical painting. The similarly transformative egalitarian
accomplishments of still life, landscape, and humble genre scenes are es-
pecially evident in some of Van Gogh’s paintings, such as The Potato Eaters
(1885) and Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles (1888), two works featured in Resnais’s
Van Gogh (1948).
In the genre scene of The Potato Eaters, five peasants and all the objects
around them are presented so embedded in their daily life that one can al-
most hear their conversation about labor, the soil, and the food they pro-
duce year after year. In discussing Resnais’s editing, Dudley Andrew remarks
that the director’s approach is deictic: “here look at this.”50 One could argue
that the editing’s fragmentation of The Potato Eaters is overly didactic. But
Resnais’s cuts accompany images that highlight sharing the same light, the
same tray, and the same beverage. The director’s mobilization of looking in
his film’s treatment of The Potato Eaters is an homage to the harmony cinema
finds with painting in still life and genre scenes.
Furthermore, like a memento mori or a vanitas, the aspects of still life
isolated by Resnais’s editing within the genre scene of The Potato Eaters
lend themselves effortlessly to the cinema’s qualities of eventfulness and
contingency. In Van Gogh’s painting, a beverage flows out of a teapot.
This moment could precede a spill in a fictional film, were Resnais to rely
on live action instead of filming this canvas source for his documentary.
Meanwhile, the canvas’s stillness allows the rear view of one peasant woman
to set into relief the eye-line matches between two pairs of characters posi-
tioned on each side of her. Despite the lack of live action in Resnais’s film,
Van Gogh’s paintings mobilize the viewer’s eyes so easily that everything
and everybody could change and move from one moment to the next. It
is as if Van Gogh’s work had already absorbed a sense of photographic
instantaneity.
In Bedroom in Arles, objects such as clothing, two pillows, two chairs, and
two framed portraits on the wall function verbally. They are replacing one
of Vincent’s letters to his brother, Theo, in which he details his loneliness.
Art 41
Things disclose emotions and thoughts. The painter searches for a deeper
relationship with another person, just as cinema looks for a deeper engage-
ment with painting. In Resnais’s Van Gogh, the art documentary shifts from
a pictorial and mute text into an introspective and live narrative unfolding in
real time. The idea is that the art documentary participates in an evolution
of film language, in ways comparable to how a new living species emerges
and changes our scientific understanding of an evolutionary history—in this
case, of media.
Thus, Resnais’s Van Gogh marks a clear step forward from previous art
documentaries. Van Gogh’s works—with details such as distant houses and
little churches huddled under the starry sky, or the orchestration of looking
in The Potato Eaters—are quite ready to become cinematic sequences. These
pictorial scenes are filled with whispered voices, spiraling motions, and
transitional moments. The painter’s centrifugal yearnings run up against
painting’s objecthood. Instead of being restricted to a (framed) center,
his whole work wishes to extend itself into nature and the cosmos, free of
boundaries between himself and the unknown.
Despite the clear distinction Bazin identifies between the centripetal
canvas and the centrifugal screen, the still unresolved problem for the art
documentary is negotiating between the external recording of photography
and the inner exploration of the human mind. Without a doubt, Resnais’s
Van Gogh is the first truly mental and literary example of an art documen-
tary. It is, perhaps, why the film is regularly punctuated by self-portraits of
Van Gogh and by paintings showing the artist with easel and brushes. The
painter’s lonely figure reminds viewers that this art documentary is a journey
with no clear destination ever to be found.
Like Rembrandt, Van Gogh executed innumerable self-portraits during
his career and lifetime. But this constant self-interrogation is not due to nar-
cissism. Rather, it springs from the need to look at oneself from the outside.
Film can accomplish this undertaking; external recording can move beyond
the surface, make visible the invisible, and become the blueprint of an exis-
tential search. The detached objectification of the recording camera lens is
comparable to Van Gogh’s ongoing, unflinching self-portraits that chronicle
but offer no relief to his chronic mental anguish. The difficulty of capturing
temporal changes in nature using only a static set of swiveling marks, and the
impossibility of reaching into one’s own depths, resonates from the painter’s
still life of his own shoes. It is his most eloquent example of objectifying self-
portraiture, based on his restlessness in space and gravity in time.
Rather than lamenting the destruction of painting’s pictorial space, Bazin

praises its transformation by Resnais’s montage in Van Gogh:
The effectiveness of the film derives from the fact that Resnais never shows
us a complete painting, frame included. Thanks to the editing, to cinema’s
mobile framing, to the subject of the painting, to the camera movements,
and certain editing tricks that succeed in creating the perfect illusion of a
third pictorial dimension by using two canvases that depict the same scene
from two different points of view, the work of van Gogh ceases somewhat
being a series of paintings to become a limitless universe, the result of the
fusion of his entire oeuvre, and where the filmmaker leads us as freely as in
reality.51
Although Resnais’s camera films drawings and paintings, the artificial

and closed status of these objects does not compete or conflict with the
documentary’s perceptual realism. The film’s montage becomes a stream
of consciousness that, in turn, becomes a mobile way of seeing for the film
viewer. Resnais’s montage is also so discreet that we believe that Van Gogh’s
world could be our world were we to visit the same locations during the same
seasons.
We suspend our disbelief in spite of Van Gogh’s intense and singular style.
Shown in close-up, the painter’s markings are unmistakable: abstract, thick,
swirling and whirling. Van Gogh is considered the founder of Expressionism,
but during the first half of Resnais’s film, his work becomes quasi-realist.
Resnais relies on two principal camera movements: horizontal traveling
pans, and vertical tracking shots associated with psychological swings into
depression. These camera movements signify, respectively, geographical
wandering and an inner voyage, and an increasing sense of vertigo.
Resnais’s film is an overview of Van Gogh’s life, filtered through a selected
group of works that are not arranged in chronological order. During the
second half of the documentary we see Van Gogh’s black shadow cast on
the ground. This shift from earlier pictorial images of Van Gogh to only
projected shadows corresponds with the painter’s descent into a loss of self.
Resnais also intercuts religious imagery of Christ’s passion with the artist’s
Wheat Fields with Reaper at Sunrise (1889), causing the reaper’s scythe, in
close-up, to anticipate the artist’s suicide.
For his project Resnais avoids all period photographs dealing with Van
Gogh’s social work in the slums of London. He transforms Van Gogh’s life
Art 43
and work into a mental landscape without using any autobiographical

sources, with the one exception of a brief citation at the very beginning of the
film, taken from one of the hundreds of letters from Vincent to his brother,
Theo: “Il me semble toujours être un voyageur qui va quelque part et à une des-
tination.” (I seem always to be a voyager who is going somewhere toward a
destination.)
The more Resnais avoids the traditional biographical approach, the more
spectators can individually and collectively appropriate the film’s moving
images, thus fulfilling the centrifugal power of the screen. We are encouraged
to forget we are looking at art and, instead, to think about daily life and exis-
tential issues. It is as if Resnais had shot a documentary on location with an
ethnographic impulse. By using a telescopic lens, Resnais pushes way back an
array of trees filled with flowers from an extreme close-up into a long shot. In
true Pascalian fashion, Resnais’s cinema wants the world’s natural beauty to
eclipse the act of painting itself. The documentary feeling of the film is also
enhanced by the use of black-and-white cinematography. We situate spaces,
bodies, and objects in relation to seasonal events, such as harvesting under
the blazing sun, but we do so according to dazzling light or haunting dark-
ness rather than color.
Van Gogh is the first postwar introspective art documentary because it
leaves out Van Gogh’s most famous color: yellow. Resnais’s counterintuitive
choice is understandable. It responds to the interface of two fraught existen-
tial situations whose complexities defy all external descriptions: the painter
and a world of deprivation in the countryside, and the painter and a world
of overstimulation in the city. The elimination of yellow, in particular, and of
color, in general, rescues Resnais’s film from the pitfalls of symbolism, while
it heightens the internal and interrelated pulses of bodies and landscapes.
The relational use of black-and-white becomes their site of encounter.
During the documentary, the lighting on screen never changes and, de-
spite the absence of color, we imagine it just the same, as if Resnais’s images
were x-rays of chromatic sensations becoming inner states of mind. At
the same time, black and white are systematized expressively. More white
suggests the summer, more gray the winter, and more black signifies death—
until the screen is filled by it at the film’s end. Bazin points out that the
elimination of yellow brings to the film’s surface a much more discernible
anatomical charting of the painter’s nervous system, with its waves of energy,
brushstroke after brushstroke, becoming a thick blackness which even the
camera lens cannot fully penetrate. We are looking at the eye of the hurricane
inside a human mind that cannot explain how so much anguish and suffering
can generate so much creativity and sharing.
Color in painting is geological and centripetal, hence quite at odds with
the centrifugal nature of film and its screen. This is so because the internal
relations among colors inside a pictorial frame contribute to their respec-
tive individual tones in that specific painting. Had Resnais shot Van Gogh in
color, fidelity to the original paintings by the artist would be impossible. In
1945, in his essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin observes
that “photography will long remain the inferior of painting in the repro-
duction of color.”52 For this reason replacing the colors of daily life with the
colors of famous paintings can make a film look less believable.53
The rise of the postwar documentary coincides with the introduction of
CinemaScope and Technicolor as resources for the cinema’s competition
with the new medium of television. Thus, Bazin’s approval of Resnais’s de-
cision to work in black-and-white, foregoing some commercial advantage,
acquires a special significance. Traditionally associated with painting, fem-
ininity, excess, artificiality, and madness, color would inevitably weaken the
introspective and literary qualities of Van Gogh. After all, this documen-
tary depicts an existential journey through ordinary objects and nameless
locations rather than historical characters or biographical detail.
Above all, Resnais wants the conceptual framework of his Van Gogh to pre-
vail over the painter’s melodrama of self-mutilation. Unfortunately, this latter
and much more traditional perspective dominates Vincente Minnelli’s bio-
graphical imagination. In his Lust for Life (1956), an MGM superproduction
shot in CinemaScope and Metrocolor, Vincente Minnelli relies too much
on color as madness and anecdote as a basis for psychologizing Van Gogh.
Educated in art history at the Chicago Art Institute, Minnelli owns a sig-
nificant art collection, and is a regular museumgoer and supporter of the
arts in New York and Hollywood. Thanks to his background in theater, he
establishes his expertise in producing colorful musicals and comedies as well
as intense melodramas, such as his biopic on Van Gogh.
In Lust for Life, the indoor sequences are crowded with actual paintings by
Van Gogh that the Hollywood director manages to borrow from museums
and private collections. All these institutions are duly credited at the very
beginning of the film, an unusual practice for a mainstream film, and one
that suggests that this Hollywood biopic is about to morph into a museum
catalogue. Minnelli’s studio sets resemble storage rooms in comparison to
Resnais’s transformation of Van Gogh’s output into a subjective landscape.
Art 45
Drawn out and stagy instead of poetic and accessible, Minnelli’s dialogue
is based on Irving Stone’s novel, Lust for Life (1956). Kirk Douglas’s pas-
sionate performance and physical resemblance to Van Gogh enjoyed great
acclaim at the time. Yet Bazin writes that he prefers the more elliptical acting
of Anthony Quinn in the role of Gauguin. In contrast to Minnelli, Resnais
keeps to a minimum all references to Van Gogh’s contemporaries, such as
Matisse and Toulouse-Lautrec. The Hollywood director, however, details the
breakup between Van Gogh and Gauguin to further heighten the tempes-
tuous atmosphere of his biopic.
Resnais’s film is concentrated on the painter’s works. The voice-over nar-
ration, written by art historians Gaston Diehl and Robert Hessens and read
by the actor Claude Dauphin, makes no mention of the painter’s religious
training and family background, apart from including a still life in close-up
of Van Gogh’s father’s open Bible. While we see portraits of some neighbors
and friends, no anecdotal information accompanies them. In fact, Resnais
never discusses the artist’s relations with women, his visits to a brothel, his
rejection by his cousin Kee, and his indulgence in absinthe. All information
about financial hardship, art dealers, and sales, is omitted.
In stark contrast, Minnelli’s Lust for Life wallows in all this background
detail, even seeking to animate each famous painting through a correspond-
ingly accurate filmic sequence. The worst resultant mistake—which Bazin
curiously fails to comment on!—occurs when Minnelli’s camera enters a
rustic kitchen and finds Van Gogh’s potato eaters engaged in their meager
meal. Perhaps because Bazin saw the film only once, the critic fails to note
that a couple of the peasants even smile in the direction of the camera.
The quasi-sacred concentration and severe atmosphere of this memorable
painting is entirely lost and, along with them, the somberness of Van Gogh’s
palette of dark and smoky browns for skin tones, clothing, and potatoes.
The strength of Resnais’s film rests in its geography of anonymous
public roads, fields, and streets. Within this landscape Van Gogh’s farmers
and weavers acquire an anthropological valence; in connection with each
painting, the voice-over commentary discusses how the work is done, how
much effort it requires, which tools or technologies are used. Resnais’s em-
phasis on thresholds such as windows and doors turns the screen into a
thinking mind. In effect, the ambition of Resnais’s film is not to show the
artist’s works as self-contained objects, but rather to articulate them as
thoughts or actions or events unfolding in time. For example, Resnais’s
camera follows an old woman entering a house, beginning by showing her
back to us in medium shot and then revealing her face in a close-up frontal
shot. Bazin is quick to remind his readers that this reverse angle framing is
impossible in painting, but it works beautifully in film.
To prepare for his film, Minnelli travels to the actual locations of Van
Gogh’s life in Northern Europe and Southern France. Back at MGM, how-
ever, the theatrical blocking and screen directions of actors make the
reconstructions of these locales appear stagy rather than authentic. While
the film follows the vicissitudes of Van Gogh’s tormented life in Provence, the
French villagers around him are hardly believable. Their daily lives unfold
between the two extremes of picnicking in the shade or quarreling over rent.
Again Bazin generously pays no attention to the poor acting quality of these
minor figures.
In Resnais’s documentary, with another example of subtle montage, two
separate paintings are intercut in four shots to produce an intensity of place
that rivals shooting on location. About Resnais’s use of the little-known
Interior of a Restaurant (1887), Bazin explains:
It is one of Alain Resnais’s best travelling shots in Van Gogh. The camera
moves precisely into the painter’s universe. In the first image, we see the
whole painting. In the second, we again approach the door. Then, in the
same movement, without transition, we enter into the interior of the
café: third image, which is from another painting. The camera continues its
advance and stops before a table (fourth image).54
Resnais does not choose drawings and paintings because of their fame or art-
historical importance. In Interior of a Restaurant, Van Gogh imitates Seurat’s
pointillist technique, showing that he is familiar with Impressionism and
wants to move beyond it. In Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life, this very same
painting appears in Theo’s apartment. It leans against the bottom of an easel
while Vincent is working on something else at the top. This canvas, however,
has no significant purpose in the narrative beyond its minor role as a mute
witness to one more argument between the two brothers.
Resnais uses the least known of Van Gogh’s canvases about leisure time
to show what it feels like to wander in Paris. This quality of lived experience
is achieved subtly when Resnais’s camera pans from Van Gogh’s Moulin de
la Galette (1886) to a few Parisians shivering in winter on the Terrace in
the Luxembourg Gardens (1886). The cut here is so lightly handled that the
viewer has the impression of running into some acquaintances by accident.
Art 47
This effect of pseudo-contingency, of course, speaks to the tension between

frame and screen. For Resnais, View of Paris from Vincent’s Room in the Rue
Lepic (1887), where Vincent lives with Theo, acquires the flavor of a docu-
mentary photograph.
Working like a biologist who does not interfere with the present tense of
his living art, Resnais does not worry about the historical accuracy of Van
Gogh’s details. Since they all belong to the paintings, he accepts them a
priori. Resnais has no need to transpose these details into a posteriori the-
atrical reconstructions, as Minnelli does. The latter situation inevitably leads
to competition with their pictorial origin. Resnais’s deductive approach,
progressing from the work to the artist’s inner life, stands against Minnelli’s
inductive search that moves from the biography to the paintings. On these
two antithetical ways of working Bazin remarks:
It’s not a question of explaining why van Gogh was “crazy” and what was the
relation necessarily between that insanity and his predilection for yellow,
for example, but of making us approach closer to that point of spiritual in-
candescence where we will sense the transmutation by its radiance.55
Paradoxically, cinema’s external recording of the surfaces painted by Van

Gogh can convey the artist’s internal “incandescence.” Like irradiation, in-
candescence comes from physics—the history of light and electromagnetism.
More specifically, incandescence refers to the white light of a filament inside
a light bulb, or to a metal glowing brighter and brighter as its temperature
increases. Significantly, this metaphor describes a process of becoming or an
event, rather than an object caught in one single unchanging state.
Even if Bazin prefers Resnais’s modest, black-and-white short film, in
the pages of Éducation Nationale he does not hesitate to praise Minnelli for
some of his sequences: “In particular I’m thinking of the scenes of Dutch
interiors, corresponding to the series of the potato eaters, or the décor of the
café in Arles that inspired the haunting nocturnal painting.”56 Once again,
the critic is eager to nurture cinema’s evolution and promote this medium’s
development in the future. Bazin even praises Minnelli, the son of Sicilian
immigrants, for his sensitivity toward the lower classes:
Moreover, the film almost succeeds in its first part, which relates . . . the
extraordinary spiritual and human experience of the young suffragan [sic]
pastor in the mines of the Borinage. Vincente Minnelli knew how to evoke
the horrifying poverty of the miners, with a realism that sometimes calls to
mind the lesson of early Soviet cinema.57
Despite Bazin’s critical generosity toward Minnelli, the fundamental and

unresolved issue in his film remains the objecthood of painting in con-
trast to cinema’s dynamic flow punctuated by cuts. Minnelli removes Van
Gogh’s figures from their pictorial settings and transplants them to an ar-
tificial environment that no longer belongs either to the paintings or to an
actual existential geography; it is solely a product of Minnelli’s research
department.
The consequences of this dislocation of historical detail from canvas to
screen become especially apparent in regard to the imaginary hat Van Gogh
creates for his portrait of père Tanguy, the well-known owner of an art shop in
Paris. Bazin explains:
Thus, for example, père Tanguy is shown wearing his comical little round
hat, as if that headgear was habitual, whereas it is more likely that Van Gogh
invented that amusing accessory. Likewise père Roulin and his son take a
walk in the streets as if they had descended from the paintings. It’s making
nature resemble art, in the words of [Oscar] Wilde, which is only true a
posteriori. Van Gogh transformed our vision of sunflowers, but before he
painted them, the sunflowers were not yet “Van Goghs.”58
Vincente Minnelli is so anxious to achieve Art with a capital “A” that he

sacrifices the living nature of his art-historical sources and underuses his
personal discoveries out of the real locations for the film.
Despite the sexual metaphor and promise of the title, in Lust for Life bi-
ography becomes frigid. The director flattens his characters into cartoonish
beings who wear supposedly accurate hats. But these imaginary accessories
can only pretend to have a link with their original context. Likewise, the ac-
tors’ performances are not based on a personal engagement with the topic,
but on masquerading inside a tableau vivant that is neither painting nor
cinema. This is why the costumes of père Roulin and his son make them look
like they have descended to street level from van Gogh’s paintings and the
museums to which these canvases belong. As a result, the studio reconstruc-
tion of this very same street fails to activate our suspension of disbelief. Thus,
when these very same figures—père Tanguy and père Roulin—sell Japanese
prints in Paris or walk around in Arles, they do not look alive but resemble
Art 49
animated drawings. Instead of symbiosis between frame and screen, here we

have the case of a filmmaker mimicking a painter.
To be fair, there are also some moments of undeniable miscalculation
in Resnais’s documentary. Bazin himself acknowledges that some failures
are inevitable as soon as nature turns too much and too soon into art. This
happens with the (perhaps excessive) number of close-up shots of torn
sunflowers in Resnais’s film. The image is a stereotypical Van Gogh icon that
lingers dangerously on the precipice of the well-known trope of genius as
madness. In Resnais’s film, these sunflowers become either kitsch or baroque,
as they twist themselves into evil omens of mental anguish. Here, Resnais
seemingly cannot resist indulging in the established cliché of the yellow sun-
flower evoking the painter’s madness. A Van Gogh without yellows is an ex-
perimental gesture, but, unfortunately, a Van Gogh with his sunflowers is
simply a postage stamp.
From Painting to Biology
Apart from documentaries on painting, Bazin does give thought to other

nonfiction films that deal with sculpture. He regularly mentions many of
them in his film reviews. Yet, between 1948 and 1956, Bazin writes most fre-
quently about art documentaries based on painting. He chooses this partic-
ular medium because it is the most elitist and oppositional to photography
and the cinema. Without a doubt, the art documentary most beloved by
Bazin is Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (1956). This film
is the most philosophical of the postwar art documentaries, and the one
that uses the lifelike moving images of the cinema to align the history of art
most clearly with a natural history of media. In Bazin’s own words, Clouzot’s
Mystery of Picasso is a “Bergsonian film.”59 In it, painting does not become
theater, but reinvents itself into biology, thus raising the question of where art
as talent and nature as creativity respectively begin and end.
Moving from mineralogy to biology and anatomy, Bazin’s scientific
metaphors suggest that a film can become a moving system of pictorial
canvases opening themselves up to the contingencies of a lifelike world of
human beings, landscapes, and objects. A technology based on projection
and a lit screen surrounded by darkness, cinema, through the art docu-
mentary, can also make visible the invisible nuances of human interiority
and in so doing interrogate its creative energy. Creativity, however, not only
concerns art but also accounts for the inaccessible origin of life on earth and
in the universe at large.
In his 1952 essay “Le journal d’un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of
Robert Bresson,” Bazin compares the aesthetics of filmic literary adaptations
to the accomplishments of the postwar art documentary in Bresson’s Diary of
a Country Priest (1961), a groundbreaking film based on Georges Bernanos’s
eponymous novel (1936). He even ponders whether or not the art documen-
tary fully fits the category of nonfiction, since its object of recording is not the
phenomenal world in motion, but a static human artifact.60 So taken is Bazin
with the creative depth of Bresson’s encounter with Bernanos’s novel that he
rethinks Resnais’s application of cinema to Van Gogh’s work. In 1952, the
critic has not yet evaluated Henri-Georges Clouzot’s art documentary The
Mystery of Picasso (1956), but after Diary, he realizes that literary adaptations
involve a temporal and introspective dimension whose aesthetics exceed
painting’s commitment to space and the senses. The level of thought and ab-
straction that Bernanos’s novel offers to the cinema pushes cinema’s evolution
much further into an exploration of consciousness, spirituality, and death.
As a result, Bazin tones down his former enthusiasm for the postwar art
documentaries made until then:
films of paintings . . . are confined from the outset to the realm of minor
aesthetic works. They add something to the paintings, they prolong their
existence, they release them from the confines of their frames but they can
never pretend to be the paintings themselves.61
Resnais’s art documentary remains a minor masterpiece that cannot change

Van Gogh into cinema. The challenge of adaptation has nothing to do with
high and low registers of culture, since the pulp fiction of minor books can
lead to great films. The true issue is how the space-time continuum of cinema
can turn the painting’s subjectivity in space into a temporal objectification
that looks lifelike. Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life demonstrates that this re-
sult is very difficult to achieve, because as soon as The Potato Eaters come to
life on the screen, their painted textural density loses its poignancy and falls
into ephemeral banality.
In their encounter with each other, cinema and literature have to ad-
dress the absence of simultaneity and duration on the written page. By
contrast, painting’s ontological alignment with stillness and exteriority
does amount to a “congenital limitation.” No wonder Bresson’s approach
Art 51
to Bernanos is neither a faithful translation nor a duplicate based on

free inspiration. Bresson’s achievement bypasses all comparison with
Bernanos’s novel because it replaces adaptation’s anxiety regarding fi-
delity with a dialogical, yet original, creation of equal aesthetic value.
In defiance of any mathematical logic based on pluses and minuses,
suggesting either inferiority or superiority, Bresson’s film is the novel
“multiplied by the cinema.”
Bazin’s invocation of multiplication is most insightful because it
acknowledges the multisensorial status of the cinematic image with sound,
music, spoken word, space, and time—all opening it up toward thought,
emotion, and change. Yet, besides appreciating that cinema’s acoustic di-
mension clashes with painting’s mute eloquence, Bazin also calls atten-
tion to how cinematic projection is incompatible with the objecthood of
the canvas: “paintings are circumscribed in space and exist outside time.”62
Bazin’s ontological comparison of painting with literature speaks to his un-
derstanding of cinema as a narrative medium of space and time.
For Bazin, the novel and the cinema are primarily temporal arts that
deal with an unfolding world unencumbered by any protective frame.
Furthermore, in contrast to painting, where the textural density of objects
overwhelms the absent presence of cinematic frames, the projected image
of film can be as abstract as the mental image triggered by the word. In his
essay on Bresson and Bernanos, written four years before seeing Clouzot’s
The Mystery of Picasso, Bazin begins to think through the paradox of aes-
thetic biology, a paradox that would negotiate the gap between art and life,
painting and science.
Significantly, after the release of Clouzot’s film, Bazin decides to add a foot-
note to his essay on Diary: “At least up to the time of Le Mystère Picasso which,
as we shall see, may invalidate this criticism.”63 In this act, he acknowledges a
new phase in the evolution of the postwar art documentary. Yet this footnote
does not invalidate his overall argument that literature is closer to the cinema
than painting is. The mere idea of anyone undertaking an art documentary
on a sacred monster like Pablo Picasso is breathtakingly daring. Clouzot’s
The Mystery of Picasso receives a Jury Special Prize award at the 1956 Cannes
Film Festival. Bazin appreciatively observes that this film approximates
the length of a feature film and deserves even more recognition for chal-
lenging the traditionally shorter duration of the standard art documentary.
Furthermore, Clouzot’s is the best film ever made on the trope of the artist at
work in his studio.
Clouzot’s shrewd concealing of the artist behind his canvas clashes with
Paul Haesaerts’s Visite à Picasso (1950). In Haesaerts’s much less innovative
and more anthropocentric film, the painter’s standing figure and his hand
at work are fully visible behind the traces of his motions while painting on
a glass surface. Haesaerts’s Visite is a film focused exclusively on the artist’s
hand; it does not seek to create or reveal anything involving the intersection
or aesthetic symbiosis between two distinct media. In contrast to Clouzot’s
living symbiosis, Haesaerts simply performs a respectful bow in front of a
famous artist, showing Picasso with very little accompanying creativity in his
own use of the cinematic medium. Ironically, the glass behind which Picasso
is working doubles the lens of the camera. This doubling of glass elements
invites the idea that Picasso has become a God-like creature provided with a
double enshrinement.
Clouzot’s art documentary unfolds in a suspenseful way, outside any log-
ical cause and effect pattern. A well-known director of thrillers, Clouzot
injects spectacle and suspense into The Mystery of Picasso. The latter reorients
the pictorial canvas from space and surface toward time and depth. Picasso
is ideally suited to such transformation because he loves risk, chance, and
surprise. Employing a static camera, no voice-over narration, and a musical
score by Georges Auric, Clouzot records the metamorphosis of one sketch
into another. A scene of seduction between a man and a woman becomes a
bullfight. A Trojan horse precedes a beachscape with the elongated shape of
a Cinemascope frame. The playfulness of appearances and disappearances
depends on stop-motion animation technique, which neither impacts the
size of the canvas nor alters Picasso’s rhythm of execution.
Since the film is shot in black-and-white, shapes stand out even more
forcefully. Meanwhile the introduction of color sequences signifies that
“painting” is, on one hand, a self-contained object housing a personal crea-
tive vision—hence, an artistic fantasy—while cinematic frame and pictorial
canvas coincide to the fullest on the screen of cinema. In fact, the off-screen
reality of the studio should have color, in principle, but during the shooting it
becomes a dark space we can ignore. Without windows, Clouzot’s film studio
resembles a camera obscura missing its pinhole opening for contact with the
outside world. This dark boxlike room is inaccessible to any distracting or
contingent natural light that might produce too many shadows competing
with Picasso’s creative activity.
Clouzot’s film explains nothing, nor does its director even attempt to do so.
The logic of a detective’s investigation never applies to Clouzot’s observation
Art 53
of Picasso’s creative process, whose deepest inspiration remains a mystery.

After mobilizing Picasso’s canvases into pictorial duration, Clouzot avoids
the structure of the palimpsest. There, different layers accumulate on top of
each other without sharing the same origin. Here, Picasso’s work is, instead,
a continuous and self-propelling stream of changing surfaces. It appears as
if science can replace art. Scientific films usually rely on time-lapse cinema-
tography that artificially accelerates or slows down change. Flowers slowly
bloom petal by petal, while embryos accelerate their birth process. The effect
of this human tampering with time is clearly anti-illusionistic.
But Clouzot avoids all the standard techniques of the scientific film
genre. Without altering the spatial integrity of Picasso’s evolving surfaces,
Clouzot’s accelerated montage limits itself to the elimination of the
interruptions between the end of one of Picasso’s iconographic series and
the beginning of the next. This approach faithfully preserves Picasso’s real
time of drawing, erasing, transforming, and coloring, while stressing the
uncanny self-confidence of his strokes. The screen blocking our view of
Picasso’s hand and absorbing Picasso’s inks recalls the opaque plate of an x-
ray device in a scientific documentary, in this case representing the artist’s
mental life as a series of patterns altering themselves. Each successive
canvas stops being a self-contained object and turns into a complemen-
tary stage, preparing the way for the next stage that in turn will retain
its own integrity despite its symbiotic or dialectic relationship with its
originating stage.
Picasso’s painting mutates into a temporal event whose beginnings
and endings are equally surprising. As soon as art encounters movement,
it begins to look like life or biology. Why is Clouzot’s art documentary a
Bergsonian film? For Bergson, creativity is an intuitive and irrational ex-
pression that springs from the deepest recesses of the human mind. In The
Mystery of Picasso, the painter’s ever-shifting flow of visual forms stems from
his memories, while his imagination becomes freewheeling.
By the end of the film, Clouzot appears on screen with Picasso. Thanks
to a second camera operated by assistant director Claude Renoir, the film-
maker and the painter become equal participants in this documentary. They
decide to compare their respective media’s temporalities and their rhythms
of creativity.
Picasso will generate one last series of sketches coinciding in duration with
the length of the filmstrip left inside Clouzot’s camera. Picasso’s time, the in-
ternal time of creativity, becomes visible in competition with a measurable
and small quantity of celluloid. Thanks to this arrangement, Clouzot steps

back into the days of early cinema when the minutes of shooting have
to match the quantity of film in meters. The viewer quickly realizes that
Picasso’s manual rhythm in real time easily matches the length of Clouzot’s
film, rolling inside his own black box and echoing the studio’s lack of win-
dows. So instead of a competitive suspenseful race antithetical to the idea of
aesthetic symbiosis, this experimental dialectic between the painter’s hand
and the filmmaker’s machine becomes an egalitarian encounter based on
mutual respect.
Together Clouzot and Picasso show that something automatic exists in-
side human creativity, and something sensitive or receptive characterizes the
celluloid strip filming away. The collaboration of these two genuine friends
is the antithesis of celebrity narcissism and self-promotion. Picasso and
Clouzot live as neighbors in Southern France. In 1955 the painter is based at
his villa, La Californie, near Cannes, and Clouzot assembles his team at the
Studios de la Victorine in Nice. Their geographical proximity facilitates their
cooperating comfortably and compatibly during this ambitious project on
painting and cinema. They interrogate their respective ontologies or man-
ners of being and discover a shared ground through a transparent screen-like
canvas. This device makes artistic temporality visible, but hides the human
hand. The external temporality of filming matches the internal rhythm of
Picasso’s creativity.
It is no wonder that Bazin loves Clouzot’s film, since the original pur-
pose of the art documentary is to rehumanize an epoch marked by the
Cold War’s divisions. Needless to say, such a rehumanization is in the plural
and it underlines cooperation without the loss of an individual person-
hood. It is indeed rare that the intersection of human self-expression and
film technology’s recording power stimulates such creative energy, and that
the participants manage their achievement with such generosity of spirit.
While human ingenuity and technological application too frequently spawn
dreams of egotistical omnipotence or collective regimentation for the sake of
war, destruction, and economic profit, The Mystery of Picasso promotes art
and dialogue.
3
Science
Bazin’s film theory is filled with scientific metaphors based on his secular
education between 1934 and 1937 at the École Normale d’Instituteurs, in
La Rochelle (Figure 3.1). There he studied biology, physics, chemistry, and
mathematics. Bazin’s biological references stand out for their objective de-
tachment. Biology’s leveling approach is comparable to the indifferent look
of the camera lens.1 The point here is to invoke nature’s egalitarian natural
selection to preserve a widespread level of vitality.2 Well aware that cinema’s
material ghost summons a lifelike appearance, Bazin repeatedly engages the
topics of birth, growth, and decay. In responding to its own creative evolu-
tion, the cinema, too, goes through bursts of energy and physical fatigue—as
if it were a mortal being.3
Always seeking a balance between logic and the irrational, the anthropo-
morphic and the mechanical, Bazin loves modern mathematics because it
accommodates contingency, and its principles are compatible with motion
and change.4 Wary of static shapes in Euclidean geometry, Bazin criticizes
André Cayatte’s courtroom dramas for their rigid use of the law. Cayatte’s in-
flexible definitions of good and evil reduce human beings to robots without
any free will.5 By contrast, biology’s creativity and resilience along with
modern mathematics’ interest in the infinite and the invisible speak much
more eloquently to the critic’s double-sided fascination with natural crea-
tivity and abstract thought.
Darwin and Bergson
Darwin’s secular approach combined with Bergson’s self-healing creativity

shape Bazin’s handling of science in his film theory. Bazin’s Darwinism is ho-
listic because nature handles the struggle for survival from zoology to botany,
outside the human realm of evil intentions. By contrast, Herbert Spencer’s
(1820–1903) “survival of the fittest”6 is a utilitarian metaphor that applies
to human competition and to the box office of the cinema. Bazin cherishes
University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190067298.001.0001
Figure 3.1 École Normale d’Instituteurs de La Rochelle. Courtesy Angela Dalle

Vacche.
biology as if this discipline alone could lift him out of his chronically poor
health. As the name of the discipline itself proclaims, biology studies eve-
rything that is alive, from humans to insects to leaves, through its various
specializations ranging from physiology to entomology to botany. In con-
trast to Darwin’s hierarchical and mechanical approach, Bergson’s Creative
Evolution pushes Bazin to consider divergent directions, competing possibil-
ities, and complementary processes.
Eager to avoid linear accounts with preestablished goals, Bazin’s essay “The
Evolution of the Language of Cinema” (1951) discloses how a multiplicity of
causes is responsible for the medium’s development. For example, technolog-
ical innovations of all kinds override the allegedly dominant transition from
silent to sound film. Rather than simple and singular, Darwinian evolution
is complex and plural, in nature as well as in the cinema. Bazin’s list includes
panchromatic film stock, development of better microphones, arrival of the
crane, disappearance of soft focus and superimpositions, not to mention
the elimination of too many close-ups in favor of shooting characters from
Science 57
the knee up. Oddly enough, in this famous essay, he does not pay attention
to the establishment of rear projection. Most of all, Bazin is eager to outline
an overarching framework behind all these changes. Taken all together, these
innovations strive to reduce the artificiality of the filmic image and pave the
way for various kinds of realisms.
During the shift from silent to sound, the most important tension is
between cinema shaking off its pictorial and theatrical ancestries and
embracing, instead, a more photographic kind of illusionism. As a result, the
screen begins to acquire an unprecedented introspective and philosophical
sensibility. In the first part of “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,”
Bazin situates a “cinema of the image” in Weimar Germany, Soviet Russia,
and in the Hollywood industry of the thirties. Traditionally associated with
the silent screen, this cinema of the image overflows into the sound period.
It thrives on artificial lighting, elaborate mises-en-scène, and special effects.
The “cinema of the image” begins to disintegrate, however, thanks to three
notable directors who challenge the limitations of studio shooting: Erich
Von Stroheim (1885–1957), F. W. Murnau (1888–1931), and Robert Flaherty
(1884–1951). Although they started their careers in the silent period, first in
Europe or Canada, and later continued in Hollywood, these directors are the
first to deploy lenses sensitive to sun and rain; they know how to work with
wind and sand, animals and nonprofessional actors. They develop a cinema
that celebrates the dramatic integrity of space and pays attention to the
unfolding of events in real time. Instead of accepting the studio’s artificiality,
they anticipate a “cinema of reality,” by making fiction and nonfiction works
which, to this day, remain baffling for their avant-garde experimentalism and
creative defiance.
Bazin’s narrative concerning the tension between a “cinema of the image”
and a “cinema of reality” does not end here. The more Bazin’s examples be-
come increasingly distant from the silent period, the more the critic reminds
his readers that sound operates in a referential manner by invoking that
which is off-screen. The second part of Bazin’s essay is based on a new ap-
proach to the image, which is now more and more temporal with an in-
creasingly mobile framing. This is the age of Jean Renoir’s use of depth of
field and Orson Welles’s deep focus. In the wake of Von Stroheim, Flaherty,
and Murnau, Renoir and Welles challenge again the distinction between a
“cinema of the image” and a “cinema of reality.” Yet they do so by interro-
gating the relationship between spectator and screen. Equally fascinated
with theatrical space and literary introspection, but not interested in the
persuasive bent of Soviet montage and analytical Hollywood editing, Renoir

and Welles experiment with reframing and with deep focus. By relying on
mobile frames and by charging their mises-en-scène with intentionally still
cameras, they invite spectators to reflect on the irrational and the ambiguities
in human relations.
Eventually, Bazin’s cinema of reality prevails over a cinema of image,
thanks to the postwar phenomenon of Italian neorealism. At this point,
Bazin’s essay calls attention to how the choice of an urgently topical subject
for a new film may single-handedly replace a traditional script. With neore-
alism, the craftsmanship of writing a good scenario is replaced by the ability
to live in the present and to turn the physical landscape or a social situation
into an eloquent character. Thus, the choice of subject matter acquires a new
level of importance, and, in order to tell stories in the present tense, both pro-
fessional and nonprofessional performers are cast.
Cinema’s evolution is not only due to a changing technological and his-
torical context but also is based on realist aesthetic principles ontogeneti-
cally linked to photography. Relevant to science, besides Darwinism, there is
also an anti-Platonic Bazin to be considered. Darwin’s discoveries, discussed
in his On the Origin of Species (1859), refute numerous Platonic typologies
based on invariance. Most importantly, a static Euclidean geometry cannot
fit into Darwin’s, Bergson’s, or Bazin’s systems. To begin with, according to
Euclid, all triangles have the same features. By contrast, Darwin rejects this
kind of typological thinking based on uniform elements. Such a modular ap-
proach is not compatible with groups of diverse living organisms, including
the human species. In fact, humans and animals belong to the same genus of
mammals, as far as biological reproduction is concerned. Within each genus,
different groups become species. Each one of these species, in turn, consists
of uniquely different individuals sharing a basic set of defining features, while
holding on to their unrepeatable individuality.
Bazin’s dislike of Euclidean geometry is evident in his “Ontology” essay,
where he associates perspective with a timeless geometric ordering. On
the contrary, Darwin’s axiom of uniqueness for anything alive resonates
in Bazin’s film theory. Each moment is different from every other moment
within the flow of time, and at the level of the single photographic negative.
Even if they are born in the same place and at the same time, no two instances
within the same species can ever be absolutely identical to one another, the
way two lifeless equilateral triangles are within a Platonic worldview.
Science 59
Although Bazin associates classical Hollywood cinema with Platonic

Idealism due to its industrial and formulaic approach, he never says that all
kinds of cinematic representations are always and only Platonic. The illu-
sionism of the cinema is not always idealistic. To be sure, in “The Myth of
Total Cinema” (1946)—an essay on the origins of this medium and a state-
ment against technological determinism—the critic situates only cinema’s
early inventors in the so-called platonic heavens7 of their fixed obsessions.
The key issue behind Bazin’s negative metaphor of “platonic heavens” is that
he refuses to glorify technology for itself.
Even though many pioneers in optics came up with crazy experiments, the
cinema was always a human dream before it became a machine. At the turn
of the twentieth century, a proliferation of dead-end inventions attests to an
ageless myth of total cinema. This myth boils down to the archetypal dream
of representing life in motion, with sound and color. Yet what is the relation-
ship between “The Myth of Total Cinema” (1946) and “The Evolution of the
Language of Cinema” (1951)? The first essay proposes a circular model, where
the dream of cinema purifies itself into an illusionist transparency, or a neore-
alism so fluid and spontaneous that it escalates into “the end” of cinema.
This gradual shedding of artificial details and conventions, however, implies
that the medium has already evolved through the various technological
ameliorations discussed in the second essay, “The Evolution of the Language
of Cinema.” To be sure, the term “evolution” does not tell the whole story, since
cinema’s evolutionary history depends on some degree of ontogenetic circu-
larity as well. In Bazin’s 1950s, for example, the medium’s latest development
is 3-D, or cinema in relief. However, 3-D points back to a much earlier phase
marked by stereoscopy. At the very beginning, the cinematograph’s moving
image was based on “attractions,”8 or one-shot films exploiting not only mo-
tion but also aggression, namely the breaking of the fourth wall. Intertwined
with cinema’s evolutionary trajectory, Bazin’s circular model of technolog-
ical history comes to fruition, when 3-D in the fifties swings in two opposite
directions: on one hand, the increased details of an image in depth are sup-
posed to be a technological amelioration and an advance in realism; on the
other, the hurling out of objects and gestures against the spectators returns the
medium to its earliest days, when stereoscopy was popular.
In “The Myth of Total Cinema,” however, the effacement of cinematic tech-
nology into “the end” of cinema, or “pure” cinema, is more important than
the accumulation of special effects or technological change. Even though he
pays close attention to technical innovations, for Bazin the person behind the
camera and the world in front of it count much more than mechanical virtu-
osity displaying itself for its own sake. Bazin gives priority to the filmmaker’s
moral stance in approaching the visible world, while recognizing that the vis-
ible world is unstable and often illegible, except for some epiphanies made
possible by the medium’s objectifying power. The more the cinema refrains
from being invasive, the more it can tell stories by allowing what is already
there in the world and in front of the camera to speak autonomously as much
as possible.
Darwin argues that the Bible’s narrative of divine creation is a mytholog-
ical fiction in conflict with his new science of evolutionary biology linking
man to animal. As a dissident Catholic, Bazin fully embraces Darwin’s sec-
ularism by replacing the concept of the “human soul” with cinema’s intel-
lectual and emotional potential to generate a symbiotic spark, to electrify
relations between Self and Other. In contrast to static binaries, Self and Other
exist in a constant state of flux. Darwin’s emergent and empirical gradualism
accepts the universality of contingency as much as Bazin’s film theory does,
through his notion of grace or providence. To be sure, Bazin felt that contin-
gency was intrinsic to the cinema due to this medium’s unavoidable depend-
ency on the physical world that it records. In fact, in comparison to the other
arts, filmmaking is the most difficult and ephemeral of media, as far as deliv-
ering aesthetic results: “the result [is] a thousand times more risky in cinema
than in painting or literature.”9
In contrast to Darwin’s teleological approach, Bergson argued that there
was never any goal-oriented plan in nature, leading to man’s superior devel-
opment. Élan vital is a blind, secular, and erratic energy that ignores linearity,
intention, design, and anthropocentrism. Thus, humankind is only one of
many possible outcomes produced by an accumulation of vitality inside mul-
tiple and competing systems. Although the impact of filmic movement on
the audience can be comparable to the energizing effect of élan vital, Bergson
disliked early cinema, whose moving images he associated with the com-
partmentalizing logic of intellectual operations. During the early stages of
Bergson’s career, cinema is still so primitive that he cannot foresee its acceler-
ated evolution during the twentieth century.
A scientific medium limited to motion studies, early cinema thrives on
the illusory motion harnessed out of separate and still frames. Later on,
when cinema becomes an art form with poetic qualities, Bergson’s “stream
of consciousness” finds in this medium one of its best allies. Through camera
Science 61
movement and editing, cinema can represent the overlap of feelings and
thoughts. Bergson, the philosopher of intuition and vitality, rails against the
excesses of mechanization. Considering the intersection of the history of
philosophy with the history of vision retrospectively, Bergson’s death in 1941
takes place exactly when Italian neorealism emerges at the end of World War
II, introducing a new kind of intuitive and introspective sensibility.
Bazin makes much of Bergson’s placement of free will in the realms of
temporality, introspection, and ethics. Without free will and agency, the self-
consciousness of adulthood cannot grow. By the same token, free will can en-
able as well as impede moral decisions. Most importantly, Bazin argues that
humans carry inside themselves a visceral memory of their own evolution. In
discussing The Silent World (Le monde du silence), a 1956 marine documen-
tary by Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle, Bazin observes that the earliest
“aquatic supermen” or underwater pioneers might have sensed within them-
selves “a secret, profound, age-old collusion” with the sea creatures floating
around.10
Inasmuch as the myth of Icarus immortalized man’s dream to fly, for
Bazin, the airplane is a utilitarian accomplishment. Thus, this machine is
not so interesting due to its arrogance in making humans believe they are
birdlike. Bazin does not celebrate the human association with the sky; this
is too close to the “platonic heavens”11 of supernatural transcendence and
egotistical inventors. For him, the ultimate moving image of “total” cinema
does not belong to the stratosphere, but to 3-D immersion in the water. It is
as if this transition from air to water could enable cinema to shift from total
to pure. Icarus floats better under water, where gravity does not weigh one
down, while no massive combustion is necessary.
Evocative Affinities
Famous among his friends and colleagues for his love of animals, Bazin is
sensitive to how we unknowingly preserve ancient traces in the trails of our
own species’ development. These quasi-mythical or involuntary memories
are comparable to the imaginative bonds that the critic describes in his re-
view of The Silent World.12 After commenting on the ocean’s creativity, Bazin
observes, “the beauty of these images draws on a magnetism that polarizes
our consciousness as a whole.” In comparison to this living framework, “we
are only a grain of sand left behind with a few others on the ocean’s beach.”13
This comparison between human life and a “grain of sand” indicates that
Bazin takes all stages of biology and geology most seriously, even when they
are as infinitesimal and ephemeral as mineral dust.
Instead of relying on affinities between humans and marine creatures as
Bazin does, Bergson’s antiteleological sensibility stems from a little-known
evolutionary stage shared by humans and insects. At first, these two species
do not yet exist separately as such, and there are only arthropods living on the
earth. This temporary overlap of humans and insects into the eventually ex-
tinct arthropods resurfaces in Bazin’s essay “Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl”
(1946): “Physically, this American Venus is a tall, vigorous girl whose long,
streamlined body splendidly represents a tall race.”14 Bazin’s entomological
title does recall Bergson’s merging of the insect world and the human popu-
lation through the uncanny arthropods. By moving beyond this temporary
overlap of the human with the insect, one may even wonder what these two
living species continue to share today. The answer is that insects and humans
are still the two most diversified “populations” on the surface of the earth.
Without a doubt, this quantitative fact is most humbling. It suggests that,
at some basic level, we too muddle through life in a fashion comparable to
an ant’s blind determination. Whereas we humans are at least capable of free
will, and of self-destruction, only pattern and labor are allowed in an ant
colony. There, each little insect carries out the same mundane tasks over and
over again, mindlessly, in view of its colony’s collective survival.
The arthropod species is characterized by a sign language and a social life,
as we are in our human society. As a result of evolution, the arthropod branch
did split into two different directions, with the vertebrate side developing a
much more sophisticated nervous system.15 By activating a major leap be-
yond the insect level, this nervous system leads from the arthropod phase
to human development later on. Thus, the whimsical idea behind Bazin’s
“Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl” is that, besides the lineage from ape to man,
there is something insect-like that still makes itself felt in the narrow waist,
generous breasts, and long legs of this American icon.
From the titles of some of his essays, such as “The New American Style: Is
the Cinema an Adult?” (1946),16 one can infer that developments in film
language require an anthropomorphic vocabulary. In clear contrast with
self-absorbed anthropocentric attitudes, anthropomorphism is the only em-
pathetic way we have to relate to animals, plants, objects, and machines. While
anti-anthropocentrism cultivates connections with what is outside our con-
trol, anthropomorphism summons the magic of a long-lost relationship with
Science 63
Otherness. Under the magnifying lens of the microscope—one of cinema’s

technological ancestors together with the telescope—minuscule microbes,
for example, steal the show. In reviewing a medical film, Bazin notes with
amusement that microbes behave like vedettes, or female starlets parading
themselves at the Cannes Film Festival.17
By the same token, in his review of The Silent World, Bazin chooses the
ocean’s naturally weightless underwater life over the artificially gravity-free
space of aviation. Thanks to postwar innovations in scuba diving, not only
can a human being swim like a fish but also this sport offers to its practitioners
an added bonus. The underwater explorer can find more freedom and inde-
pendence at the bottom of the ocean in comparison to a passenger inside a
noisy airplane:
Both the fish and the bird symbolize a liberation from terrestrial chains,
but traditionally . . . man’s dream of freedom has expressed itself through
the dry, sun-filled sky. . . . In the end, science, stronger than our human
imagination, has revealed to humankind its affinities with fish, because the
ancient myth of flying has been fulfilled by scuba-diving. . . . By moving well
beyond the dangers of diving, man has become Neptune, the master and in-
habitant of water where he is capable of flying with his arms alone.18
Bazin’s idea of man and fish interconnecting within a magnetic field seems
to be preferable to the ancient dream of flying like a bird. Together, man and
fish demonstrate how, before becoming birdlike with the airplane, “man was
a marine animal, who still carries the inner memory of the sea.”19 One way of
explaining Bazin’s preference for the depths of the sea over the “dry sun-filled
sky,” might have something to do with his anti-Platonism, since the sun’s
blinding light plays such a major role in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
Whereas an airplane is a sort of flying car for humans only, the screen
transports us into a parallel universe, but it does so by including a multitude
of other travelers. It sets the human species next to animals, plants, minerals,
objects, and landscapes. As such, the gravity-free screen resembles much
more easily a weightless universe understood in marine terms. Furthermore,
through his entomological affinities between human beings and insects,
Bazin’s egalitarian outreach never degenerates into a sensualist pantheism or
into an animist spiritualism.
Bazin’s anthropomorphic connections, however, fully recognize the
price paid for our evolutionary journey from brute matter to reflective
consciousness. Our own self-consciousness and capacity for moral judg-

ment, in fact, require a certain kind of loneliness in comparison to animals,
who can rely only on instinct and space; they do not know time, and are not
self-aware.
Much more easily than the fine arts, cinema helps us with our modern pre-
dicament of being alone in a crowd, by becoming the mass medium of com-
munity and anonymity. In oscillating among the physics and chemistry of
nature, the sociology of art, the anthropology of culture, and the automatisms
of technology, the cinema, too, recapitulates an evolutionary cycle of its own.
Through its lifelike illusions, it goes from machine to organism to mind to
parallel world. In contrast to scientists, for whom precision is more impor-
tant than life, Bazin always celebrates the living sciences over the abstract
ones. As such, biology wins out over geometry.
Bergson, Einstein, Heisenberg
Due to his passion for biology, Bazin has little use for the static tendencies
of ancient mathematics based on Euclidean geometry in a timeless space.
Bazin upholds a Bergsonian preference for the motion-filled temporality
of modern mathematics, open to contingency and sensitive to energy. In
Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson writes:
We believe that if biology could ever get as close to its object as mathematics
does to its own, it would become, to the physics and chemistry of organ-
ized bodies, what the mathematics of the moderns have proved to be in
relation to ancient geometry. The wholly superficial displacement of masses
and molecules studied in physics and chemistry would become, in relation
to that inner vital movement (which is transformation and not translation),
what the position of the moving object is to the movement of that object in
space.20
Most importantly, Bergson compares biology’s openness to contingencies

with calculus’s handling of average motion in relation to competing trajec-
tories and shifts in point of view. Bazin extends Bergson’s bridging of the gap
between biology and calculus to cinema as a spatiotemporal continuum.
Bergson’s turn- of-
the-
century work precedes the popularization of
quantum physics in the twenties and thirties, about which this film theorist
Science 65
is deeply aware due to his scientific training in La Rochelle. Philosopher of

science Andrew C. Papanicolaou points out that Bergson’s
matter should be viewed as comprised of “modifications, perturbations,

changes of tension or of energy, and nothing else.” In such a world . . . ener-
gies are pulsational (quantized), entries cease to be simply located (and
gain wave characteristics) and indetermination becomes a fundamental
feature of micro-events. (Bergson in fact urged physical scientists to look
for measurable indetermination in physical nature.) It is thus, as physicist
Louis de Broglie pointed out, no exaggeration to hold that in Bergson we
find Heisenberg before Heisenberg, Bohr before Bohr.21
Bazin’s interest in quantum physics avoids the limitations of measuring and

controlling. According to Werner Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy,
mathematics becomes fuzzy because, at the subatomic level, randomness
and flux—namely the perpetual motion of élan vital—prevail over exact
measurements. Heisenberg states that certain kinds of knowledge—for ex-
ample, a particle’s position and its velocity—cannot be calculated simulta-
neously. The more precisely one property is measured, the blurrier and more
uncertain the other becomes. Wave and particle do coexist, yet, despite their
consubstantial status, they are not mutually exclusive. This theme of indeter-
minacy reappears in Bazin’s argument that reality is opaque, intricate, and
amorphous.
Heisenberg belongs to the so-called Danish School of Quantum Physics,
whose most serious opponent is Albert Einstein. An advocate of mathemat-
ical time, Einstein deeply disagrees with Bergson’s defense of psychological
time in Duration and Simultaneity (1922). The mathematical arguments of
the philosopher of élan vital do not persuade the brilliant physicist. Einstein
repeatedly points out how weird quantum physics really is. The problem he
sees is not just with the duality of wave and particle but also with the paradox
of their unpredictable locations in space being simultaneous with their in-
evitable entanglements. Einstein concludes that no reasonable definition of
reality can permit such a messy situation. More work needs to be done in sci-
ence to bypass this odd effect of consubstantiality because, he declares, “God
does not play with dice.”22
Einstein believes that the Danish School’s upholding of randomness is
only transitional. There must be, he proposes, a deeper theory that looks be-
yond the ambiguous appearances of the “quantum veil.” Reality, he argues,
is subject to precise mathematical measurements because the space-time

continuum has its own degree of determinacy and independence, in con-
trast to phenomenological events. The dispute between Bergson and Einstein
applies also to Bazin, to the extent that, just like Bergson, Bazin is more in-
terested in human subjectivity, chance, and the small earth than in the ob-
jective and mathematical laws of the galaxy at large.23 Keen on astronomy,
Einstein strives to articulate all his research into a unified field theory that is
still relevant today.
Within an overall metaphorical use of mathematics to elucidate the re-
lationship between movement and reality in life and in the cinema, Bazin’s
prose displays a self-consciously negative view of pluses and minuses in
arithmetic. By contrast, he cherishes multiplication, which he uses to praise
Robert Bresson’s literary adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country
Priest (1951): “In no sense is the film ‘comparable’ to the novel or ‘worthy’
of it. It is a new aesthetic creation, the novel so to speak multiplied by the
cinema.”24 One can only wonder whether Bazin’s enthusiasm for multiplica-
tion derives from its capacity to amplify and distribute resources, in contrast
to selfish accumulation lurking behind the use of pluses and minuses.
One can begin to see here how Bazin’s enthusiasm for multiplication rad-
ically challenges the reformist liberal tradition within which he is errone-
ously situated by those who consider him to be a social democrat at best. His
ethos is peacefully revolutionary. After all, the logic of liberal capitalism is
intertwined with the assembly line of Taylorism, which Bergson condemns
repeatedly throughout his works. Such a compartmentalization of time
reduces humans to unfeeling machines without any free will.
The clocklike efficiency of industrial labor is, of course, a negative trope
in Bergson’s philosophy.25 In Time and Free Will (1889), Bergson promotes
an introspective temporality in opposition to measurable time. For Bazin,
the spiritual “reality” that counts is always temporal and subjective because it
derives from the dialectic of Self and Otherness.
Besides his references to arithmetic, Bazin frequently brings up algebra
in his essays. Generally speaking, algebra’s ambition is to operate outside
human subjectivity, the slippages of language, and the dilemmas of ethics in
order to turn equations into self-contained, quantifiable arrangements. The
danger of this approach is the total rationalization of life to such an extreme
that life’s most lyrical insights become reduced to a streamlined formula. The
numerical values accompanying algebra’s alphabetical symbols can change,
Science 67
but the abstract truth of their spatial arrangement must remain quantitative,
invariable, and Platonic.
Geometry and the Snowflake
The goal of Euclidean mathematics is a pure objectivity of stable results, which

corresponds to the Platonic solids of geometry. Without a doubt, cinema can
be used in an idealist manner, as happens in many escapist Hollywood films.
There, realism thrives on precise calculation of detail, as if storytelling were a
theorem carried through climax, denouement, and resolution, according to
an unflappable formula that clicks away like a Swiss clock. Yet before dealing
any further with Hollywood cinema’s capacity for idealization, something
must be said about the relationship between Plato and ancient mathematics.
Fascinated with convex polyhedrons with four, six, eight, twelve, and
twenty faces,26 Plato felt that these three-dimensional forms embody the mys-
tical qualities of the golden section, or Phi. As an advocate of Euclidean ge-
ometry, Plato argued that these interchangeable solids can unlock the secrets
of the whole cosmos. The golden section is an irrational, finite number that is
occasionally found in the morphology of animals, flowers, and the nautilus
shell. All of these are rare cases of automatic, natural creativity. Outside any
contingency, Plato’s five Euclidean solids do rely on the golden section. Thus,
he considers them to be the best intermediaries between the perceivable and
finite objects of the material world and his ideal forms.
Bazin’s anti-Platonic rejection of Euclidean geometry is evidenced in the
critic’s discussion of the courtroom films of André Cayatte:
People and their behavior are the product of a quadrilateral of forces whose
longer side is the time period, the society, and the environment, plus the
historical circumstances, and whose shorter side is the kind of family up-
bringing they have had. [ . . . ] reality becomes an intelligible organization
without mystery, set in motion by the spring of logic and given a regular
rhythm by the pendulum swinging back and forth between the pros and the
cons of the argument in question.27
Thus described, Cayatte’s method is an extreme version of Cartesian ration-

alism. But Bazin’s outreach toward Otherness is more important than the
cold logic of geometry. The basis for this symbiotic choice is, once again,
Bergson’s élan vital, namely a current of living energy in the world.
Without the unknown and the irrational, there can be no poetry, and
without poetry, imagination, and trust, there cannot be any love among
human beings. Bazin writes:
What distinguishes reality from abstraction, the believable character from

a shallow psychological equation, is the portion of mystery . . . that resists
any attempt at analysis. Abstraction is legitimate in films only in the nar-
rative modes that designate it as such. . . . André Cayatte gives us a judicial
universe that is mechanical and peopled with automatons. We now await
the revolt of the robots.28
In contrast to Cayatte’s geometrical theorems, Bazin’s anti-anthropocentrism

views the human experience as only one element within a much larger bi-
ological history. Within this centrifugal framework Bazin’s passion for me-
teorology emerges from his comparison of a snowflake to photography’s
natural “miracle.”29
Individual snowflakes amount to unique geometric patterns. They are
meteorological wonders, for each one articulates a different version of the
golden section. By contrast, Plato’s five geometric solids are logically inter-
related, and each one of them manifests the same ratio of Phi. Thus, their
three-dimensional cross sections are interchangeable from one solid to an-
other. On the contrary, by freezing into one moment in time, every single
snowflake is unique, born as it is out of an uncontrollable process of crystal-
lization. The snowflake’s form derives from how the wind makes each crystal
congeal differently. Given that each moment in time is different from every
other moment, Bazin uses the analogy of the snowflake to call attention to
the fact that every photographic negative, before its positive serialization, is
different from every other.
Architectural theorist Stanford Kwinter explains the connection between
the physics of the event and the infinite morphology of snowflakes:
Each [snowflake] is different because the crystal maintains its sensitivity

both to time and its complex milieu. Its morphogenetic principle is active
and always incomplete . . . the snowflake interacts with other processes
across both space and time: [in contrast to an ice-cube, a system operating
in an unreal time], [the snowflake] belongs to a dynamical fluvial world.30
Science 69
Nothing in nature can be more ephemeral than a snowflake. It belongs to

a natural history of little things, through which Bazin acknowledges the
humble yet cosmological origin of the cinema at the level of photography.
Mathematics and the Policier
In his essay “Du réalisme dans les films policiers” (1955) Bazin points out
that mathematical logic and human weaknesses rarely coincide.31 The
French term policier applies to films dealing with crime, with or without po-
lice investigation. This genre specializes in the dangers of the modern city
and the power of logic: thinking well is crucial in detection. While thought
differentiates a human from an animal, logic can degenerate into sheer ab-
straction. The more realistic and unpredictable is the mise-en-scène, the less
mechanical becomes the policier.
Whenever the policier reduces itself to a formula solving an investigation,
this approach will downplay the dilemmas of life and death. The latter involve
multiple explanations in comparison to the univocal solution of a criminal
intrigue. This means that great policiers must rise above a puzzle of perfectly
interlocking pieces. This genre must tap into something beyond logic by
leaving some open question. Only if it does so, can the policier show that the
elusive appearances of daily life and human behavior are way more contra-
dictory than just any enigma waiting for resolution. Uninterested in stable or
equivalent structures, Bazin celebrates policier films with destabilizing events
and changing perceptions.
According to Bazin, the very best policiers venture out into the domain
of contingencies and epiphanies. This emphasis on realism benefits from a
quasi-documentary mise-en-scène with location shooting and the casting
of lesser-known actors or nonprofessional performers. Bazin argues that
spectators believe in fictional characters when the genre’s mathematical logic
bends itself toward imperfections and surprises. In Bazin’s own words, the
Manichean Hollywood crime story falls way too often into the limitations of
Platonic, Euclidean geometry: “For a long time now American cinema has
been producing the same narratives over and over again, out of its Platonic
matrix.”32 The matrix of Hollywood cinema is based on an abstract idea of
verisimilitude without enough loose ends.
Hollywood’s suspense works on an artificial clock removed from a kind
of urban realism featuring dead ends and empty time. Hollywood’s Platonic
bent is not only based on too much logic and not enough realism, but also
on a mechanical use of psychoanalysis to get rid of any existential nuances.
In discussing a Hollywood remake of Fritz Lang’s M, directed by Joseph
Losey, Bazin writes: “They haven’t spared us the inevitable introduction of
the Oedipus complex. Hollywood decidedly fears the mysterious. There is no
poetry without mystery.”33
In his review of The Big Clock (1948), Bazin praises John Farrow’s tech-
nical perfectionism. The director, however, fails to deliver an engaging po-
licier. Despite the accuracy of its New York corporate setting, in black and
white with ample neighborhood detail, the subject matter never achieves
enough depth to make viewers believe that the hero and heroine can over-
come American stereotypes. George Stroud (Ray Milland), is not only a
victim of corporate life but also a one-dimensional puppet. In fact, Stroud’s
behavior is predicated on the whims of his evil boss, the media guru Earl
Janoth (Charles Laughton). Stroud’s troubles start when he decides to spend
time in the countryside with his wife (Maureen O’Sullivan). Doomed to
work around the clock, Stroud drinks too much and nearly falls for Janoth’s
mistress, Pauline York (Rita Johnson). Thus, he misses his appointment with
his wife. Upset with himself, the absent-minded husband drinks even more.
Meanwhile Pauline tries to persuade him to blackmail Janoth.
After an evening of alcohol and talk, but no adultery, Stroud leaves Pauline’s
apartment. The drunk but faithful husband is unaware that, at the moment
of his departure, a spying Janoth manages to see only a shadow emerging.
Without having recognized Stroud, Janoth marches into Pauline’s apartment;
she insults him, and he murders her. After confiding to his lawyer that he is
the murderer, Janoth maneuvers to neutralize the police. To this end, the evil
boss places his exploited employee, Stroud, in charge of this criminal inves-
tigation. By pretending to perform with clockwork efficiency, Stroud must
seem to be working as hard as he can to identify the “real” murderer. At the
same time, this married man cannot reveal that he was in Pauline’s apart-
ment. Thanks to his wife’s detection of crucial clues, Stroud concludes that
Janoth’s lawyer is the murderer of Pauline. This wrongful charge, however,
pushes the lawyer to denounce his own boss. This indictment precipitates a
crisis that makes Janoth fall down an empty elevator shaft, right below his big
and all-seeing clock.
Bazin observes that not one single image or detail goes to waste in The Big
Clock. Yet the film does not take its characters seriously enough. Consequently
this story does not explore moral questions that are sufficiently interesting to
Science 71
compel the viewer to ponder issues and take the characters more seriously.
This example of a classical American policier proves that a director’s tech-
nical competence alone is not sufficient to elicit a thoughtful involvement
from the audience. Despite the talent of the actors, the characters are too thin
to emerge as credible human beings in an otherwise well-crafted narrative.
When asked by his lawyer why he committed a murder, Janoth himself says
he does not even know.
Bazin compares Hollywood to a perfect clock in order to call attention to
this film’s robotic superficiality: “A mechanism well put together, but . . . this
invisible and silent clockwork mechanism that implacably moves the story
forward becomes meaningful only to the extent that it demonstrates what
one can do better in this genre.”34 In short, the critic admires the film’s perfect
design, evident in the clever logic of the criminal intrigue. With its stereotyp-
ical characters, however, the actual unwinding of the detection plot becomes
too predictable.
By telling stories with ordinary weaknesses, the French policier, how-
ever, differentiates itself from the stereotypical characters of the American
detective film. In “The Style Is the Genre” (1954), Bazin situates Clouzot’s
Les diaboliques in the classical policier genre. Les diaboliques is classical
because “the major interest is the police investigation.” This French di-
rector, however, does not stop at the logical solution. In fact he adds an
irrational, yet powerless twist at the very end of Les diaboliques. Without
a doubt, this film exemplifies one of the most innovative uses of a classical
formula. Bazin underlines, “it is as if another film grows out of this one’s
resolution.”35
Bazin remarks that Clouzot’s narrative follows a well-known Aristotelian
plot. Les diaboliques must be logical, cruel, and under control in such a
way that the genre never becomes immoral or dangerous. Once catharsis
happens—namely the passage from the visceral to the cerebral—no matter
how evil the crimes, Clouzot’s film boils down to a mathematical scheme.
The opening title card of Les diaboliques warns the viewer not to give away
the mystery’s solution, as if there were an authentic closure at the end.
Obligingly, Bazin avoids any plot summary that could compromise the im-
pact of Clouzot’s last-minute unexpected twist, after its pseudo ending.
Bazin does credit the film’s first apparent closure with the cathartic impact
of an Aristotelian tragedy, even though its characters are nothing more than
“pieces on a chessboard.”36 The narrative’s moral purpose is safe as long as the
cruelty of Les diaboliques remains a self-contained, cold intellectual exercise.
Based on a crime story, She Who Is No More, by Pierre Boileau (1906–

1989) and Thomas Narcejac (Pierre Ayraud) (1908–1998),37 the action of Les
diaboliques is set in a boarding school on the outskirts of Paris. The school’s
director, the sadistic and adulterous Michel (Paul Meurisse), persecutes his
own wife, the very prudish Christine (Vera Clouzot), and schemes with his
pragmatic mistress, Nicole (Simone Signoret). In secret agreement with
Michel, Nicole pretends to befriend Christine. On the surface, the two
women bond and eventually decide to kill the abusive Michel.
With Christine’s help, Nicole dumps a heavy chest containing Michel’s
body at the bottom of the school’s swimming pool. Yet the evil husband is
alive and well. Being a great swimmer and an accomplished tennis player,
Michel is able to hold his breath under water in the tub where he presum-
ably dies. Furthermore, his physical stamina also enables him to escape the
chest, slip out of the school’s swimming pool, and get away in the darkness of
the night.
Clouzot’s editing and use of objects do persuade the spectators that Nicole
and Christine have succeeded in their intent. Eventually, it is Christine who
dies, of a heart attack, when she discovers that her husband has only pre-
tended to be dead. In secret collusion with his mistress, Nicole, Michel plays
tricks on his wife’s gullible imagination by planting clues of his physical
presence in a hotel and in front of a typewriter. This plot development effec-
tively doubles the film’s generic identities. The policier becomes a horror film,
exploiting first Michel’s alleged resurrection and, later, Christine’s potential
return to life in the guise of a house ghost or a child’s hallucination.
In a gesture of recognition to the rationalist infrastructure built into the
classical policier, Bazin’s essay ends with exponential mathematics tucked in-
side an algebraic equation. The critic’s summary of Les diaboliques derives
from the police investigation. In discussing the acting style of Charles Vanel,
the French actor who plays the film’s Maigret-like detective38 in an endearing
way, Bazin writes: “Maigret [squared] multiplied by -1 equals the solution
to the film’s puzzle.”39 According to Bazin’s impeccable algebra, the intuitive
investigative style of Georges Simenon’s down-to-earth inspector is raised to
the square and set next to Charles Vanel’s Inspector Fichet. The latter’s ap-
proach is preceded by a minus sign. This mathematical notation pays tribute
to how Clouzot’s film is not only a classical, but also an intensified policier.
What does the minus sign mean in this particular case? The detective’s in-
tuition of Christine’s (and the spectator’s) perceptual naïveté is the one and
only recognition of shortsightedness in the whole film. The equivalent of a
Science 73
minus sign—a cognitive impairment, if not a metaphorical blindness—

propels Clouzot’s generative intrigue from persecution to friendship to be-
trayal and, finally, to inheritance. The adulterous couple’s foresight, which
is the narrative’s driving principle, proves diabolical in its long-term vision
and sadistic stamina. In fact, Michel and Nicole engineer the perfect crime
through a fake one. The fake crime fulfills their expectations by provoking
the “natural” death of Michel’s wealthy wife.
Even the last narrative twist cannot destabilize Bazin’s algebraic equation
to describe Clouzot’s classical sense of proportions. According to a young
student, with possibly too much imagination, Christine’s ghost haunts the
boarding school. The film shifts from a policier to horror. Meanwhile the
minus sign also indicates that even though Fichet’s intuition may be vi-
sionary, it still does not extend so far as to explain a dead woman’s reappear-
ance. Only one of her beloved students can summon her ghost. After all,
Christine is a nurturing teacher of English who trains her class with patient
repetitions. By contrast, Nicole is harsh and specializes in mathematics. The
problem, here, is that the student’s hallucination has no agency, and his emo-
tional attachment is not enough to prevent cruelty.
By privileging contingency and realism, in contrast to Clouzot’s stress
on mathematical logic and action, Michelangelo Antonioni’s first impor-
tant fiction film, Story of a Love Affair (1950) impresses Bazin. This film is an
anticlassical, modernist policier that challenges the strong sense of logical,
reflective selfhood required by the genre. The director’s creative agenda is to
weaken the formula through a heightening of realism. The latter draws its
sensorial overload from the stylish worlds of fashion and design. A control-
ling and wealthy husband asks a detective to investigate the past of his beau-
tiful young wife, Paola (Lucia Bosé). A photograph, ripped in half, shows the
young woman next to a man, Guido (Massimo Girotti), who cannot be iden-
tified. The two of them have been involved in a secret love triangle and in a
passive kind of murder-at-distance. Unknowingly, the interference of Paola’s
husband brings the former lovers back together. In the guise of a lazy femme
fatale used to servants, Paola suggests murder to Guido, who hesitates.
Eventually contingency takes over their criminal plan. At the wheel of his
race car, driving recklessly during a rainy night, the husband dies by accident
on an industrial road.
The elegance of Antonioni’s urban setting, the female protagonist’s inac-
tion, and the male lead’s disappearance into the night—all this suggests that
desire, illusion, and absence are what cinema needs to channel irrational
belief into a narrative of suspicion, scheming, and waiting. Struck by the

originality of this policier-in-reverse, Bazin praises the laissez-faire tone of
Antonioni’s approach. Featuring Milan’s sleepy periphery and the quasi-
metaphysical streets of Giorgio De Chirico’s Ferrara, Story of a Love Affair
develops a “stylized realism,”40 of sleek contours and shiny black-and-white
surfaces without any real substance of their own.
Inside a cavernous planetarium, reminiscent of a movie theater, the stars
and the planets are nothing but Paola’s and Guido’s mental projections
for a parallel universe, an alternative life that will never come into being.
Maladroit with both romance and murder, Paola’s and Guido’s affair thrives
on her search for everlasting love and on his economic impotence in the af-
termath of the war. Their shared crime scene speaks to a failure of will and a
triumph of denial. As the spectators of a second murder, which they do not
commit, they become the dreamers of an imaginary life they cannot have.
Interestingly enough, the very powerful realism that subtends three-
dimensional sculptures may become a reason for serial killing—an issue
central to André De Toth’s House of Wax (1953), the first 3-D film released
by Warner Brothers in Technicolor. Here the criminal is an artist who runs
a wax museum. His beloved objects are life-size, handmade wax statues
representing major historical figures, such as Marie Antoinette and Joan
of Arc. So entranced is Jarrod (Vincent Price) with his likeness of Marie
Antoinette that he claims an erotic relationship with the very eyes of his
French Queen. His profane lust threatens to disrupt his museum’s quasi-
sacred space of fetishes and relics. Needless to say, Jarrod’s three-dimensional
effigies fit Bazin’s Catholic iconophilia of mummies and death masks for his
film theory.
In Hollywood cinema, love and art are always in conflict with money and
commerce. In keeping with this principle, Jarrod’s authentic wax museum
does not yield enough profit. Thus Jarrod’s partner burns it down to collect
the insurance. Jarrod survives, disfigured by the flames, but his creative hands
are damaged forever. He takes on the false identity of a handicapped art col-
lector moving around in a wheelchair, an equivalent of camera movement.
Jarrod’s lethal editing, instead, happens at night when he wears a mask and
slashes women with a knife. Secretly, he switches from practicing sculptor to
serial killer. Thus, he can open his second and murderous wax museum with
real corpses covered in wax.
Bazin was no special fan of 3-D, because he argued that spectators would
eventually get tired of wearing the special glasses.41 Yet De Toth’s agenda is to
Science 75
juxtapose the limitations of traditional photography against the advantages

of 3-D. In fact, the incriminating detail can become visible only through
3-D innovation. Furthermore, House of Wax aligns art with crime and reli-
gious faith. This metonymic chain stands in antithesis to logic, intuition, and
asking questions.
After associating male creativity with quasi-divine overtones, De Toth
allows House of Wax to swing in the direction of female emancipation. The
female protagonist, Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk), notices something odd shared
by her recently murdered friend Cathy and Jarrod’s second Joan of Arc: a
pierced ear. Due to its technologically self-reflexive agenda, De Toth’s thriller
downplays who committed the crime and why. The suspense comes from
how the tiniest feature, perceptible only through 3-D, is enough to unmask
the murderer way ahead of a full police investigation. Although the serial
killer does admit that he used a posthumous photograph from a newspaper,
and the police inspector does state that Jarrod came to his office to look at the
photographs of recently murdered women.
Well aware of the illusionistic nature of all kinds of realism, Bazin would be
the very first to agree that neither 3-D films nor forensic photographs tell the
truth. Even when it is intentionally staged, a photographic trace is the hic et
nunc, or the “here and now,” of representation. Through its indexical qualities,
it attests that someone or something was there at a certain moment in time.
De Toth’s agenda is to celebrate a new technology capable of competing
with photography. On the strength of its Platonic Idealism, Hollywood must
solve a criminal intrigue according to a narrative logic that intertwines the
real with the truth. In competition with any police investigation, an enhanced
kind of realism, or cinema in 3-D, delivers the solution of an enigma that
is both artistic and criminal. Cathy’s pierced ear speaks volumes: the actual
hole in her pierced ear reveals the whole truth.
Les diaboliques deals with the allure of money, Story of a Love Affair
explores the longing for erotic fulfillment. Bazin’s tension between logic and
documentary-like realism in the French policier comes up again in his re-
view of Jules Dassin’s Du rififi chez les hommes (1955). Based on a policier by
Auguste le Breton, Dassin’s title retains an argot expression from its literary
source—faire le rififi (to start trouble).
Dassin’s film is concerned with the ironfisted logic of the criminal world’s
closed structure. Instead of raising the policier’s cold logic to ultimate perfec-
tion, Rififi explores the mediocre weaknesses of criminals. Nobody is a mon-
ster. Rififi is remarkable for its three quasi-documentary sequences. The first
two underline the criminals’ ethnographic research in the neighborhood,

and their team work in synch with the rhythms of the street. The third deals
with their leader’s moral consciousness.
In response to Dassin’s policier, with its elimination of intrigue and inves-
tigation, Bazin celebrates the film’s realism: “The documentary-like precision
of the film attenuates the mythology, it increases the genre’s credibility and
sustains the useful confusion between reality and its realist substitution.”42
Rififi’s betrayal takes place among accomplices as a result of male vanity with
women. To be sure, these criminals become weak with desire, revenge, do-
mesticity, and jealousy.
The film’s plot is straightforward. After spending years in jail, Tony
le Stéphanois (Jean Servais), an older gangster, puts together a group of
professionals for his new project. They neutralize an alarm system and drill
a hole into a big safe filled with jewels. While they wait for the jewels to be
smuggled abroad, César (Jules Dassin himself, in the role of Perlo Vita)
makes the classic mistake of talking too much with a woman. This leak of
information triggers a war based on unsettled accounts inside the criminal
world. The rivalry explodes between the young owner of a nightclub and the
elderly but tough Tony. The young nightclub owner revenges himself by kid-
napping the child of one of Stéphanois’s colleagues.
Instead of slipping into horror, this policier risks sliding into a melodrama
because an innocent child is involved. Bazin, however, latches on to how
the documentary edge of Rififi keeps sentimentality at bay. The first quasi-
documentary sequence seems to emerge from the silent genre of the city
film, especially with its detailing of a wealthy neighborhood. In preparation
for their heist, the criminals study every shopkeeper’s schedule.
The second example of quasi-documentary filmmaking unfolds without
music or dialogue for thirty minutes, during the heist. Bazin observes that
this sequence allows Dassin’s policier to flirt with the scientific film. After
tampering with the alarm system, the burglars drill a hole in the floor above
the room with the safe and its riches. This whole operation achieves “an enor-
mous feeling of truthfulness which explains why the breakthrough burglary
sequence looks like a surgical film.”43 Marked only by ambient sound, Bazin
concludes, this thirty-minute sequence is an example of “pure” cinema based
on how the original decoupage in the screenplay matches the editing without
any last-minute revisions.44
Dassin’s film strikes some viewers as a useful source for learning how to
steal. Always on top of controversies, Bazin remarks “this reenactment of a
Science 77
crime is . . . dated. The technique that was employed had been previously
used.”45 Because of its low-tech, improvisational nature, the loosely filmed
ending of Rififi unravels causality into Tony’s stream of consciousness.
Why so much enthusiasm from Bazin? Within Stéphanois’s old-fashioned
criminal code, an emotional and ethical dimension gains priority over any
logical resolution of the plot. The old criminal goes out of his way to save a
kidnapped child. During this process he looks more and more like an old,
wounded man barely able to steer his car. In his review, Bazin appreciates
Dassin’s film for achieving an exception within its genre:
At the end of the film, I love the return of Jean Servais agonizing at the wheel
of his car, after so many useless killings, worried only about returning to its
mother a live child who unconsciously plays cowboy with a revolver. This
sequence could have been conventional and melodramatic, but simplicity
of technical means and the sincerity of the feeling make it unsettling.46
Worth mentioning beyond Bazin’s film review, Rififi contains one more hyp-
notic sequence marked by Alexander Trauner’s simple, but introspective set-
design. In a nightclub setting, Magali Noël sings Rififi’s theme song. During
her performance, the camera frames a white, fully lit screen that looks like
the support for a Chinese shadow play, an obvious ancestor of the cinema.
Behind this screen, the two black silhouettes of a gangster and his girl slowly
move in a dancelike fashion. Thanks to the cartoonlike modesty of Trauner’s
background, their moving reliefs become poetic and erotic at the same time.
Miraculous Mathematics
Perhaps because of its utopian plot, compatible with Mounier’s Personalist

thought, Bazin champions Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan (1951). Well
aware of the stylistic influences of René Clair and Charlie Chaplin on De
Sica’s ironic handling of social class and the film’s reliance on gags, Bazin
finds Miracle in Milan to be courageous and free-spirited. De Sica’s film
exposes human selfishness, as well as capitalist accumulation, without ever
falling into the simplistic moralizing dichotomies of rich and poor, typical of
much Marxist analysis of the class struggle.
The film tells the story of Totò, a young boy who transfigures the geog-
raphy of the slum in which he lives, by renaming all of the street signs that
typically glorify Italian antiquity. To debunk residues of Fascist nationalism

in his urban milieu, he playfully appropriates the multiplication tables that
children learn in school. In describing Totò’s revitalizing use of multiplica-
tion, Bazin writes: “Like an urban planner, Totò names streets and squares
4 × 4 = 16, 9 × 9 = 81, because these cold mathematical symbols for him are
more beautiful than mythological names.”47
This is a remarkable example of how arithmetical logic can become the
flipside of fantasy. Like De Sica’s Totò, Bazin, too, wants to enliven mathe-
matics and the machine of cinema with a touch of universal poetry, artistic
intuition, and neighborly love. Bazin’s enthusiasm for Miracle in Milan
suggests that his fascination with childhood stems in large part from how
the all-inclusive, undiscriminating, open perception of children like Totò
replicates cinema’s equalizing, nonhuman lens.
Miracle in Milan is coauthored by De Sica and Cesare Zavattini, based
on Zavattini’s 1943 novel Totò il buono.48 The novel grows out of a three-
page treatment written in 1940 by the left-wing Zavattini and the legendary
Neapolitan comedian Antonio De Curtis, known as the “Prince of Laughter,”
whose stage name is Totò. The date 1940 is significant because the project
precedes World War II and antedates neorealism’s official birthdate in 1943,
with Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione.
The original idea also blooms long before the antagonism between Italian
Communists and Catholics during the political elections of 1948. Miracle in
Milan’s left-wing orientation is justifiable. In 1940, despite Fascist censor-
ship, Stalinist Russia is exercising its full influence among artists, university
students, intellectuals, and in Italian film circles, through Socialist Realist
cinema. The use of fantasy, magic, and special effects in Miracle in Milan is
especially suspect from Marxist, populist, and neorealist perspectives alike.
Bazin stands out as the critic uniquely capable of appreciating this highly
original and courageous film on human imperfections.49
The early title of De Sica’s screenplay refers to an orphan found under a
cabbage by an old lady, Lolotta, in a fiction that begins with the intertitle
“Once upon a time.” After the death of Lolotta, Totò grows up in an or-
phanage. As soon as he leaves this institution, Totò surrenders his suitcase
to a poor man who, after stealing from him, offers the homeless Totò a place
to sleep in his own disheveled shelter. Conceived in opposition to the reli-
ance on studio sets in traditional Hollywood films, the shooting locations
of De Sica’s film are actual places near the railway station of Lambrate, in the
Science 79
industrial outskirts of Milan. There, homeless people manage to share a few

rays of sunshine during a freezing winter.
To be sure, children take their fairy tales very seriously. At a very young
age, their cognitive abilities are still developing. Thus they cannot tell the
difference between the real and the contrived, or the violent and the comic.
Miracle in Milan is a neorealist fairy tale for adults. As such, it aspires to-
ward the genre of the moral fable with a social consciousness. For a while,
the working title of the film is The Poor Are in the Way (I Poveri Disturbano).
De Sica’s and Zavattini’s primary project is to expose the painfully divi-
sive side of capitalism, but they also show that rich and poor alike can be
selfish and unreliable. The allegorical mode cannot prevail because Miracle’s
characters all make mistakes, including Totò. Likewise, a dishonest man,
among the poor characters, maintains his clumsy humanity without ever
turning into an evil monster. Nobody becomes a mythical or superhuman
figure.
Miracle in Milan is three times more expensive than De Sica’s much more
famous and also costly Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di Biciclette, 1948). In addition,
fantasy challenges a documentary-like esthetic. Early on, Lolotta provides a
basis for the fantastic tone of the film’s narrative. She places a few miniature
trees and houses on milk that has spilled on the floor. Then she tells Totò, who
looks down from above, “This is the earth.” This moment explicitly links the
fantastic inspiration of the fairy tale with Totò’s visionary trust in the human
heart, regardless of social class or individual psychology. Since Lolotta shows
the boy the earth from the point of view of the moon, Toto’s rejuvenating
perception is lunar or extraterrestrial. During this episode, it coincides with
the camera’s eye. This alignment of perspectives emphasizes, once again, the
analogy between childhood inexperience and the indifferent, equalizing lens
of the camera.
At first, the capitalist Mobbi does not care if the homeless occupy a slum
area, living out of cardboard boxes and inside empty cement pipes. He
and Totò agree that rich and poor are all human because, mathematically
speaking, everybody has one nose and five fingers on each hand. However, as
soon as oil is discovered in the slum, the greedy and fat Mobbi persuades the
police to chase the homeless out of their miserable dwellings. A bloody clash
between rich and poor seems to be inevitable. But Totò instructs his friends
to “breathe” against the police who are about to assault them with guns and
batons. What could be more powerful than a whole crowd breathing out
their spiritual energy against adversities? In comparison to a healthy person’s

automatic heartbeat, exhaling is a more willful response.
This struggle between classes, however, is about to be won by Mobbi and
the police. Thanks to a series of special effects, engineered by Hollywood’s
Ned Mann, more screen magic prevents this outcome. Totò receives a special
dove from Lolotta, who comes from heaven to rescue her child. Full of good
intentions, Totò uses this supernatural gift not only to push back the po-
lice but also to give his poor friends all the things that they desire: a vacuum
cleaner, a regal outfit, a dresser, and a pair of shoes. Some of the homeless,
however, take advantage of their new possessions to exploit their fellow
neighbors, violating Totò’s ethos of sharing. By looking like transparent
ghosts in superimposition,50 two angelic creatures come down from heaven
and take Lolotta’s magic dove away from Totò. He lacks sufficient control
over the consequences of his magic gifts.
The ending of Miracle in Milan is utopian and in line with Catholic so-
cial mythology. The homeless are convoyed in locked police vans through
the square of Milan’s Duomo, the famous gothic cathedral. Miraculously,
all the locked police vans break down. On his magic broomstick, Totò leads
the group into the sky of an imaginary afterlife, as the homeless imitate their
leader, flying one after another behind Totò. In the screenplay, Zavattini’s
original conclusion, however, is different from the film. After traveling
around the sky for a while, the poor seek a landing area where they would
not disturb anyone. This search proves impossible. As they look down on the
earth, all they see are signs stating in big letters “private property.” Here, one
can see how Mounier’s dislike of capitalism carries over into Bazin’s approval
of this film.
Although De Sica’s film receives the Grand Prize at the 1951 Cannes
Film Festival, the critical reception is mixed and mostly negative. This crit-
ical reaction in the middle of the Cold War is understandable. Despite the
director’s visual rhyming of the capitalist Mobbi with the wealthy moguls
in Eisenstein’s Strike (1924), Miracle in Milan is banned in the atheist Soviet
Union. In the West, left-wing critics find the film too evangelical, while right-
wing critics claim that it is a subversive Communist work. Except for the left-
wing Catholic dissident Bazin, nobody is happy with De Sica’s and Zavattini’s
tightrope-walking act. In Miracle in Milan, the Christian ethos based on uni-
versal human fellowship is more important than allegiance to social class or
to a political party.
Science 81
Instead of allegorizing economic injustices and proposing a binary model

of the class struggle through one-dimensional characters, the neorealism
of Miracle in Milan embraces an irrational belief in a parallel, utopian re-
ality, or Catholic “Paradise.” There people live in a world free of death, social
injustices, and class divisions. This happy ending moves the fairy tale be-
yond moral fable, into the realm of the marvelous. In this little understood
film, the realm of the fantastic—with its oscillation between the impossible
and the believable, the explicit fairy tale and the potential social allegory—
escalates into something hopeful. The imaginary heaven at the end of
Miracle, however, strikes a note of contrast with the “platonic heavens” of
ambitious inventors in “The Myth of Total Cinema.” One must acknowledge
that, whenever he can, Bazin practices a certain critical generosity. In con-
trast to the theorist and the historian who can fall back on previous models,
the film reviewer is a lonely pioneer with only the stars for compass.
De Sica’s imaginative interface between the mathematics of capitalism and
the fantastic in neorealism is useful for explaining why Bazin constantly pits
surprises from the life sciences against the logic of the exact sciences. Keen
on equilibrium between reason and faith, he engages the policier to dem-
onstrate the sadistic extremes of rationality. Most remarkable, however, is
the connection between phenomenology and calculus that Bazin proposes
through neorealism. As the mathematics of modernity, calculus applies to
a world intersected by different speeds. In this context, the static logic of
Euclidean models must surrender itself to displacement and epiphanies.
Applied to cinema, calculus fits changes in line with optical perception and
moral consciousness. Likewise, phenomenology, the philosophy of subjec-
tive encounters and emerging insights, exchanges exteriority with interiority.
By so doing, it opposes stable as well as binary ideological readings.
Neorealism and Calculus
Neither a style, nor a genre, nor a formula, the “Italian School of the
Liberation”—or neorealist cinema—is a “revolutionary humanism,”51 thanks
to its anti-anthropocentric ethos. Possibly, Bazin calls it a “school” to under-
line the power of its legacy into the future and the ways in which this ap-
proach impacts the cinemas of Latin America, Asia, and Africa by enabling
the representation of marginal or oppressed people.
For clarity’s sake, Bazin explains that Italian neorealism is not more re-
alistic than other realisms. On one hand, for this cinematic sensibility, the
quantity of reality is never the determining factor. On the other, any realism,
including neorealism, requires a loss of reality and engagement of artifice.
Given that neorealism is not bound by rules, the choice of subject does matter
a great deal. Topic functions qualitatively, since it requires a sincere stance of
honest attentiveness. In response to a particular topic, the director needs to
care and embrace an intuitive creativity that can function in unstructured
situations.
This is not to say that topic is everything and that the figure of the director
becomes less and less important in neorealist films. On the contrary, such a
creative role grows in significance the more it accepts a subordinate position
in the face of spontaneous events. The challenge is to proceed as if traditional
cinema—with lights, set design, microphones, and costumes—no longer
matters that much.
Temperamentally, Rossellini is a master at seizing small and large oppor-
tunities capable of displacing his actors and his spectators. Rossellini believes
in using what is there, around him, ranging from people to locations, to ways
of living. His talent consists in relating to narrative as a live being gifted with
biological rhythms of its own. He is able to engage an objective reality of facts
and endow it with the visceral intensity of life and death.
Over the years, one of Rossellini’s most controversial statements has
been: “Things are, why change them?”52 For the critics of the 1980s, keen as
they were on ideological criticism, such a phrase sounded like a reactionary
admission of passivity in front of the status quo. Looking retrospectively at
this erroneous interpretation, one can now begin to understand that what-
ever Rossellini finds in his real locations, ranging from local inhabitants to
geographical atmospheres, inspires him to take in a whole “aesthetic ge-
ology”53 at face value.
Neorealist filmmaking depends on a new kind of postwar receptivity. In
the wake of this moral climate based on renewal, but also overwhelmed by
the war, neorealist characters struggle and search. They are more reactive
and exploratory than goal-oriented and self-confident. They wish for change,
but as victims of traumas and injustices, their ability to act has undergone
a breakdown. This rupture, however, is most productive in that it leads to a
renewal of perception, social orientation, and moral growth, rather than to
habit, paralysis, or resignation. Neorealism’s fluidity strikes a note of contrast
with the positivist determinism of nineteenth-century naturalism based on
Science 83
melodramatic coincidences, accumulation of realistic details, and a fatalistic

thesis. Neorealism is tragic, but always centrifugal, so that a call for social jus-
tice becomes morally imperative rather than didactic or preachy.
As the closest fulfillment of his entire film theory, Bazin associates Italian
neorealism with immanence, phenomenology, and ontology:
Neorealism knows only immanence. It is from appearance only, the simple

appearance of beings and of the world, that it knows how to deduce the
ideas that it unearths. It is a phenomenology. [ . . . ] Thus neorealism is more
an ontological position than an aesthetic one.54
Ontological means a way of being otherwise. Deduction, here, underlines

the ways in which neorealist cinema asks its audiences to reflect on human
delusions. Flashes of illumination and occasions for self-criticism and altru-
istic compassion are the true protagonists of neorealism.
Italian politicians, like Giulio Andreotti, opposed these films for they
denounced chronic social evils. By the same token, dogmatic Marxist critics
like Guido Aristarco spoke against Federico Fellini’s introspective turn or
against Luchino Visconti’s operatic approach. Had it not been for Bazin’s in-
ternational advocacy, this phase of Italian cinema would have been discour-
aged from pursuing its avant-garde edge.
Even during its best years and through its best examples, neorealism is, by
definition, unstable and characterized by a delicate chemistry of direct expe-
rience and interpretation. To this day, neorealism transports the spectators
inside an ontology in search of itself, which asks over and over again what
a human is. Furthermore, Bazin’s notion of immanence applies to a cinema
that blurs the differences between the fictional and the nonfictional, the exte-
rior and the interior.
During such a chaotic historical phase, abstract binaries are always a temp-
tation. The unstable syntheses that neorealist directors choose to observe,
through the messy fabric of daily life, oppose an either-or mentality. Since
neorealism escapes all systematic definitions, Bazin admits that he can only
deduce examples of different kinds of neorealisms from different directors,
depending on what they have done in each film.
No repeatable neorealist recipe exists, so much so that even Rossellini
and De Sica are, at first, neorealist directors, even though, later on, they
stop being so. And Bazin is the first critic to be highly aware that this kind
of cinema is so deeply rooted in a particular historical experience that it is
constitutionally doomed to be very short-lived; it carries the seeds of its own

decay inside its historical premise.
Bazin never associated the realism of neorealism with a transcendent
truth. To be sure, his film theory always privileged subjective perception
over objective knowledge in fictional and nonfictional cinema. The prefix
neo, in neorealism, implies a historical departure from the clear cause-and-
effect relationships of many previous “realisms” (Hollywood realism, Soviet
sociorealism, French naturalist melodramas). Neorealism is a new realism
where the inner transformation of someone’s way of seeing and feeling is
much more important than a self-contained class consciousness or cultural
origin. In neorealism, constant becoming discards stable being, multifaceted
ambiguities win over clarity, while the intuitive grasp of lifelike situations
prevails over logical analysis. Despite neorealism’s tragic mode, open endings
prevent a dogmatic mode.
Bazin’s critical acuity thrives on the anti-anthropocentric bent of neore-
alism whose quickly sketched narratives sustain themselves by turning the
moment into “history in the present tense.” In 1945, it seems that everything
is possible. After decades of living with Fascist propaganda and, during the
war years, with fear and violence, some areas of Italian society feel they can
give birth to a better world. This widespread feeling of self-willed reinven-
tion temporarily resonates in the streets and in the film studios alike. For a
while, filmmakers respond to the here and now of the war through a quasi-
documentary approach.
Even though Bazin writes essays on Giuseppe De Santis, Pietro Germi,
Renato Castellani, and Alberto Lattuada, to mention only a few names from
that whole generation, the critic’s foremost neorealist directors are Rossellini,
with his War Trilogy, and De Sica, with Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto
D (1952). Precisely because neorealism involves an anti-anthropocentric at-
titude, one is free to develop it in different ways. Bazin differentiates between
these two directors’ ways of working:
Rossellini’s love for his characters envelops them in a desperate awareness

of man’s inability to communicate; De Sica’s love, on the contrary, radiates
from the people themselves. They are what they are, but lit from within by
the tenderness he feels for them. It follows that Rossellini’s direction comes
between his material and us, not as an artificial obstacle set up between the
two, but as an unbridgeable, ontological distance, a congenital weakness
of the human being which expresses itself aesthetically in terms of space,
Science 85
in forms, in the structure of his mise-en-scène. [ . . . ] By contrast, De Sica

is one of those directors whose sole purpose seems to be to interpret their
scenarios faithfully, [ . . . ]. The mise-en-scène seems to take shape after the
fashion of a natural form in living matter.55
As far as Bazin’s use of scientific metaphors in relation to Rossellini’s War

Trilogy, the critic relates the six fragmented stories that make up Paisà to
a parallelepiped (a six-sided polyhedron).56 Paisà’s parallelepiped is stuck
onto the surface of the screen. It is as if ready-made chunks of imaged reality
had been intercepted by the camera and traveled through the screen. True,
the screen is nothing but a fixed surface with an absolute scale. Yet, with the
term “parallelepiped,” the critic underlines the multidimensional density of
Rossellini’s “image facts.”57 Instead of perfectly designed, the image is rough.
It looks as if the physicality of matter and flesh, the neorealist prolif-
eration of sensorial detail, with sweat and blood, could linger inside the
flat play of shadow and light flickering on the screen. The latter, in turn,
becomes more and more absorbing. One may think of tortured bodies
in Rome: Open City (1945); or one may reflect on the harsh natural light
around the buildings razed by bombs in Germany Year Zero (1948). Keen
on reaching out, neorealism turns Rossellini’s camera into a quasi-tactile
antenna, dipping into chaos and struggle. Thus, like a ready-made con-
tainer, the neorealist image emerges out of crowd scenes and scattered
ruins covered in dust and debris.
Whereas Rossellini’s films take audiences by surprise with their sketchy
narratives, De Sica made a name for himself thanks to his transparent, yet
subtly pictorial approach. In regard to this director, who worked closely for
several years with the writer Cesare Zavattini (1902–1989), Bazin argues that
the more planning and improvisation converge on each other, the more the
“myth” of “total” cinema, with more technology, looks dated and weakens it-
self in front of its alternative possibility: the “end of cinema.”
In the wake of black-and-white photojournalism spurred by the social
consciousness of the thirties in America and in France, cinematic artifice
must hide itself in seemingly spontaneous events. In regard to Bicycle Thieves,
Bazin explains: “No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say
that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema.”58 In
other words, by becoming the exact opposite of “total” cinema with cinema-
scope and 3-D in its future, neorealism accomplishes the “end of cinema,”
with its unobtrusive present tense.
Always predicated on the sincerity of its own directors, neorealist

cinema’s “extraordinary feeling of truth”59 takes cinema back full circle
to an imaginary denial of its invention. Significantly, this phase of pseudo
self-effacement makes clear why Bazin argues that the technological tele-
ology of “total” cinema was nothing but a “myth.” In fact, neorealism proves
that “pure” cinema and artsy expressionism are incompatible. The dream of
cinema belongs to the human impulse to record life, and keep it in motion,
fully alive with its heart beating inside a static photographic image. By the
same token, technological illusionism, focal lengths, cheap film stock, nat-
ural lighting, sound done in postproduction, and real locations transform
the recorded footage into a lifelike event.
Neorealism demonstrates that less is more. Rossellini’s low-quality film
stock captures not only the look of a whole period ravaged by destruction,
but also its inner and most hidden pulsations. Life itself is the miracle that
his cinema wishes to imitate, even with a minimum of technology due to the
scarcity of equipment imposed by the war. Neorealism challenges the myth-
ical status of “total” cinema as a cinema of money and technological power.
Neorealism demonstrates that more and more technology by itself does not
always lead to a transparent and perfect illusion of reality.
A case in point is how Rossellini’s intentionally antidramatic, elliptical
filmmaking welcomes lacunae. The key point, here, is that it becomes impos-
sible to tell the difference between reticent images and the loose ends that life
itself refuses to bring together. Such serendipitous examples of neorealism
approaching reality can take place only when the camera behaves like a par-
ticipant observer inside a narrative it can only witness, but can never control.
Granted that neorealism rarely exists in a pure state and it can combine
itself with other aesthetic tendencies,60 Bazin argues that De Sica’s Bicycle
Thieves brings about “an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own
image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or
the irreversibility of time.”61 Gifted with Neapolitan warmth, De Sica’s “pure”
cinema is different from Rossellini’s, which is more concerned with indi-
vidual loneliness.
Rossellini’s cinema thrives on the centrifugal62 spin of its lonely images,
asking viewers to come up with their own narrative route of interpretation.
Reality does exist and is made of facts. How the director and the spectator
link these facts is subjective. The issue is not the truth, but a sincerity of ap-
proach that is intellectual as well as emotional. By manipulating scale and
framing, Rossellini’s eye-level shooting technique turns the screen into a
Science 87
factual world of isolation: a half-naked child cries in the twilight. We guess

his parents were peasants and they have been killed by the Germans.
As if it were a candle in the darkness, Rossellini’s camera intersects with the
child, without adding anything more. Due to their brevity, Rossellini’s quick
shots have a tragic, devastating impact. There is no time for explanations or
compositions. The crying child hits us with the uniqueness of a one-time dis-
closure that will never become an encounter. He is alone and we, too, are
alone in front of him. There is no solution.
Equally supportive of a different kind of neorealism, Bazin admires De
Sica, who continually thrives on movement, thus opening up possibilities
of mutual exchange. De Sica’s stories underline the constant horizontal and
vertical crossing of spaces: running, walking, moving through a flea market,
chasing a thief, climbing a ladder set against a wall, coming down the stairs
with a bucket for water. Whereas Rossellini’s crowds are overwhelming and
dangerous, in De Sica’s cinema there is a sustained exploration of group
situations that range from indifference to support, from help to aggression.
De Sica turns quotidian desperation into a perceptual adventure whose
tragic outcome is tempered with the possibility of human solidarity, or by
the bond between a destitute man and his dog in Umberto D. There is none
of this in Rossellini’s Paisà: the Sicilian girl, Carmela, dies alone on the rocks.
She has been equally abandoned or misunderstood by her own people, and
by the American and the German soldiers. Interestingly, there is no room for
tears with either Rossellini or De Sica.
Bazin never used the word “ideological” to describe Rossellini’s or De
Sica’s documentation of struggle and poverty. Thanks to these two directors’
deep understanding of how every social tragedy is an existential condition,
their films avoid piety and sentimentality. This is why their stories remain
forever modern and antagonistic to the status quo. Even if the protagonist
is a partisan or an unemployed worker, personal and class dilemmas never
become melodramas, thanks to these directors’ allegiance to an objectifying
point of view. All of their characters are deeply entrenched in the urban envi-
ronment or in the natural landscape that surrounds them. Yet they never lose
their complexity and they never become picturesque figments.
Regardless of staged or unstaged contingency, neorealist films are
occasions of becoming on the part of ephemeral life forms, energized by a
moment in history and vivified by nonprofessional actors working next to
trained performers. Such a required “amalgam,” Bazin’s word, from all walks
of life is a constant strategy for Rossellini and De Sica alike. Their “osmosis”63
of different levels of experience and self-consciousness sets into relief how

fictional roles do not always match physical appearance, while gesture and
posture by themselves are often more eloquent than dialogue.
By pointing out that the use of nonprofessional actors is not a law of neo-
realism, Bazin compares the film set to life-in-progress or to a traveling bus.
Everybody shares the same journey—which is nothing but the making of
a film. This elbow-to-elbow situation dictated by public transportation, or
by making a film, is precisely what interests Rossellini and De Sica. Bazin
captures the secret complementarity of these two directors’ different intu-
itive methods: De Sica finds his way of seeing through emotions, whereas
Rossellini relies on his special ability to seize the moment. As far as the
overlap between filmmaking and traveling, Bazin observes:
That is why the Italian film makers alone know how to shoot successful
scenes in buses, trucks, or trains, namely because these scenes combine
to create a special density within the framework of which they know how
to portray an action without separating it from its material context and
without loss of that uniquely human quality of which it is an integral part.
The subtlety and suppleness of movement within these cluttered spaces, the
naturalness of the behavior of everyone in the shooting area, make of these
scenes supreme bravura moments of the Italian cinema.64
Whenever a group of people participates in the making of a film or the

unfolding of a journey, a network of potential relationships inevitably
emerges, thus transforming artificial spaces and natural landscapes into a
narrative and temporal mise-en-scène.
In regard to Bicycle Thieves, Bazin observes that “De Sica’s film took
a long time to prepare, and everything was as minutely planned as for a
studio super-production, which as a matter of fact, allows for last-minute
improvisations.”65 Briefly, the narrative of Bicycle Thieves: De Sica’s adult
protagonist, Antonio Ricci, played by nonprofessional actor Lamberto
Maggiorani, goes through a crisis of knowledge. This inner process is trig-
gered by the theft of his bicycle, which he desperately needs in order to work
as a poster hanger all over the streets of Rome.
The editing of the film underlines the protagonist’s perceptual limitations
in space, and even the repeated misperception of his own son, Bruno (played
by the nonprofessional Enzo Stajola). For example, after an argument with
his child, the father erroneously thinks that Bruno has drowned in the Tiber.
Science 89
A few shots underline Antonio’s state of panic and spatial disorientation. The
father’s agitation looks even more hysterical as soon as the camera shifts from
him to pay attention, instead, to the body of a different boy. This method of
anti-anthropocentric disempowerment spells out the character’s impasse—
and our own—in front of an unknowable objective reality.
In a neorealist film, everything must occur as if it were happening for the
very first time, outside of any expectations, including the director’s. Or so
it seems, because the opposite is indeed the case. De Sica relies heavily on
miming for his direction of actors and is very strict with his nonprofessionals.
Admittedly, he chooses nonprofessional performers whose daily lives are
similar to his fictional characters’ roles. In this way, De Sica can strike a chord
of authenticity. As precise as his miming is, it never becomes dictatorial,
but he is always caring with adults as well as children. De Sica predicates his
casting on an aspect of physical appearance that seems to disclose something
introspective or immanent.
The more spontaneous the children’s miming becomes, the more their
facial expressions guide the film. In Bicycle Thieves, for example, little Enzo
Stajola, with the dark shadows under his naïve eyes, is the perfect choice
to tell the story of a child who behaves like an adult. By contrast, Lamberto
Maggiorani’s lengthy stride conveys all the impatience of an adult who, from
time to time, acts like a child. After all, De Sica becomes famous for his un-
canny ability to find the character in the body of a nonprofessional, without
ever falling into any simpleminded typecasting based on physiognomy alone.
In neorealism, as Bazin sees it, a narrative unfolds in an apparently erratic
way, according to one single point of view struggling inside an unreadable
world. Without a logical trail of clues to rely on, a neorealist film is usually
characterized by a proliferation of sensuous details. Regardless of any re-
lationship to local color, this quasi-ethnographic turbulence underpins a
multifaceted reality that yields no logical answers. In De Sica’s neorealism,
the perceptual novelty of formless events becomes so overwhelming that ra-
tional cognition gives way to a dreamlike, surreal state.
For example, before Antonio decides to steal someone else’s bicycle, he is
mentally haunted by a flurry of bicycle riders during a competitive race that
passes before his eyes. In this sequence, the difference between subjective per-
ception and visionary hallucination becomes unclear. At such moments, the
self oscillates between displacement and receptivity. Neorealism reveals the
imperfections, ambiguities, anger, frailty, and duplicity of all human beings,
be they thieves or policemen, political activists or unemployed citizens. It
shows how their behaviors resist or exceed simpleminded categories such as

good and evil, rich or poor. De Sica’s characters are “persons,” namely human
beings that no definition, summary, or explanation can fully capture.
In Bicycle Thieves, the victim of a theft nearly becomes a thief himself.
What is worse, Antonio Ricci happens to do so in front of his own son, who
worships his father as an ideal, superhuman creature. While Zavattini and De
Sica avoid any institutional or class-based scapegoat, the end of the film with
a crowd of unemployed men walking sadly down the street suggests a life of
precariousness and squalor. Yet, by the conclusion of this film, father and son
connect through the mutual acceptance of each other’s imperfections. Such a
conclusion is not based only on social class, but also on the ability to love and
the power to forgive.
Most of all, Bazin admires the mix of precision and freewheeling form in
De Sica’s film. Let us, for example, examine the critic’s use of the term “inte-
gral,” from calculus, so that we might evaluate the relevance of this mathe-
matical metaphor to Bicycle Thieves.
In contrast to Platonic algebra, calculus accommodates contingency. To
be sure, calculus stands for the modern mathematics of movement, changing
values, and displacement. As such, calculus acknowledges a kind of reality
that is subjective and in constant flux. This fluctuating world in search of new
moral values is quite different from Hollywood’s Manichean oppositions.
The predictable struggle of good and evil in American cinema summons the
static world to which Zeno’s famous paradox belongs.66 Within this latter
framework, the arrow can never reach its target. In contrast to Zeno’s arrow,
Bergson and Bazin differentiate themselves by embracing a new and more
introspective sensibility based on flow, exchange, surprise, and flux rather
than on measurable lines and identical points.
As a method of computation open to macroscopic as well as to micro-
scopic changes, calculus offers Bazin the most accurate terminology for
commenting on a protagonist in constant motion and blinded by his own
anxieties. Although each real location used in the film was carefully chosen,
the narrative is intentionally episodic and loosely organized. Bazin writes:
It is in fact on its reverse side, and by parallels, that the action is assembled—
less in terms of “tension” than of a “summation” of the events. Yes, it is a
spectacle, and what a spectacle! Ladri di Biclette, however, does not de-
pend on the mathematical elements of drama, the action does not exist
beforehand as if it were an “essence.” It follows from the preexistence of
Science 91
the narrative, it is the “integral” of reality. De Sica’s supreme achievement,

which others have so far only approached with a varying degree of success
or failure, is to have succeeded in discovering the cinematographic dialectic
capable of transcending the contradiction between the action of a “spec-
tacle” and of an event. For this reason, Ladri di Biclette is one of the first
examples of pure cinema. . . . in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there
is no more cinema.67
The integral of calculus deals with variations of speed. It integrates them into
an average of alleged contingencies based on two human beings moving in
space: the father runs in front and the son struggles to keep up. The absence
of causal links among the various episodes of Bicycle Thieves is so crucial that
their ordering can be rearranged without any loss of narrative intelligibility.
And the very absence of any distinction between spectacle and event is pre-
cisely why Bicycle Thieves is a rare example of “pure cinema,” the “perfect
aesthetic illusion of reality,” or “the ‘integral’ of reality.” The term “integral”
confirms that the “real” of neorealism is simultaneously a subjective halluci-
natory experience and an objective fact based on two people walking at two
difference speeds.
Eventually, in his long essay on De Sica as a metteur-en-scène, Bazin drops
calculus and the integral. Nevertheless, he remains consistent, because he
turns to another mathematical metaphor that allows for contingency. He
refers to an asymptote, from analytic geometry, to discuss a subsequent
film by De Sica and Zavattini, Umberto D (1952). To begin with, the asymp-
tote, just like the integral of calculus, stands for changing trajectories and
perceptions.68 Especially worth discussing is how the famous “kitchen se-
quence” of Umberto D is literally based on waking up and coming slowly to
terms with the world around oneself.
Indeed, the true subject of this sequence is how someone’s perceptual alert-
ness comes into being tentatively and painfully. Through a repeated use of
medium and long shots, together with a proliferation of tight frames dealing
with touch, sight, and hearing, the emphasis is all on the young maid Maria’s
automatized and indifferent demeanor at the very beginning of her morning
routine. The ringing of a doorbell interrupts her casual gestures: grinding
coffee, slouching on her chair to kick the door with the tip of her foot. She
sits in a dirty, disheveled kitchen, with one window overlooking a gray winter
day, in a working-class neighborhood. Throughout this sequence, there is an
intentional avoidance of close-ups, even though it would have been so easy
to focus on Maria’s belly, her hands holding an object, her eyes staring into
the void. If any of these close-ups had taken place, the whole sequence would
have sunk into condescension.
Played by a nonprofessional actress, Maria Pia Casilio, the maid Maria
experiences a sudden vertigo of anxiety. Her sleepwalking manner interrupts
itself as soon as her hand touches her stomach. Such a small gesture proves
that she knows all too clearly that she is pregnant. Absolutely nothing else
overtly dramatic happens. Well aware that Bicycle Thieves’ fluid temporality
has been replaced by Umberto D’s routine motions, Bazin writes:
Have I already said that it is Zavattini’s dream to make a whole film out
of ninety minutes in the life of a man to whom nothing happens? That is
precisely what “neorealism” means for him. Two or three sequences in
Umberto D give us more than a glimpse of what such a film might be like;
they are fragments of it that have already been shot. But let us make no
mistake about the meaning and the value realism has here. De Sica and
Zavattini are concerned to make cinema the asymptote of reality—but in
order that it should ultimately be life itself that becomes spectacle, in order
that life might in this perfect mirror be visible poetry, be the self into which
film finally changes it.69
Neither visionary nor voyeuristic, the camera concentrates on the “mi-

crophysics,”70 or unpredictable and quasi-subatomic particles, of Maria’s
morning routine. A world of objects takes over our attention: the coffee
grinder, the door ajar, the leaking faucet, the insects over the sink, the
matches scratched on the wall, and the window framing a lonely cat. All of
a sudden, this barely developed, marginal, and apparently passive character,
Maria, opens herself up to our scrutiny. Her superficial tasks give way to the
depth of a young woman lingering between sleep and anxiety, pregnancy and
loneliness.
Without idealizing their topic or stereotyping their character, De Sica and
Zavattini make timeless poetry out of a kitchen. The latter becomes most fa-
miliar and credible as soon as, through Maria’s point of view, we gradually
come to know every nook and cranny, each worn-out tile and every single
wet surface.
In regard to Umberto D’s poetry of daily life, the final sentence of Bazin’s
essay (“be the self into which film finally changes it”) paraphrases a line
by Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898),71 a symbolist poet for whom grand
Science 93
abstractions and mundane reality were always incompatible. Mallarmé’s

avant-garde poetics sought extreme, total solutions such as: the ground zero
of language, the blankness of the white page, an instant eternally suspended.
Well aware that the elitist Mallarmé purifies his language to denounce the
banalities of ordinary life, Bazin willfully chooses to ignore the gap between
high-culture modernism and the miserable environments of neorealism. In
order to prove that there is no room for melodrama with De Sica, and eager
to comment on Umberto D’s deepening of neorealism, the critic turns to
Mallarme’s hermetic sonnet on the death of Edgar Allan Poe.
By paraphrasing Mallarmé, Bazin argues that neorealism, in its pur-
suit of “pure” cinema or “the end of cinema,” is an avant-garde phase in the
history of cinema. The point is that Umberto D explores a virgin territory
based on the deepest and most infinitesimal levels of existence. Whether one
calls it the “end” of cinema or “pure” cinema, the bypassing of conventional
drama in the kitchen sequence is as sophisticated as Mallarmé’s linguistic
experimentations striving for poetry’s purified eternity above ordinary lan-
guage.72 Why does Bazin replace the “integral” of Bicycle Thieves with the
“asymptote” of Umberto D? Because in an asymptote, the distance between
the line and the curve approximates zero. Thus it relates to Bazin’s claim of
the “end of cinema.”
Zavattini’s plan was to make a ninety- minute film “where nothing
happens,” because every moment is different from every other and is equally
important. By taking the neorealism of Bicycle Thieves one step forward, so to
speak, De Sica and Zavattini turn inside out overlooked pockets of time filled
with physical sensations. Thus they convey Maria’s mental state through ex-
ternal surfaces. This approach is comparable to Mallarmé’s attempt to re-
invent language. In the kitchen sequence, De Sica’s sparse editing and slow
camera work make “visible and timeless poetry,” out of daily life seized in its
passing. Through the cinema, the biology of human experience becomes ob-
jectivity in time.
Michael Faraday
In the language of calculus, the mathematics of live relationships, De Sica’s

reversals are as important as his parallels because these two methods inform
what Bazin calls a sommation (summation) of episodes, thus invoking a
Riemann sum. Of interest here is the effortless way in which the episodes of
Bicycle Thieves fall into place organically, without eliciting confusion. Not too
different from the word “integral,” the term “summation” means that all the
episodes enhance each other, while each one maintains its own purpose. In
calculus, “summation” describes the coexistence of multiple trajectories in a
state of simultaneous transformation.
Bazin’s choice of the term “summation” is important for a further reason.
It proves that his mathematical references do correlate. Due to its compati-
bility with an egalitarian yet individualized arrangement, summation speaks
to an experiment in electromagnetism developed by the nineteenth-century
British scientist Michael Faraday (1791–1867). This experiment involves iron
filings and a magnet (Figure 3.2). It provides an analogy for Bazin’s model of
cinematic spectatorship where independence of interpretation goes hand in
hand with community of experience. Worth noting is that Bazin’s passion for
Faraday points back to his direct knowledge of Henri Bergson’s work, one of
the very few philosophers that the film critic mentions in his writings.
Just like Bazin, Bergson, too, is a fan of Faraday. In a series of essays,
published between 1903 and 1923, Henri Bergson writes:
As scattered particles of iron filings are attracted toward the poles by force
of the magnetic bar and compose themselves in harmonious curves, so, at
Figure 3.2 Magnetic field of bar magnets attracting. Courtesy Wikimedia

Commons.
Science 95
the call of a genius it loves, the virtualities slumbering here and there in a
soul awaken, join and work together with a common action in view.73
Whereas Bergson uses Faraday’s famous experiment to describe the birth

of a consciousness through the “concentration of all the powers of mind
and heart on a single point,” Bazin turns to Faraday to argue that acknowl-
edging differences enhances society as a whole, instead of pulling it apart.
In “De Sica: Metteur-en-scène,” Bazin, for example, redeploys the term
“summation”:
But it is precisely from the dialectical synthesis of contrary values, namely

artistic order and the amorphous disorder of reality, that [the film] derives
its originality. There is not one image that is not charged with meaning, that
does not drive home into the mind the sharp end of an unforgettable moral
truth, and not one that to this end is false to the ontological ambiguity of
reality. Not one gesture, not one incident, not a single object in the film
is given a prior significance derived from the ideology of the director. If
they are set in order with an undeniable clarity on the spectrum of social
tragedy, it is after the manner of the particles of iron filings on the spec-
trum of a magnet—that is to say, individually; but the result of this art in
which nothing is necessary, where nothing has lost the fortuitous character
of chance, is in effect to be doubly convincing and conclusive.74
This itinerary from Bergson’s calculus to Faraday’s electromagnetism

supports Bazin’s understanding of cinema as an electrifying, inspirational
medium. Like a magnet attracting many little pieces of iron, the movie the-
ater brings people together, while each viewer relates to the same film with
different thoughts and emotions.
Considering that Bazin is keen on the biological sciences, the critic’s little-
known reliance on calculus and on Faraday’s experiment might explain why
his film theory and neorealist phenomenology have not yet been fully under-
stood. However, one can still admire how Bazin’s use of scientific metaphors
is consistent. He celebrates over and over again an unobtrusive, yet selec-
tive filmmaking style that approximates the duration defining physical
movements in real locations. Meanwhile, the editing cuts capture the rhythm
of the characters’ thought processes without depending on much dialogue.
At the same time, this unveiling of a narrative world pulsing away depends on
a director’s uncanny ability to show instead of describing, to witness instead
of commenting, to choose to let go until the film finds itself in the disorderly,
yet productive reality surrounding the actors.
In addition to grounding Bazin’s praise of Bicycle Thieves in the wonders
of science, Michael Faraday’s experiment is so crucial and representative of
Bazin’s theory of spectatorship that it comes up again in his discussion of
Rossellini’s Paisà and of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951).
Concerning Rossellini’s rejection of a tight plot for the sake of a loosely knit
fabric of events, Bazin writes that the director “polarizes the filings of the
facts without changing their chemical composition.”75 Such a metaphorical
use of Faraday may be surprising, considering that he is a scientist, but Bazin
manages to draw all sorts of parallels between filmmaking and electromag-
netism as he moves among different directors.
For example, Faraday’s filings come up again where they refer to Bresson’s
method of literary adaptation. In the latter case, Faraday’s experiment
illuminates how the film’s avant-garde mixture of narrative freedom and nec-
essary rigor moves the evolution of cinematic language onto a new stage of
unprecedented emotional and intellectual intensity: “Each moment in the
film, each set-up, has its own due measure, alike, of freedom and of necessity.
They all move in the same direction, but separately like iron filings drawn
to the overall surface of a magnet.”76 Science casts Bazin’s film theory in the
realm of universality, without erasing contingency, materiality, hallucina-
tion, and fantasy.
Bazin’s fascination with Faraday is due to how this experiment suggests
invisible forces below the surface of phenomenal reality. This is not to say
that Bazin is a spiritualist who believes in the hand of God shaping human
destiny. On the contrary, his view of religion is anthropological, rather than
fatalistic or mystical. Likewise, his love of science springs from a profound
respect for life, rather than from a wish to reinvent nature. More specifically,
Bazin appreciates science’s equalizing way of looking at beings and things.
Science tells the story of life and death, which applies to all mortal beings
and perishable things. Science strives for objectivity through typologies,
classifications, simulations, and proofs. Situated in dialogue with art and
religion, the logic of science is indispensable, but not dominant in Bazin’s
film theory. Capable of protecting humankind against illness and prejudice,
science can also become egotistical and destructive. Within Bazin’s discus-
sion of the cinema, especially through the physics and chemistry of photog-
raphy, science anchors this medium in the factual existence of the world we
Science 97
live in. Significantly, photography starts in science, and only later is it used
artistically.
For Bazin, reality corresponds to the destructive passage of time, which
we cannot stop. The only exception to this state of affairs is the medium of
photography. As a rupturing force against the temporal flow, a photograph
preserves and isolates the moment—without telling a full story around it.
On the contrary, fictional and nonfictional mainstream cinema thrives on
storytelling to such an extent that it can hide time’s corrosive impact through
a lifelike illusion. By eliminating the painter’s touch on the canvas, cinema
preserves photography’s connection to the physical world and offers an al-
ternative to the anthropocentrism of human creativity. By setting the pho-
tographic record in motion, cinema becomes a lingua franca universally
understood in ways comparable to how biology studies the human species as
an object independent of linguistic and cultural differences.
In Bazin’s film theory, science by itself cannot fully explain what a human
is. Science needs art and religion to grasp the complexity of the human ex-
perience and to chart its trajectory from the physical to the spiritual and
vice versa. As long as science reckons with the limitations of human know-
ledge, it is indispensable. Science can keep art away from vanity, while it can
teach religion that the excesses of mysticism are different from the insights of
spirituality.
4
Religion
Cinema and religion foster suspension of disbelief, while they appeal to the
masses. The etymology of the word “religion” comes from the Latin religare,
that is, bringing people peacefully together.1 As systems of thought, religions
can become misguided and turn into corrupt practices over time. In keeping
with his Darwinian views, Bazin argues that nature exists outside of God’s
sphere of influence. Immanence shapes Bazin’s film theory from beginning
to end. Due to its paradoxical ontology of absent presence, photography
echoes an incarnational and Christological model. Such a definition is useful
to underline that photography puts forth a natural model of creativity based
on time, light, and matter.
Time is what we need to change ourselves, but it is also the dimension
we cannot control in front of death. In comparison to space, which we can
control and share with animals, time is a much more elusive dimension. It
is both intrinsic and beyond us. Time holds inside itself questions of origins
we cannot fully answer, even when the scientist and the theologian talk to
each other. Because we do not quite know where we come from, humankind
wonders whether its placement in the universe is a unique event. Just as the
cinema probes reality’s darkness, we seem to move across the centuries to-
ward an unknown destination as a species. By harnessing energy, cinema’s
electric light may produce experiences of insight into Otherness. Cinema is
the material ghost that mediates between the realm of time and the reality
of death.
Bazin was a Catholic dissident and a Personalist, open to all religious
denominations, and his film theory concerns human spirituality rather
than rigid dogmas or abusive power. In principle, religion through the-
ology and cinema through philosophy interrogate the nature of being.
On an everyday basis, these two mass rituals are repositories of moral
codes that need constant verification and updating. Religion is usually a
public domain, while spirituality is a private matter. They both offer guid-
ance at the level of everyday behavior and they alleviate the fear that death
evacuates all meaning.
University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190067298.001.0001
Religion 99
To be sure, Bazin believes in the necessity of a belief in God. Belief in

God functions as a placeholder to make sense of inexplicable realities. For
the critic, instead of being a transcendent entity or a personal being, God
is a dimension that, just like time, only human beings can conceptualize.
A Christological definition of photography enables an anti-anthropocentric
framework of ethical self-questioning. Belief in God, or an attitude of faith
toward the Other, is a necessary concept to define what a human is. Along
with art and science, creativity and logic, only time enables us to become
self-conscious of how we are different from animals, plants, machines, and
objects. Thus, God is an indispensable term of reference for articulating the
paradox of man’s frail, yet morally responsible position on the earth and in
the universe.
God needs to exist to set into relief the human limitations of scientific
enterprises and fallible institutions. As far as science is concerned, whenever
it becomes arrogant, through excessive insistence on rationality, it may at-
tempt to replace God. In the case of the legal system, we have the right and
the duty to use the law for the sake of civil society, but we can never presume
to be our neighbor’s ultimate and only judge. In his review of Carol Reed’s
The Third Man (1949), for example, Bazin writes:
C’est une affaire qui se règle entre Dieu et Welles et dont les hommes sont
mauvais juges. (It is a matter that needs to be settled between God and
Welles wherein human beings are likely to be bad judges.)2
Likewise, Bazin positions himself in disavowal of the empty office at the end
of Kafka’s The Castle (1926):
one does not have to believe in a cruel God to feel the guilt of which Joseph
K. is culpable. On the contrary, the drama lies in this: God does not exist,
the last office in the castle is empty. Perhaps we have here the particular
tragedy of today’s world, the raising of a self-deifying social reality to a tran-
scendental state.3
In contrast to Kafka’s pessimism, Bazin insists that only a theological

grounding based on hope and compassion allows humankind to learn
from its worst misperceptions. Like his mentor Emmanuel Mounier, Bazin
practices the paradox of a “tragic optimism.”4 By the same token, Bazin is the
first to agree with Kafka that when bureaucracy becomes a “self-deifying”
end in itself, it gives the whole system permission to reject any criticism of its
artificial methods.
Kafka’s horrific view of a totalitarian state is not that different from Bazin’s
descriptions of the nightmarish reality surrounding Alfred Radok’s The Long
Journey (1949). In this film, episodes of religious tolerance among Catholics
and Jews are worthy of admiration. Yet this mutual respect quickly becomes
impossible: first, because of Nazi collaboration in Prague, and second, due to
the spreading of the Cold War after the release of The Long Journey. Radok’s
film stands out as an exception to its times. As soon as Prague falls into the
Stalinist orbit, films such as The Long Journey are no longer possible be-
cause the Soviet censors automatically question all projects with a religious
component.
All religions are sociologies of human behavior. More specifically,
Christianity sets a boundary between the sacred and the profane, so that hu-
mankind may remind itself that every human life is sacred and incommensu-
rable, that is, outside all rational or quantitative categories. Theology focuses
on the stories we tell ourselves about our nature as humans in the light of the
“sacred,” which is what sustains and limits legitimate rule over our collective
lives. In defining the sacred, Bazin focuses on human behavior:
Naturally by sacred I here mean, first of all, the various social aspects of the
religious life. [ . . . ] However, there are other rituals besides the religious.
Society approves a thousand forms of acceptable behavior which are a sort of
permanent liturgy that it performs in its own honor. This is particularly true
of table manners. . . . Religious or not, the sacred is everywhere present in the
life of society and not only in the magistrate, the policeman, the priest, but in
the ritual associated with eating, with professional relations, and public trans-
portation. It is the way society retains its cohesion as if within a magnetic
field. Unknowingly, every minute of our time we adjust to this framework.5
In Bazin’s writings, the relationship between cinema and religion is very rich
because, on one hand, he introduces religious topics into his responses to
secular films, while, on the other, he develops sociological arguments out of
religious films. Thus, films do not have to depend on religious subject matter
to become spiritual works of art. Although art is slightly less important for
Bazin than religion, he still considers it the irreplaceable expression of a
profound human need. While the artist is not God, creativity nevertheless
defines what a human is in comparison to an animal.
Religion 101
Irrational belief and the human awareness of death occupy the pin-
nacle of Bazin’s film theory. He even seems to suggest that cinema is the
“new” secular religion or spiritual lingua franca of our times. Religion and
cinema, not to mention spiritual depth and the creativity of art, constantly
overlap in Bazin’s writings. The kinship of religion and cinema is such
that Bazin handles Federico Fellini’s films La Strada (1954) and Il Bidone
(The Swindle, 1956) as if they were religious films. La Strada explores how
an individual’s encounter with the Other might lead to introspection. Il
Bidone, by contrast, tells the story of a wretched gangster who, in the last
minutes of his life, finds the courage to look at himself objectively, from
the outside, and thereby to understand how he has wasted his time on
this earth.
Bazin stretches the label of the “religious film” beyond obvious choices, such as
Maurice Cloche’s Monsieur Vincent (1947), on Saint Vincent De Paul. The critic
approves of how this film celebrates the power of radical social reform; Cloche
makes it clear that Saint Vincent never performs any miracles, but instead works
himself to the limit in his attempt to realize his dream of rescuing the poor. Thus
he attains sainthood after his own death. Bazin’s awareness of the Vatican’s old-
fashioned ways emerges from his anticonformist definition of sainthood in
Augusto Genina’s Cielo sulla Palude (Heaven over the Marshes, 1949).
Bazin makes mistakes in his criticism, and for this reason the complex
filmmaking style of Jewish director Max Ophuls amounts to a “Jesuitical
Baroque” steeped in Austrian Catholicism. Worth discussing also are Bazin’s
insights on Protestantism in Jean Delannoy’s La symphonie pastorale (1946)
and Dieu a besoin des hommes (1950).
Next, considering that the tension between science and religion, the
mechanical and the hallucinatory, applies to the cinema as a whole, Bazin
focuses on the scientific and religious procedures for validating miracles
described by Georges Rouquier’s Lourdes et ses miracles (1955). Finally, this
chapter on religion contextualizes the references to Søren Kierkegaard and
Paul Valéry in Bazin’s essay “The Stylistics of Robert Bresson” (1952), which
analyzes Diary of a Country Priest (1951).6
Immanence and the Supernatural
Bazin’s dialectical perspective on Self and Otherness informs his under-

standing of the relationship between the Lumière Brothers (Auguste and
Louis), and the magician-filmmaker, Georges Méliès. Trained as engineers

and factory owners, the Lumière Brothers and their cameramen focus on
actualités; they travel the world and pan with their cameras. While Méliès—
working on a magician’s stage, cutting and splicing pieces of film together—
invents editing and gives impulse to fantasy. However, the intertwining of the
documentary and the fantastic is a major subtext running throughout Bazin’s
film theory.7
Bazin applies this double-sided argument to the newsreels that Frank
Capra re-edits for the Why We Fight series (1942–1944). He observes that
“the cinema rarely moves the historical sciences toward more objectivity.”
This is the case because a newsreel can be used to give history “the additional
power of illusionism, by its very realism.”8 Whether or not they engage in
fiction or nonfiction, all realisms in the cinema depend on audience percep-
tion, cognition, and hallucination. Furthermore, Bazin denies the separa-
tion of reality and fantasy, even though he sides with immanence over the
supernatural:
The opposition that some like to see between a cinema inclined toward
the almost documentary representation of reality and a cinema inclined,
through reliance on technique, toward escape from reality into fantasy and
the world of dreams, is essentially forced. [ . . . ]. The one is inconceivable
without the other. [ . . . ] The fantastic in cinema is possible only because
of the irresistible realism of the photographic image. [ . . . ] What in fact
appeals to the audience about the fantastic in the cinema is its realism—I
mean the contradiction between the irrefutable objectivity of the photo-
graphic image and the unbelievable nature of events it depicts.9
By immanence, Bazin means that the possibility of miracles—that is, of ex-

ceptional and inexplicable events—inhabits the ordinary. Bazin believes
such possibility is ever-present in the guise of contingency or providence.
A filmmaker has only to imply this potential; there is no need to overstate it.
Less is always more. Thus, in the context of postwar cinema, the repeated use
of superimpositions and dissolves to highlight the supernatural becomes an
outdated and redundant stylistic solution, pointing back to the silent film era
when the medium was anxious to display its technical resources.
Bazin’s dislike for obvious supernatural effects is also due to his asser-
tion that the photographic basis of cinema is already tied to irrational belief.
It follows for him, therefore, that two versions of irrational belief clash on
Religion 103
screen: the photographic film images themselves and a depicted supernat-

ural ghost, for example. These two elements are in competition with each
other. After all, cinema is already a material ghost.
Bazin is not surprised or upset if a rain of roses pours down onscreen, or
a sudden spring of water gushes out of the arid sands.10 The equivalence be-
tween the supernatural and the miraculous is typical of the Hollywood reli-
gious film. Contrary to this facile assumption, the scientific Bazin does not
believe in superstitions and realizes that often miracles are only legends. Yet
the religious Bazin never rules out the possibility of exceptional occurrences
that might emerge from the convergence of religious faith and contingency.
Two apparent impasses would seem to challenge cinema’s approach to reli-
gion. On one hand, cinematic recording is unable to represent the mental
structures of irrational belief. On the other, neither photography nor cinema
can show a medical miracle’s inner workings. These media can only record
an external image suggesting an internal change. However, showing less can
trigger belief.
Miracles do not match expectations and can happen without a logical
reason. Even a moment of grace or insight is a sort of miracle that can happen
to the most wretched of beings. “These beings are what they are, and, if they
are moreover the signs of grace, grace does not impress itself on the film-
strip. These signs impact the spirit only of those who have eyes to recognize
them.”11 Even if grace is unpredictable, in the end faith in God facilitates its
appearance and makes miracles possible.
Eager to underline the limits of human knowledge in front of the inex-
plicable, and to celebrate science’s explanatory power against superstitions,
Bazin reviews Georges Rouquier’s Lourdes et ses miracles (1955),12 an investi-
gation of the thin borderline between propaganda and documentation, spir-
ituality and scientific accuracy. Rouquier’s film begins under the financial
and conceptual auspices of Père Raymond Pichard (1913–1992), a pioneering
and very biased figure in religious television. His name appears in Rouquier’s
credits as “religious consultant.” Pichard’s financial backing envisions a short
film of only thirty minutes. Yet Rouquier takes his topic so seriously that he
extends it beyond a brief exercise in religious propaganda. He decides to turn
an ethnography of popular faith into a scientific investigation. Digressing
from Pichard’s conception, he delivers a ninety-eight-minute essay film di-
vided into three parts: Witnesses, Pilgrimage, The Unforeseen.
First, Rouquier interviews individuals who have witnessed or experienced
in person a medical miracle associated with Lourdes; second, he describes
the procedures of the medical and Catholic committees charged with eval-
uating these miracles. During this section, statistics are provided to under-
line the degree of divergence and overlap between these two committees’
findings. Interestingly, both sides appear to be very skeptical. It emerges
that, out of all the cases that aspire to inclusion in the category of “miracle,”
only an extremely minute percentage achieves approval by both the Church
and the medical establishment. Third, Rouquier’s ethnographic approach
emphasizes how patients are anxious when they go through an immer-
sion in Lourdes’ freezing water. Finally, without any reservations, Rouquier
acknowledges and surveys the most sordid aspects of Lourdes, where all
sorts of kitsch religious souvenirs attract tourists.
The director himself then appears on the screen and invites viewers to eval-
uate his own method of filmmaking. He wants his audience to reflect on how
thin is the borderline between science and religion. Neither mystically in favor
of transcendence nor skeptically dismissive of the illogical, Rouquier’s docu-
mentary is a balanced anthropology of spirituality in daily life. Bazin, too, agrees
that religion is fair game for anthropology. Likewise anthropology presupposes
some kind of theological grounding. Once again, the point is to understand that
humans are irrational beings and rational animals at the very same time.
Here, anthropology calls attention to how Rouquier’s flat interviews,
conducted in the homes of his witnesses, always include him sitting near his
interlocutors, thereby normalizing the interactions. Furthermore, Rouquier’s
anti-illusionist direct address to the viewer in medium shot, with his use
of long shots and long takes, prevents anecdotal distraction. Aerial views,
long shots, long takes of faceless crowds holding candles, rows of nameless
patients lying in their cots, a multitude of nurses and relatives, all foreground
the importance of a general situation of faith in the nocturnal and chanting
landscape of Lourdes. Rouquier’s even handling of religion and science is re-
markably antimelodramatic and antirhetorical. Bazin approves of Rouquier’s
film, possibly because the director manages to be respectful of his clerical
producer. At the same time, he remains mindful of his secular spectators
as well.
Catholics and Communists
Without historical contextualization, Bazin’s views on religious my-

thology, ethical codes, and spirituality are difficult to grasp. In discussing
Religion 105
the immediate postwar period in France, British art historian Sarah Wilson
underlines social struggles between rich and poor, between Catholics and
Protestants, and between proponents of scientific secularism and anti-
modernist religiosity:
With both Communists and Catholics . . . a dialectic was established be-

tween the notions of a liberated, materialist enlightenment and spir-
itual degeneracy. Thus, the communists defined the phases Renaissance,
Reformation, French Revolution and democracy. . . . Right-wing clerics
and opponents of modernism evoked this evolution in precisely the op-
posite sense, as the chart of the spiritual downfall of modern man. [ . . . ]
The Communist Party policy coincided of course with Comintern-backed
Peace movement initiatives and the attempt to court the new female vote
[1945] (women traditionally being more religious and conservative than
their husbands).13
In those days, the expression la main-tendue (the outstretched hand, or reach-

out approach) refers to an alliance between Communists and Catholics. The
leader of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez, pursues this ide-
ological goal from 1947 onward. Such a plan is officially approved in 1949
with the following statement produced during the party’s general congress
in Montreal: “To apply without hesitation an outreach-approach towards
Catholic workers without abandoning our commitment towards a secular
society that respects different religious beliefs.”14 Wilson notes that, fol-
lowing in Thorez’s footsteps, Emmanuel Mounier favors an open dialogue
between Catholics and Communists, despite the Vatican’s rejection of such
an unprecedented idea:
On July 14th, 1949, The Catholic Holy Office forbade Catholics to join the
Communist Party. The Church’s decision to sabotage any rapprochement
caused much heart-ache to the working class, Communist voters who had
not renounced their religion, and was judged by Emmanuel Mounier as
“une erreur historique massive.”15
Mounier felt that the Vatican’s ban against Catholic Communists was a mas-
sive historical mistake, thus he became an outspoken opponent of Pius XII,
questioning the pope’s silence regarding the Nazis’ persecution of Jews.16
The pope’s controversial record on the Holocaust remains incriminating
in two ways. First, Pius XII spends many years in Bavaria, giving him roots
in a heavily Catholic German region where no Jewish population survives
Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Second, during World War II, Pius XII does not take a
clear and official stand against the Holocaust, of which he is very well aware.
Reportedly he wants to protect German Catholics from the Nazi regime. In
the 1950s, the decade of the Cold War, the pope embarrassingly maintains
a conservative strategy antithetical to dialogue with French modernist and
left-wing Catholics, as well as secular and non-Catholic areas of European
society. He also pursues an isolationist stance that refuses to recognize the
existence of other religions, such as the Palestinians’ Islamic faith (at the time
of the founding of the state of Israel in 1948). Typically, he is more concerned
with calling attention to how the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe leads
to the imprisonment of Catholic cardinals in Poland and Hungary.
Critical of the Vatican’s indifference toward the Jewish genocide during
World War II and its exploitation of anti-Stalinist feelings in the postwar pe-
riod, Emmanuel Mounier is one of the few French public figures who pub-
licly challenge Pius XII’s crafty style of politics. From the pages of Esprit,
in 1935, Mounier opposes Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. In 1939
Mounier questions why the Vatican does not condemn Italy’s invasion of
Albania.17 Mounier’s cause is taken up by Catholic writer François Mauriac,
who, in 1951, rehashes Mounier’s condemnation of the pope’s silence about
Albania. Mauriac further condemns Pius XII’s inactivity during the perse-
cution of the Jews in Germany and Poland. Notoriously opposed to French
colonial rule in Vietnam and Algeria,18 Mauriac’s preface to Léon Poliakov’s
Bréviaire de la haine (Harvest of Hate) declares that this very first book on
the Holocaust19 is not only important for German readers but also for the
French public.
In Mounier’s and Mauriac’s footsteps, Bazin is well aware of Pius XII’s si-
lence during the Holocaust. In 1952 Bazin writes on Alfred Radok’s (1914–
1976) The Long Journey (Czechoslovakia, 1949), a film set in the transit
camp of Theresienstadt. Although some real locations are used in the film,
the half-Jewish, half-Christian director Radok mostly shoots his film in the
studio. The result is a German expressionist look, which is dominant in his
domestic film industry. Instead of condemning The Long Journey for its ex-
pressionism, Bazin compares Radok’s style to the “réalité d’un cauchemar” (a
nightmarish reality).20 More specifically, Bazin maintains that expressionism
has switched to a quasi-documentary realism or living nightmare that opens
the spectators’ eyes to the unimaginable:
Religion 107
I doubt that as a director Radok has consciously chosen the style of his film.
Rather we have here an individual renewal of the expressionist esthetic
style that has always been either hidden or explicit in Czech cinema. What
is most impressive is that the most questionable aspects of expressionism,
paradoxically, here become justifiably profound, taking on a sort of realist
virginity.21
In Theresienstadt, the Nazis stage art performances by prisoners in order to

receive a stamp of approval from the International Red Cross’s ineffective
visits. Suggestive of how deception turns into madness, Radok shows a group
of Jewish musicians giving a deafening performance of bombastic and irrev-
erent music. In the meantime, hundreds of prisoners walk through heavy
rain and mud to a train, on the way to their deaths in Auschwitz.
By alternating between archival newsreel footage of the Nazis’ ascent to
power and staged scenes of daily life in Prague, Radok intertwines history
with fantasy, reality with horror, at a time when memories of the wartime
period are too recent, confused, and very difficult to represent. In his review
of this film, Bazin uses the phrase “virginité réaliste” to mean that one senses
a level of documentary fidelity in relation to an experience that is both actual
and mental.22
Despite his reliance on studio shooting, Radok, as the son of a prisoner
tortured in Theresienstadt, conveys the closest possible echoes of his family’s
and his community’s nightmare. The result is a highly sensitive depiction of
Jewish family life, including attention to ritual objects, holidays, and neigh-
borhood fears.23 In comparison to other films on the Holocaust from the
same period, The Long Journey is characterized by a “realist virginity” be-
cause Radok openly deals with Czechoslovak anti-Semitism and Christians’
collaboration with Nazism. Before the release of The Long Journey, hardly
anyone brings these two topics into the open. Radok is the very first to handle
the issues of wartime rejection and betrayal on the screen in such an ex-
plicit fashion. Hence, Bazin chooses the term “virginity.” In addition, Radok
raises the two controversial topics of national anti-Semitism and internal
collaboration right before Soviet censorship stifles any further discussion of
Holocaust history.
Mauriac’s indictment of Vatican and French collaborators, Mounier’s crit-
icism of Pius XII, and Bazin’s Personalist spirituality are three examples of a
much more progressive French Catholicism after 1945. Unfortunately, with
the encyclical Humani Generis (Of the Human Race) (August 12, 1950), Pius
XII opposes the radical priorities of the Nouvelle Théologie movement. In

a similar initiative, two years before the Catholics’ effort toward reform in
France,24 the pope openly intervenes in the Italian parliamentary elections
of 1948 to support a conservative turn in the nation. Pius XII’s meddling in
Italian politics is worth mentioning because Bazin is deeply aware of national
differences in French and Italian Catholicism. He clearly demonstrates this
knowledge in his reviews of Julien Duvivier’s films starring Fernandel as a
local priest, Don Camillo, and Gino Cervi as a Communist mayor; the two
are always trying to outwit each other.25
Eager to moderate the Vatican’s negative stance toward non-Christian
religions and its overall rejection of modernity, the Nouvelle Théologie
movement included many French intellectuals. This new phase of reli-
gious rethinking and self-criticism appeals also to lay individuals who,
in some cases, had fought in World War II or had participated in the
Resistance. Nouvelle Théologie, for example, counts on the support of
the Jesuit priest Henri de Lubac, the Dominican priest Yves Congar,
and the Jesuit priest and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This
neomodernist Catholic avant-garde movement was linked to the review
Témoignage Chrétien.
Nouvelle Théologie accepts Darwinian evolution and embraces quantum
physics. Much closer to Mounier’s preference for Saint Augustine’s utopian
views (Mounier, Traité du caractère), the Catholic intellectuals of Nouvelle
Théologie are wary of Jacques Maritain’s Thomistic theology, with its ranking
of sins according to their different degree of seriousness. In contrast to
Nouvelle Théologie’s call for modernization, Maritain’s Thomistic system
lends itself to all sorts of compromises that slow down change.
Mounier criticizes Pius XII’s decision to ban the French left- wing
worker-priests movement in 1951. Against the backdrop of these social,
political, and theological controversies, in 1950, Pius XII announces a new
Catholic dogma: the Virgin Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven. As if
this new development were not surreal enough, during the month of June
of that same year, Pius XII reinforces his repressive stance on female sex-
uality. To make things worse, in 1947, this puritanical attitude transpires
in the writings of the young Enrico Berlinguer, a future and major leader
in the Italian Communist Party.26 And to top it all off, Pius XII stages the
largest public ceremony ever held in Saint Peter’s Square for the canoniza-
tion of Maria Goretti, a young girl brutally murdered. Cinema, of course,
took notice.
Religion 109
Taking Risks
Augusto Genina’s Il Cielo sulla Palude (Heaven over the Marshes, 1949),
a movie about Maria Goretti, causes quite a sensation in the film world by
winning first prize at the Venice Film Festival. Heaven over the Marshes
is shot on location, and its sound is recorded on the spot, instead of
being postsynchronized. Genina casts only local people to play peasant
characters like themselves, living in the countryside near Rome. He directs
his nonprofessionals so well that they sound utterly convincing when they
speak their unscripted lines, in contrast to Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique
(1946), with scripted dialogue. Even the neorealist Luchino Visconti, in La
Terra Trema (1948), Bazin remarks, relies on dubbing the Sicilian dialogues
in postproduction. Bazin applauds Aldo Tonti’s cinematography as well.
In Heaven over the Marshes, Tonti’s camera work is even more restrained
and less noticeably pictorial than his previous work for Visconti. Now the
“pictorial and decorative theatricality” Tonti develops for La Terra Trema
subordinates itself “to the most modest and prosaic subject.”27 Heaven may
be over the marshes, but the gravitational pull of extreme poverty dominates
in this miserable swamp.
Genina shoots his film in one of the most forsaken regions of Italy,
near Rome, the so-called Pontine marshes. Although the story is set at
the turn of the century, this swampy area remains notoriously wretched
due to its extreme natural resistance to cultivation. In reviewing Genina’s
film, Bazin raises serious questions regarding a repressive Catholic ed-
ucation for young girls preparing for their First Communion. Typically,
this ceremony involves a white veil and dress, thereby invoking a mar-
riage with Christ, comparable to a nun’s taking her vows. Insightfully,
Bazin describes a cultural situation that discourages young girls from cel-
ebrating their physical transformation into women. Too much religious
zeal leads to sexual sublimation and fear. In discussing how, for young
Maria, catechism is the one and only form of schooling she has access to,
Bazin writes:
constantly focusing on catechism and the upheaval for her first Holy
Communion, by themselves, these two pressures produce a banal piety.
[ . . . ] Let us also acknowledge that a Christian education exercises a moral
influence which does not help with unconscious desires. Maria’s behavior is
not yet convincing.28
Bazin’s phrase “constantly focusing on catechism” calls attention to a sen-

sitivity that escalates into an overreaction. Briefly, the plot of Genina’s
film: Maria Goretti (Ines Orsini), a peasant girl, rejects the sexual advances of
eighteen-year-old Alessandro Serenelli. In contrast to Maria’s demure beha-
vior, Lucia, her best female friend, sees no contradiction whatsoever between
catechism and dating.
To further complicate Maria’s dilemma, Alessandro has grown up with
her, day after day, like a brother and a friend. This is because the Goretti and
the Serenelli families are so poor that they have lived together for many years
in the same shack-like house. Within these circumstances of unavoidable
intimacy, Genina describes a culture rooted in machismo. Alessandro’s fa-
ther does not hesitate to sexually harass Maria’s mother as soon as she loses
her husband to malaria. Meanwhile, a secret history of mental illness runs
through the Serenelli’s genealogical tree. Sexually rejected by Maria, but at
the same time treated as her most preferred companion, Alessandro becomes
more and more aggressive. In this context, illiteracy and fear turn Maria’s re-
ligious education toward an excess of religious zeal.
Bazin does not discuss Heaven over the Marshes in detail. Primarily, he
limits himself to situating Genina’s film within neorealist cinema. But in ad-
dition, he uses the film to offer some observations on the anticonformist and
radical nature of sainthood. Before moving to Bazin’s theological comments,
a few sequences in Genina’s film are worthy of additional analysis. To begin
with, the director associates a punitive and anthropomorphic God with the
mezzadria, or métayage, labor system. Although they toil desperately on a
land that yields very little and earns them little money, Maria and her family
owe money to their aristocratic landowner and his rapacious middlemen. In
short, they work for a pittance. In this impossible situation, Maria and her fa-
ther kneel down to pray in the middle of the marshes, under a cloudy heaven.
As if they were always on the edge of falling into sin, they understand God to
be an omniscient master “who sees everything we do.” At the end of the film,
the unforgiving, omnipotent gaze of this deity reappears in Genina’s crane
shot, looking down on Alessandro’s arrest.
The point of view of this transcendent God not only coincides with the
director’s camera on a crane, but also with their invisible, feudal landowner.
Furthermore, this stern and ubiquitous God motivates Maria’s fear of saying
yes to Alessandro. Paranoia about a punitive God reaches a climax during
Maria’s lonely walk across the marshes. By relying on a mobile and inde-
pendent camera in this scene, Genina seems to pay homage to Karl Freund’s
Religion 111
detached camera in the swamp of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927). In Murnau’s

film, the camera abandons the married peasant to off-screen space and
precedes him to the spot of his fatal appointment with the city vamp who has
enchanted him.
In keeping with Freund’s legacy, Genina’s independent and all-seeing
camera movement observes Maria’s hesitant steps in the swamp. Her tenta-
tive motions demonstrate that, unlike Murnau’s peasant, she is deeply afraid
of the uncertainties ahead. Vulnerable inside a spacious long shot, we see
her isolated in the marshes. Meanwhile, the camera also reveals Alessandro,
hidden behind the vegetation, spying on her movements. Maria’s feet test the
slippery ground. She worries about walking in the swamp as much as she is
uncomfortable with Alessandro’s advances. Only once in the film does she
experience joy in encountering an unfamiliar space: when Alessandro takes
her to the beach. There, she delights in seeing the waves for the first time,
and spontaneously lifts her skirt, inadvertently revealing her bare legs to the
lustful young man.
Worth quoting at length are the comments Bazin makes that show how
he secularizes the circumstances leading to the stabbing of Maria in order to
question the validity of Goretti’s candidacy for Catholic sainthood:
And even this martyrdom: a banal sex crime, . . . There is not a single aspect
of this crime that does not have a natural explanation. The resistance of the
girl is perhaps nothing but an exaggerated sense of propriety, the reflex of a
scared little animal.29
Relying on original documents from the trial after the killing, Genina’s film
shows Maria, in the short time before she dies of her stab wounds, as she asks
her childhood friend to forgive her. This request acknowledges all the years
they have spent together. For Bazin, this is an important decision—a degree
of self-awareness on Maria’s part that redeems the criminal and the victim
alike from their equal limitations in confronting sexuality. Nobody is an evil
monster and everybody is a victim of poverty and ignorance in this film.
The key rhetorical purposes of Bazin’s review are not easy to establish.
Perhaps his agenda is to make a statement against Pius XII’s exploitation of
Goretti’s case for the purpose of religious propaganda. Certainly, the critic
points out that Goretti’s canonization and Genina’s film fare better in emo-
tional Italy than in rationalist France. In a single sentence he juxtaposes
French secular culture with the pope’s hold on Italian public opinion.
Pius XII’s canonization ceremony for Goretti is the ultimate media event
before the advent of television. One can even say that it anticipates the “live”
broadcast by showcasing the still living mother of the “saint.” Yet Bazin is
more concerned with what constitutes serious sainthood. To him, Maria
Goretti is a very minor figure in comparison with Saint Teresa of Avila,
Thérèse de Lisieux, Bernadette Soubirous, and Saint Vincent de Paul:
at least in France, this saint’s life has disappointed the Christians even more
than it has the nonbelievers. [ . . . ] it is to Genina’s credit that he made a
hagiography that doesn’t prove anything, above all not the sainthood of the
saint. . . . He looks at sainthood from the outside, as the ambiguous mani-
festation of a spiritual reality that is absolutely impossible to prove.30
A spiritual reality can never be represented directly on film, and the attempt
to do so leads only to failed special effects. The ambiguities of human beha-
vior in grappling with religious faith are far more interesting to Bazin. Hence,
he concludes:
This is not, and this must not be a saint whose life we see going by, but rather
the little peasant Maria Goretti. The camera lens is not the eye of God, and
microphones could not have recorded the voices heard by Joan of Arc.31
Even if Genina’s camera takes on a God-like point of view that Bazin fails to
acknowledge, his basic argument is that the filmstrip cannot show God or
the soul directly. It can only imply a human interrogation, search, or belief
regarding something that is irrational, conceptual, and nonrepresentable.
Bazin’s ultimate conclusion about sainthood is that it can be evaluated
only retroactively, after the individual’s death, on the basis of facts and
actions. In reflecting on Maurice Cloche’s famous film, Monsieur Vincent,
Bazin writes: “a saint does not exist as a saint in the present: [Monsieur
Vincent] is simply a being who becomes one and who, moreover, risks
eternal damnation until his death.”32 In line with Sartre’s dictum that “exist-
ence precedes essence,” sainthood is not an a priori essence someone is born
with. Rather it is the result of an accumulation of choices with attendant
risks and no clear immediate resolution. An individual’s behavior can be
evaluated only a posteriori. In the absence of such a case for Maria Goretti,
Bazin criticizes the Vatican for its superficial use of hagiography to pursue
religious propaganda.
Religion 113
Looking at Oneself from the Outside
A central question in Bazin’s film theory is how, with its mechanisms of de-
sire and belief, can the cinema differentiate among religious faith, spectators’
credulity, believable narratives, and moral responsibilities in a modern
world ruled by utilitarian rather than spiritual values? In the course of
highlighting the need for spiritual self-interrogation through the cinema,
Bazin works on lesser-known neorealist films, such as Federico Fellini’s
Il Bidone (The Swindle, 1955). In contrast to Sartre’s assertion that we are
what we do, without any chance for appeal, Bazin argues that we could also
be what we might become at any moment. And Bazin wonders whether
visual appearances in film are capable of suggesting an individual’s spiritual
epiphany just before death.
In connection with this topic, two characters stand out in Il Bidone, a black
comedy about callous criminals impersonating Catholic priests and robbing
the poorest peasants of the Roman countryside. One of those characters is
Picasso (Richard Basehart):
a nice, sensitive, sentimental man, always full of good intentions, and always
ready to take pity on others and on himself. Yet Picasso’s salvation is prob-
ably hopeless. He steals because he “looks like an angel.” [ . . . ] Incapable
of overcoming his issues, of bridging them, Picasso is doomed to darkness
and to ultimate downfall, despite the love and kindness he displays towards
his wife and child. Picasso’s actions do not make him evil, but he is lost.33
Here the critic highlights Picasso’s inability to face deeper questions, behind
his apparently well meaning, angelic face, with an innocent expression that
is nothing but a form of laziness. Just because his face makes his life easier,
Picasso can deceive himself and avoid any level of introspection.
The second major character of Il Bidone is Augusto (Broderick Crawford).
Augusto is the best actor in the whole gang of crooks and their leader. His
actions may seem to be more despicable than Picasso’s, but this is not the
case. By asking spectators to compare Augusto with Picasso, Fellini pushes
his agenda forward. The director wants viewers to think through their own
behavior in the light of their moral judgments of Others.
Picasso, Augusto, and their accomplices set out to rob a peasant family that
includes a paralyzed girl the same age as Augusto’s daughter. For the scam,
Augusto impersonates a high-ranking Catholic priest, while simultaneously
deftly employing distinctive gestures that recall the reactionary Christian-

Democrat minister Giulio Andreotti, the notorious enemy of neorealism
who censored Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D (1952). Thanks to the peasants’
religious naïveté, the swindle succeeds. Fooled by the promise of future
riches to come from the Church, the poor family surrenders all its belongings
to the criminals.
Before the gang can leave, the family’s innocently unaware daughter
expresses gratitude for Augusto’s superficial level of attention. Usually,
Augusto is incapable of either charity or compassion; he thinks only of his
own best interests. Yet this brief encounter has an impact on him because the
destitute but pretty girl reminds him of his daughter. During their brief con-
versation, the semiparalytic girl never tries to appeal to his pity, but rather
she states that she is grateful for the little that she has. This attitude of accept-
ance is comparable to his own neglected daughter’s resolute search for finan-
cial independence and her willingness to work, instead of going to school.
In the wake of his interaction with the young woman, guilt about
abandoning his family triggers Augusto’s decision to rob his accomplices and
use their bounty for his daughter’s education. In this moment of insight, sud-
denly able to look at himself objectively, Augusto adds professional disloyalty
to family betrayal. With his self-awareness, something significant changes
for the very first time, notwithstanding the complication of turning on his
partners. Bazin observes:
actions, whether good or evil, don’t permit [Picasso and Augusto] to be

judged any more objectively than subjectively. The purity of the man lies
deeper: for Fellini it is defined [ . . . ] by a certain permeability to grace. . . .
[Augusto’s] conversation with the paralyzed girl introduces turmoil to his
soul; it made him see, finally, not so much the accidental lie of his actions, as
the essential imposture of his life.34
For Fellini, as well as for Bazin, “events are in fact never anything but the com-
pletely accidental instruments through which human souls feel their way”35
through life. No single action, no isolated choice, no one-time decision can
guarantee salvation. These are nothing but isolated instances in an ongoing
process of groping in the darkness of one’s own spiritual reality. There is no
formula for salvation. Alternatively, no single act of evil behavior automati-
cally spells damnation. The complexities of human interiority escape the sur-
face level of external observation and filmic recording. Something hidden
Religion 115
might be taking place in the depths of an individual’s being. Furthermore,

nobody knows with certainty how one’s own or someone else’s level of self-
awareness might play out, as the end of life approaches. The meaning of
events is always unclear as they take place, while reality is endlessly intricate.
This condition of moral uncertainty impacts Bazin as a film reviewer
who is an engaged spectator and an educator for his readers. Worth noting
is that Bazin’s position on the question of Augusto’s “salvation” or “damna-
tion” changes from the review he writes for France Observateur to the re-
view he publishes in Le Parisien Libéré, and then he eventually reverts to
his Observateur position. The resolution of his indecisiveness comes when
he again discusses Il Bidone in the light of Nights of Cabiria. Significantly,
the ending of Nights of Cabiria emphasizes a profound change in terms of
self-esteem. This motivates Bazin to reconsider the existential trajectory of
Fellini’s male characters. In Le Parisien Libéré, Bazin is much more pessi-
mistic in regard to Augusto:
In contrast to Gelsomina, the Fool, and Zampanò, this character [Augusto]

is too far removed from childlike naïveté as far as finding his own path
toward the Light. He will die groping around within the ignorance of his
soul.36
Eventually Bazin concludes that Fellini’s male characters do not so

much evolve as suddenly “ripen.” These immature males confront their
immoralities only when they face the vertigo of death. Until then, they re-
main so stubborn in their ways that no critical self-interrogation is likely to
take place. Most importantly, Fellini’s “ripe” character is the result of events
that build up with “vertical gravity,” instead of happening on the axis of “hor-
izontal causality,” or through an evolutionary narrative marked by Darwin’s
gradualism:
As for the characters themselves, they exist and change only in reference to
a purely internal kind of time—which I cannot qualify even as Bergsonian,
in so far as Bergson’s theory of the Données immédiates de la conscience
contains a strong element of psychologism. Let us avoid the vague terms of
a “spiritualizing” vocabulary. Let us not say that the transformation of the
characters takes place at the level of the “soul.” . . . This does not mean at the
level of the unconscious or the subconscious but rather at the level on which
what Jean-Paul Sartre calls the “basic project” obtains, the level of ontology.
Thus the Fellinian character does not evolve; he ripens or at the most
becomes transformed (whence the metaphor of the angel’s wings, . . . ).37
Until some major rupture happens, Fellini’s immature males resist change.
They feel weighed down, but do not understand why. Like spoiled grown-
ups, they are stubbornly attached to their vices. Once they confront death, if
they are still able to reach out to the neighbors they have neglected in life, they
might become more vulnerable and introspective. At the end of Il Bidone,
Fellini shows us Augusto, covered with wounds inflicted by his accomplices,
reaching out toward nameless peasants. A few women and children go by,
bent with fatigue under the weight of dry branches on their backs. Yet he re-
mains alone, for he fails to get their attention. They do not see him and they
do not hear him. At the very beginning of La Strada, Gelsomina will echo
this iconography of twigs and wings on people’s backs, by carrying a bundle
of thin branches, with the wind blowing into her cape’s folds.
These faceless peasants are more than just visual filler in a starkly barren
landscape, or even potential figures of assistance. They are a reminder of
Augusto’s lifelong lack of compassion. With their loads on their backs, these
peasants are Augusto’s very last vision of normal people struggling to sur-
vive. Meanwhile he looks more than ever like a wounded reptile on the rocks.
But, simultaneously, these bent peasants may also represent an inkling of
hope. Bazin’s “angelic” analogy endows them with a surreal quality justifiable
only through death’s hallucinatory impact. No miraculous conversion is nec-
essarily taking place, for they are only a glimpse of immanent grace. But it is
as if, thanks to his waning eyesight, Augusto can begin to see another reality,
and in so doing can look at himself from the outside for the very first time.
Fellini’s increasingly surreal style—from Il Bidone, via La Strada, to The
Nights of Cabiria—was no betrayal of neorealism, but a shift from a quasi-
documentary sensibility to a visionary perspective still rooted in daily life. By
concentrating on his images’ analogical potential, Fellini pushes for an intro-
spective depth. In discussing Fellini’s approach, Bazin first calls on the term
“symbolism,” only to soon revise that label in favor of poetry:
There is no end to Fellini’s symbolism . . . these associations of objects and

characters . . . derive their value . . . from realism alone . . . from the objec-
tivity with which they are recorded. . . . it is enough to see the wing in the
twigs for the old monk to be transformed into [an angel]. . . . One might say
that Fellini . . . achieves . . . a poetic reordering of the world.38
Religion 117
Without insisting on Augusto’s “damned” or “saved” status, Fellini seeks a

strange wealth in the fabric of daily life, because he is eager to make visible
the invisible. Instead of associating appearances with deceptions, Fellini and
Bazin believe that analogies between beings and things can reveal overlooked
and redeeming connections.
Charlot and Cabiria
In his review of Il Bidone, Bazin brings up the issue of redemption in connec-

tion with another famous character created by Fellini, Zampanò, the male
protagonist (played by Anthony Quinn) of La Strada (1954): “So, we may
believe that Augusto is saved, just like Zampanò.”39 The critic here refers to
the moment when Zampanò feels guilty and mourns Gelsomina’s (Giulietta
Masina) death, on the beach under a night sky. But there are no stars vis-
ible in the sky and there is no conversion. Zampanò never looks up while he
cries for the first time in his life. In the absence of Nino Rota’s magical music
during this sequence, silence speaks volumes. Only the halfwit Gelsomina
can bring the brutal Zampanò to tears. Through each other, they have be-
come one single whole: “La Strada is the story of two handicapped derelicts,
one mentally and the other physically, but their love . . . discloses to each of
them an inner depth with a purpose.”40
Zampanò’s humanization, however, comes from Gelsomina because she
is much more open to childhood, the irrational, and the creativity of the nat-
ural world. For her, every leaf, every earthworm, is a fascinating microcosm
of possibilities. Although Zampanò seems to make all the decisions, she is
the one in touch with the world’s wonders, and she is the only one of the pair
who can endow the film’s narrative with poetry.
La Strada is simultaneously a documentary of an unknown Italy without
monuments, the spiritual journey of two barely self-aware creatures, and an
ethnography of creativity based on the circus. To be sure, Gelsomina’s artistic
persona enables Zampanò to diversify his performances. Only when she is
present can he bring comedy to the act. Without her, he is limited to rote rep-
etition of his strongman routine, as if he were either an animal or a machine.
Interestingly, Bazin never takes occasion to discuss Gelsomina’s efforts to
imitate Zampanò’s skills, using a toothpick, during their first meal in the trat-
toria. Although she is an adult woman, she behaves like a child who wishes
to look as important as her new boss. In using the toothpick, however, she
also acts like a creature between a human and a monkey. Consequently,

Gelsomina’s imitation becomes more mindless than creative.
Effectively, she becomes the exact opposite of Charlot’s “inimitable imita-
tion,”41 to use Bazin’s exact words. But instead of remaining stuck in this sort
of monkey-like mirroring, Gelsomina gradually acquires more of a unique
personal voice. In contrast to Fellini’s irresponsible male characters, she
wishes to be a caring wife, and confides her plan to an air-bound figure—a
sort of philosophical messenger suggestive of an angel. More to the point,
this spiritual mentor empowers her to such a degree that she begins to feel
morally responsible for Zampanò, rather than living in fear of him.
The Fool (Richard Basehart), a tightrope-walking artist with wings of
cardboard, explains to Gelsomina that the only way to make sense of life is
to realize that everything needs everything else. Thus, the little pebbles on
the side of the road and the huge stars shining in the night are equally im-
portant. Eager for a deep human attachment, Gelsomina decides to spend
her life with Zampanò who, without her, would be nothing more than a bully
pretending to be an artist. With the assistance of the Fool, Gelsomina learns
to play a melancholic tune on the trumpet. He, in turn, is better suited to the
miniature violin, with its range between the upbeat and the somber. Angel-
like, the Fool is a goofy, daring clown as well as an empathetic, risk-taking
creature. He becomes a victim, because he can anger Zampanò more than
anyone else with his free spirit and sense of humor. His talent for comedy
and laughter challenges the literal and figurative constraints of Zampanò’s
big muscles and heavy chains.
In his review of La Strada, Bazin uses the term “interconnectedness”42 to
describe the relationship between Gelsomina and Zampanò. Instead of psy-
chology, Bazin notes, Fellini relies on objects to show changes in the relation-
ship between his two major characters. Their caravan, for example, has an
open or a closed flap according to the emotional situation at hand, without
ever escalating into an explicit symbol calling attention to itself as such:
The screen shows us the caravan better and more objectively than could the
painter or the novelist. I’m not saying that the camera has photographed it
in a straightforward manner—even the word “photography” is too much
here—but rather that the camera simply shows us the caravan, or even
better, allows us to see it. [ . . . ] Nothing that Fellini reveals to us owes any
additional meaning to the manner in which it is shown. But that revelation
nevertheless exists only on the screen.43
Religion 119
The key point, here, is that the caravan is the only thing that links Zampanò
and Gelsomina during their life together on the road. Even if a mermaid
adorns one side of the caravan, and an aggressive bird with a long beak
appears on the opposite side, the camera never dwells on these two symbols.
They remain barely noticeable and resist all linguistic explanations.
In Bazin’s words, Fellini’s formal originality stems from how he “does not
cheat on reality.”44 “Only the cinema could . . . confer on Zampanò’s extraor-
dinary motorcycle-driven caravan the mythic force that this object, both
strange and commonplace, attains.”45 By intentionally rejecting the pictur-
esque, La Strada is a story of desolate country roads, nameless villages, and
anonymous town squares.
The mountebank Zampanò needs Gelsomina to perform, and Gelsomina
needs Zampanò in order to feel that she has a purpose in life. They are two
social rejects who belong together. Yet the Fool’s death estranges these two
misfits, because violence prevails over art. Without Gelsomina, Zampanò
quickly degenerates into an aimless bum, until, one day, her music evokes
their lost connection. On the beach, his memory of her transforms Zampanò
from an animal into a human being. Poetry and spirituality are interchange-
able in Fellini’s early films.
Although Bazin does not analyze The Nights of Cabiria at length, he does
make an insistent point of comparing Masina’s character, in this film and in
La Strada, with Chaplin’s Tramp. But at the level of appearance alone, Bazin
is likely to agree with Karl Schoonover’s detailed list of overlapping features:
The ill-fitting clothing and eccentric accouterments that they share accen-
tuate the body’s hermeneutic significance. The awkward length of their
sleeves underscores their devilishly callous shrugs, which are themselves
barometers of their aberrant inclinations. Their high hems punctuate their
backward kicks, delirious dances, and stomping cacophonous rages. The
dark eyebrows against pale faces emphasize their emblematic sideways
looks. The rhythmic sways of their handheld appendages, with Cabiria’s
umbrella clearly referencing Charlie’s cane, syncopate with their bowlegged
waddles.46
The sartorial aspects by themselves are not enough to establish the deeper
qualities and connections of these two figures. Bazin refers to Charlie’s re-
petitive resourcefulness, namely his endless ingenuity and his grounding in
the present. These strengths are in contrast with Gelsomina’s inability to take
care of herself. It could be added, however, that the Tramp displays a degree
of self-sufficiency conducive to loneliness.
Although the Tramp does fall in love in The Gold-Rush (1925), his char-
acter never finds an ideal soul mate. Everybody in the world loves Chaplin,
but no woman takes the Tramp seriously, just as no man, except for The Fool,
pays attention to Gelsomina’s looks and feelings. In contrast to the Tramp’s
“sin of repetition,”47 Gelsomina and Cabiria ripen all of a sudden: Gelsomina
does so to the point of total madness, in response to the Fool’s death, whereas
Cabiria matures through an eye-opening recognition of the oppressive re-
ality of her romantic illusions.
Especially interesting in Bazin’s reviews of La Strada and The Nights of
Cabiria is his attention to how Masina’s screen persona evolves to differen-
tiate itself from Charlot’s. Bazin asserts that in the shift from Gelsomina to
Cabiria, Masina emancipates herself from the Tramp and develops her own
independent acting style and distinctive construction of character. In 1955
Bazin states: “Her acting, which at first recalls Chaplin’s Little Tramp, reveals
a second, much more personal vision: the unforgettable face of Gelsomina.”48
And, in 1957, after seeing The Nights of Cabiria, Bazin observes:
As for Giulietta Masina, her interpretation was not the same as what I liked
in La Strada. Her progress struck me as incredible. This time, her acting
completely filled the character and the character filled the film.49
Bazin’s insights regarding the difference between Masina’s and Chaplin’s

acting do not emerge only from his reviews of Fellini’s early films. They are
also informed by his comparison of Chaplin and De Sica.
Charlot is a living portrait of freedom and dexterity, because he can turn
the sacred old rules of conformist behavior into a playground of new rules.
Bazin notes that this happens without any sacrilege, anger, or offense because
Charlot is simply and fully secular. He carries on outside any religious af-
filiation. Charlot must operate outside the “sacred” because his creativity is
anticonformist in regard to all social rules:
One of the most characteristic aspects of Charlie’s freedom in respect to

the demands of society is his total indifference to the category of things
held sacred. . . . But the principal strength of this portrait is . . . a radical
a-clericism . . . There is no sacrilegious intent. . . . ritual and faithful are
Religion 121
relegated to a world of the absurd, reduced to the condition of ridiculous,

even of obscene objects, . . . deprived of all meaning.50
In a way, Chaplin not only calls attention to social injustices but also exposes
the conditioning of all religious mythologies through his unique kind of
physical comedy. He imitates norms of behavior that are not spontaneous,
because they are already routinized forms of imitation in themselves. These
norms are based on religious faith, profession, class, gender, age, and habit. In
The Pilgrim (1923), for example, Chaplin is an escaped convict who pretends
to be a Protestant minister. Completely out of synch with his congregation
and its practices, the false reverend has to be reminded that he is supposed
to deliver a sermon. Chaplin’s version of David and Goliath takes on the style
of a vaudeville act. The Tramp’s gestures are incompatible with conveying a
moral message to an audience of stern parishioners. Bazin underlines the
comic incongruity of the ex-convict in clerical garb: “It is almost as if he had
introduced a Negro dance into the ritual.”51
Relatedly, I would add that, as far as Catholic iconography is concerned,
the Paradise sequence in The Kid (1921) is similarly unforgettable. In that
scene, the Angel Charlot flirts with a female Angel (Lita Grey) as they fly
among other male winged angels competing for female attention with some
stranded and horny devils. Here, Chaplin is imaginatively and sexually sub-
versive, yet absolutely lovable and nonthreatening. In fact, in his film roles
he can imitate everybody and everything so well that he effectively becomes
everybody and nothing at the same time.52
Charlot’s oscillation between all or nothing is a paradoxical combination
of resilience and self-effacement. The Tramp is the cinema itself. Cinema
starts with the machine’s passive recording, and Chaplin shares the medium’s
mathematical precision in his slapstick routines. The medium begins to
breathe through human energy, until it learns to think and create anew.
Chaplin creates poetry through slapstick’s physical comedy, a poetry that al-
ways escalates into the complexities of human depth. Comparable to the dy-
namic power and frail status of the moving image, Chaplin’s machine-like
plasticity is intertwined with his sentimental appeal as a downtrodden bum.
At the same time, Charlot’s resourceful marginality encourages his universal
acceptance; he conveys a message of love and resistance. Notoriously in total
control of his films by virtue of carrying out key production roles himself,
Chaplin’s acting dominates the screen to such an extent that, for The Kid, he
selects Jackie Coogan, a choice based on how well this child actor can mirror
him; Coogan can look and move like a miniature and younger Tramp.
Paradoxically, Chaplin is a social hero, while Charlot is not a social char-
acter. As a symbol of the best humankind has to offer in defiance of economic
greed and social injustice Charlot achieves worldwide impact and mythic
status. Yet Chaplin’s gags are always organized around himself alone rather
than in dialogue with other performers. Thus, these gags amount to props
sustaining the display of his survival skills. It is as if a certain isolation were
the price Charlot must pay for Chaplin’s enormous talents in writing, dance,
music, acting, and directing.
Caught between the running filmstrip and the motionless stage, Chaplin
becomes an anthropocentric version of mechanical motion that never
complicates itself introspectively or retrospectively. He understands only
the present. Although film recording pushes him to make his performances
absolutely exact, Chaplin’s talents are prodigious and independent of any
medium; he would have become an amazing artist in whatever medium he
would have chosen to work. Yet Bazin does point out that cinema’s interna-
tional outreach skyrockets Chaplin to mythical stature.53
In comparing Chaplin to the Italian director and actor Vittorio De Sica,
Bazin underlines the exceptional charisma of these two figures who can float
between creative roles in front of and behind the camera during the film-
making process. After claiming that the charm of De Sica becomes, thanks
to the cinema, the most sweeping message of love the fifties has experienced
since Chaplin, Bazin proceeds to clearly differentiate between these two fig-
ures. And their differences are fundamental:
Chaplin concentrates on himself and within himself the radiation of his

tenderness, which means that cruelty is not always excluded from his
world; on the contrary, it has a necessary and dialectic relationship to love
[ . . . ]. Charlie is goodness itself, projected onto the world. He is ready to
love everything, but the world does not always respond.54
De Sica, Bazin explains, “infuses into his actors the power to love that he
himself possesses as an actor. Chaplin also chooses his cast carefully, but with
an eye to himself and to putting his character in a better light. We find in De
Sica the humanity of Chaplin, but shared with the world at large.”55 Unlike
Chaplin’s centripetal spin that rearranges the whole world according to his
own will, Bazin’s De Sica is the ultimate example of an outward-extending
Religion 123
warmth: “The tenderness of De Sica is of a special kind and for this reason

does not easily lend itself to any moral, religious or political generalization.”56
De Sica uses miming in his direction of nonprofessional actors.57 However
he does not expect them to simply imitate his pantomimes. Rather, he asks
his performers to engage in the most mechanical activities, such as walking,
looking, waiting, eating, counting, running, and sitting, until he sees some-
thing emerge out of his performers’ bodies that he can use for his fictional
characters. His goal is to enable his nonprofessionals to discover and per-
form imaginary and immanent alter egos that they already have inside them-
selves. Thanks to his personal warmth and expansive approach to acting,
De Sica summons out of his first-time performers what they can become,
helping them to find new roles or ways of being.
In contrast to Chaplin’s near-total control over his film projects, the cinema
controls Cabiria in Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria. She is a romantic dreamer
who seeks an ideal man’s everlasting love, the way the silent divas of Italian
cinema always do on screen. During her visit to a male star, Lazzari (Amedeo
Nazzari), she turns into a gullible and voyeuristic female spectator. Hidden
in the actor’s bathroom, she looks through the keyhole and witnesses a pas-
sionate kiss between the dashing Alberto and his platinum-blonde American
lover, Jesse.
In Lazzari’s mansion, Cabiria becomes easily disoriented and repeatedly
bumps into reflecting surfaces.58 She suffers from a chronic condition of
metaphorical blindness when it comes to seductive males. As a result, every
time she falls in love, she gets robbed.
The theme of blindness travels from the Tramp’s filmography to Masina’s
Cabiria. After all, Fellini develops Nights of Cabiria out of Chaplin’s City
Lights (1931), the story of a blind girl who sells flowers. Once she recovers her
sight, she continues looking for the wealthy and secret Prince Charming who
paid for her surgery. As soon as the formerly blind girl recognizes the touch
of the Tramp’s hand and sees him for the very first time, she realizes that she
has fallen in love with a figment of her imagination. Of course, the Tramp
understands this just as well. His generosity is intelligent enough so that he
forsakes a love based on her romantic illusions.
In contrast to City Light’s realistic logic of romance, the cinema is respon-
sible for all of Cabiria’s illusions about herself and about men in general. A list
of cinematic allusions in Fellini’s eponymous film should clarify the differ-
ence between Chaplin’s and Masina’s acting styles. To begin, Masina’s “pro-
fessional” name, Cabiria, is a reference to the child of Giovanni Pastrone’s
famous silent epic of 1914. In the sequence devoted to the neighborhood cab-
aret, Fellini’s Cabiria is hypnotized by a magician whose headgear with two
horns suggests that he is the devil of cinema. He stages two films. The first is
a peplum of rowing men in a trance. They have become Roman slaves and
they jump ship during a storm. The devil’s second film references Genina’s
Heaven over the Marshes. Just as Maria Goretti dreams of her white dress and
little crown of white flowers for her First Communion, Cabiria waits for her
Prince Charming all her life. The bridal veil with white orange blossoms worn
by adult Italian brides in the 1950s is often similar to that worn by young girls
for their First Communion.
The film’s cinematic references do not end with the teatro di varietà. On
her way to leave town with Oscar, the swindler who proposes marriage to her,
Cabiria leaves behind the statuette of a female owl, which is another refer-
ence to silent cinema, in this case Giovanni Patrone’s Il Fuoco (1915), starring
the diva Pina Menichelli. During this same sequence, Cabiria puts into her
suitcase a nautilus shell large enough to listen to the sound of the sea. Besides
pointing to Genina’s Maria Goretti, who receives this very same gift from
Alessandro Serenelli, this object also suggests that Gelsomina, with her love
for the sea, still lives inside Cabiria.
Even Cabiria’s mambo in the nightclub has two cinematic sources: Fausto
(Franco Fabrizi), one of Fellini’s immature swindlers in I Vitelloni (1953),
performs this dance in the middle of the street; and, Robert Rossen’s Mambo
(1955), with Silvana Mangano, marks the climax of this Latin dance in Italy
just one year before the release of Nights of Cabiria. Cabiria’s repeated dance
performances, however, betray her hidden feelings of inadequacy to the point
that her mambos turn into masquerades of self-confidence. Responding to
her dances, film specialist Karl Schoonover explains: “Their physicality keeps
us in a delicate tension between the cathartic thrill of watching the tran-
scendence of social entrapment and the cringing discomfort of witnessing
someone embarrassing herself.”59 Aggressive and insecure at the same time,
Cabiria dances to let the rest of the world know that she is unashamed of
her life, and is so anticonformist and self-reliant that, unlike all the other
prostitutes, she earns her living without a pimp’s protection. She can afford
to be stubborn and seemingly fearless; she has her own bank account and, in
the wasteland of the outskirts of Rome, her home is a petit-bourgeois haven.
While Cabiria waits for the right man, deep down she would like to stop
prostituting herself. But such a change would require a substantial miracle
in her life. After some hesitation, she decides to attend the procession to
Religion 125
the Madonna del Divino Amore (the Madonna of Divine Love). Shot in a
quasi-documentary style, this religious feast was very well known in Rome
during the fifties. It is the dramatic and Catholic counterpart to Cabiria’s
adventures on the stage of the teatro di varietà run by the devil of the cinema.
Unfortunately, neither her prayers to the Virgin nor her earlier trance are
enough to radically alter her life. She cannot sufficiently identify with, and
join, the spectacle of hundreds of pilgrims walking to the sanctuary. Radical
change—which the term miracle encapsulates—is too overwhelming and
scary. Little wonder, then, that in the wake of this failed religious outing, the
picnic of Cabiria and her friends becomes a profane indulgence in eating and
drinking.
Apart from this procession, during which Fellini even includes an actual
priest delivering a sermon, there is only one episode based on irrational belief
and social action that moves Cabiria as deeply as her exposure to hypnotism.
This is her encounter with the “man with the backpack,” a nameless young
man who delivers blankets and food to old people living in the caves out-
side of Rome. This relatively minor character is Fellini’s allusion to a militant
spirituality, devoid of the spectacle of the Vatican and the decorations of the
Divino Amore’s procession. Yet producer Dino De Laurentis surreptitiously
deletes the scene before the release of the film to avoid censorship problems.
Possibly inspired by the Abbé Pierre in France and his work with the poor,
Fellini conceives of the “man with the backpack”60 as a counterbalance to
Cabiria’s lighthearted encounter with Padre Giovanni. This little fellow
looks like an old Franciscan monk handing out devotional images of Saint
Anthony. Needless to say, Padre Giovanni is a reference to Rossellini’s The
Flowers of Saint Francis (1950), a film that Fellini worked on.61 Freely moving
through a wasteland of poverty, prostitution, and slums, Padre Giovanni
charms Cabiria, who fails to understand the codes of conformist femininity
and the responsible choice of a husband. Neither does she realize that Padre
Giovanni is a fake, an ignorant Franciscan who might even try to sell his little
images of Saint Anthony for sheer lucre.
Encouraged as she is by the prospect of a radically new life with Oscar,
Cabiria feels free to seek the friendship of Padre Giovanni. Thus, she chooses
another swindler who is more of a religious transvestite than a real monk
with institutional credentials. When The Nights of Cabiria screens at the
Cannes Film Festival in 1957, Bazin views the version with the “man with the
backpack.” Only after the screening of Cabiria in Paris, does he become aware
that footage is missing, due to the cuts imposed by Dino De Laurentis.62
Whatever the case may be, there are only two moments in the entire film
when Cabiria explicitly acknowledges her authentic self, from whom she is
profoundly alienated. Her actual name is Maria Ceccarelli, a name aban-
doned before she undertakes her life of prostitution and assumes another
identity, one spruced up by her movie-made fantasies. During the hypnotist’s
trance, “Maria Ceccarelli” is a name that Cabiria speaks as if it belongs to
someone else. Later she whispers the name “Maria Ceccarelli,” as if she
were thinking of another person, when she sits in the car of the “man with
the backpack.” Precisely because she never develops herself into a Maria
Ceccarelli who can think and choose, Cabiria is blinded by the cinema. In
her life, the film medium represses a moral philosophy based on the self-
consciousness of her own limitations.
The unreconciled divide between Cabiria and Maria Ceccarelli takes the
ending of Fellini’s film to a level of such emotional intensity that it justifies
Bazin’s comment: “[Masina] completely filled the character and the char-
acter filled the film.”63 When Oscar robs Cabiria on the eve of their wedding,
she shouts at him to take all the money and kill her. For the very first time
in her life, she really “sees” and understands what is happening to her. By
pretending to love her and encouraging her to fall in love with him, Oscar’s
imposture becomes far more painful than any theft. Terrified by her lucidity
of vision and unable to victimize her further, Oscar runs away. Now having
lost all her savings, Cabiria crosses alone the dark forest, emerging onto a
road with young people playing music. No longer the gullible female spec-
tator she had been, Cabiria’s romantic illusions have been replaced by an ap-
preciation for the community around her.
No longer the competitive mambo dancer, and with no money and no ro-
mance, Cabiria begins to consider new ways of being. A change at the level
of self-consciousness has taken place beneath the surface of her expressive
and mobile face. Masina’s physiognomy is as unique as Chaplin’s, but, in this
case, also radically different from his. The Tramp already knows what he is
and why, so well and so deeply that, through mimicry, he can become every-
thing else. In Cabiria’s case, her mambo masquerades of self-confidence are
a denial of Maria Ceccarelli’s vulnerable feelings. Fellini ends his film with
Masina looking toward his camera, breaking through the fourth wall in an
extreme close-up. On her face a smile lingers, between sadness and relief.
The viewer can spot just a small touch of makeup, the white, frozen tear of a
clown’s disguise. The actress pays homage to, and mourns, the Chaplinesque
Religion 127
Gelsomina that she is born out of, and which she outgrows, both as a char-
acter and as a mature actress.
Saint Sulpice and Max Ophuls
By using Genina’s film, Heaven over the Marshes, to write against Catholic
hagiography, Bazin nurtures a cinema “that does not reduce religion to
simple moral or social propaganda, and the cinema to the level of its instru-
ment.”64 A Franciscan emphasis on sobriety of means, or what Blaise Pascal
associates with Jean Racine’s (1639–1699) dépouillement,65 is in clear con-
trast to the kitsch paraphernalia sold in religious shops around the Parisian
church of Saint Sulpice. Located only one subway stop from the Saint
Germain-des-Prés of the existentialists, the area of Saint Sulpice is charac-
terized, on one hand, by the powerful and very intellectual religious orders
of the Jesuits and the Dominicans and, on the other, by a shameful display of
Catholic consumerism.
The cinematic equivalent of Saint Sulpice’s pious kitsch surfaces in
Max Ophuls’s baroque style of filmmaking. Antoine De Baecque points
out in his biography of François Truffaut that the launching of Ophuls’s
positive reputation as an auteur is due to Truffaut, who does not sway in
favor of Bazin’s opinion. Their critical disagreement about Ophuls, how-
ever, does not mar the mutual respect that the two critics feel for each
other. Truffaut “had to convince a public that is extremely skeptical and
sees the German director as a gentle and eccentric dreamer specializing
in slightly sugary Viennese pastries.”66 In stark contrast to Truffaut’s de-
fense of Ophuls, after the release of Lola Montès (1955), starring Martine
Carol, Bazin unleashes against baroque and rococo Catholic ornament in
Ophuls’s work:
But Ophuls is . . . a baroque filmmaker. Not only because of his fetishistic
predilection for little wooden angels and the tormented pseudo-realism of
his Jesuitical style, but more seriously because of his manner of expressing
the essential with a proliferation of details of secondary importance.67
Bazin’s rejection of Ophuls strikes a major note of dissent regarding the “au-
teurist fever” that is spreading across Cahiers du Cinéma:
It’s not by chance that the endless number of baby Jesuses in the Italian
Renaissance are just little kids escaped from Lilliput. Little men already
armed with smiles, winks, and intelligence (à la Shirley Temple).68
Bazin’s reference to Shirley Temple exposes how children in paintings and kids
fabricated in Hollywood are distorted by adult stereotypes. In the fine arts, the
painter’s manual skills unknowingly channel adults’ assumptions in regard to
childhood. Thanks to its nonanthropocentrism, the glass eye of the camera has
no preset agenda when looking at very young children who are still spontaneous.
In light of Ophuls’s Jewish background, Bazin’s association of the director’s
style with the baroque iconography of Saint Sulpice merits further consider-
ation, especially in the case of Lola Montès. This famous courtesan is an out-
cast, a woman without a country, and as such she mirrors the cosmopolitan
career of Max Ophuls. Born in the city of Saarbrucken, between the French
Lorraine and the German Alsace, Ophuls worked in Germany, France, Italy,
and the United States. Because of history’s cruelty against his Jewish race,
Ophuls’s peripatetic cinema reflects the painful displacement of individuals
with no national roots. By implication, the narrative repetitions of Ophuls’s
films are complicit with a fear of change. His characters are constrained
within a Viennese aristocratic fantasy. In his review of Ophuls’s final film, the
extremely expensive Lola Montès, Bazin argues that the female protagonist
has no depth. She never makes a mistake, never stops seducing, and never
loses her confidence. The critic associates Ophuls’s heroine with the shallow
spectacle of Austrian Catholicism:
Spiritually from Austria, he no doubt had a predilection for the baroque

style, which manifests not only in flights of chubby-cheeked little angels
even in the Normandy churches of [Le] Plaisir, but also in an even more
profound sense in the actual style of his directing.69
Due to his fondness for living myths rooted in the everyday, Bazin is disap-
pointed by Ophuls’s metaphorical use of the circus in Lola Montès; it neither
champions creativity nor celebrates freedom. Instead, it flirts with death in an
obscene manner. Discussing Lola’s circus as an “hallucinatory metaphor of
Hell,” Bazin concludes that the courtesan Lola Montès enters into a Faustian
pact with the devil, namely the circus barker who is her business partner and
her new lover. Like him, Lola only understands profit and spectacle. Thus she
Religion 129
knowingly chooses Hell because it’s part of her personality! Perhaps also
because she loves the Devil and he is good to her. Let’s not feel sorry for
her. Moreover I’m speaking of metaphor, not of symbol. The circus is just a
circus, but we acknowledge that great directors surpass reality.70
In Lola Montès, Ophuls’s moving camera is more of a nostalgic reverie than

a progressive force. Bazin does acknowledge the realism of Ophuls’s circus.
What infuriates him is that this circus has no poetry the way it does in Fellini.
The tent of Lola Montès covers, instead, a money-making factory emblem-
atic of capitalist greed.
One year before the release of Lola Montès, in 1954, Truffaut’s controversial
essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema”71 attacks the perfectionist
literary adaptations of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost as prime examples of
what he labels the “Tradition of Quality, or Cinéma du Papa.” Even though
Ophuls relies on short stories by Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, and Guy de
Maupassant, the challenges of literary adaptation and the stylistic pitfalls of
the chastised “Tradition of Quality” do not interest Ophuls in any way.
The fluidity of Ophuls’s camera stands apart from any established cine-
matic tradition, which is why it fascinated Truffaut. With a much more
discerning eye and a better sense of taste than Bazin’s, the young critic
understands the historical and cultural reasons behind Ophuls’s nostalgia for
Vienna, the city of Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein, a cultural cap-
ital of music, opera, and literature. In contrast to Bazin, Truffaut senses that
a sincere emotional struggle in regard to a lost past underpins the director’s
arabesques with his restless camera.
Robert Delannoy’s Religious Adaptations
Despite their differences on Ophuls, Bazin and Truffaut agree that Jean
Delannoy’s La symphonie pastorale (1946) and Dieu a besoin des hommes
(1950) belong to the Tradition of Quality. These two films are literary
adaptations carried out in the safety of the studio. In Cahiers du Cinéma, in
1954, Truffaut challenges Aurenche and Bost for their algebraic approach to
adaptation, which he called “adaptation équivalence.” Truffaut’s argument is
openly polemical:
Since adaptation, if we are to believe Aurenche and Bost, is an exact science,

they will one day have to explain to us what criteria, what system and what
internal and mysterious geometry of the masterpiece they are adapting,
govern the way they cut, multiply, divide and “rectify” it.72
Truffaut’s contempt for these two major scriptwriters is comparable to Bazin’s

well-known dislike of classical mathematics, whose exceedingly clean logic
he applies to the Hollywood policier. Yet, in contrast to Truffaut’s wrath,
Bazin is more measured in his assessment of these two adaptations. After all,
Delannoy’s religious adaptations provide the critic with an opportunity to
comment on a Protestant director and two Protestant screenwriters dealing
with literary sources produced by Catholic writers.
Adapted from André Gide’s eponymous text (1919), Jean Delannoy’s
La symphonie pastorale is a stuffy, yet titillating film. Dudley Andrew
summarizes Delannoy’s overall method: “There is a glass between the viewer
and this film, the glass of store window barring us from the action and asking
to hold it visually in place, to understand it, but certainly not to enter it or to
help construct it ourselves.”73
Delannoy’s Symphonie pastorale deals with self-delusion and hypocrisy.
A Calvinist pastor’s hypocrisy causes him to deny his sexual attraction to his
blind adopted daughter, Gertrude. The story’s central question is: how can it
be that physical blindness makes life significantly more erotic than normal
eyesight? In La symphonie pastorale, blindness is both metaphorical and lit-
eral, moral and experiential.
In Bazin’s words, “Faith is the operative mechanism in the trap that the
pastor sets for himself; it is the moral alibi for his sin.”74 In Gertrude’s case,
however, blindness is all she has known since birth. Tutored by her lustful
and all-seeing mentor, she imagines a world that is pure and beautiful, with
singing birds and objects she enhances through her exploratory touch. Once
she recovers her sight after a surgical operation, she sees snow for the first
time. But the reality of a few snowflakes dancing in the air disappoints her.
Most of all, she is saddened by the suffering world she discovers. Unable to
cope with how her innocent beauty destroys the pastor’s relations with his
entire family, Gertrude refuses to live within an impure reality. Her ear-
lier untroubled experience of purity, eroticism, and blindness has become
impossible to hold on to, and daily life has lost all its magic. Clinging to a
frozen perfection, she commits suicide in the snow and ice that surround the
pastor’s house.
Religion 131
Although La symphony pastorale is the biggest box-office success since the

Liberation, due to its combination of repressed eroticism and Protestant re-
ligion, Bazin prefers Jean Delannoy’s Dieu a besoin des hommes (God Needs
Men, 1950). This literary adaptation, scripted by Aurenche and Bost, is based
on a novel, Un recteur de l’Île de Sein (Island Priest), published in 1944 by the
Catholic writer Henri Queffélec. Unlike Truffaut, whose intense dislike for
this creative duo leads him to dismiss all of their work, Bazin grants this film
from the Tradition of Quality considerable credit. He states, “the Protestant
sensibility is not indispensable to the making of a good Catholic film, never-
theless it can be a real advantage.”75
Set in a forsaken land off the coast of Brittany, but shot in a studio for
the most part, Delannoy’s film deals with poor fishermen. They live off
shipwrecks and constantly abuse each other. This community is so isolated
that all rules of civility are extremely thin. There is a desperate need for sa-
credness and for moral codes of mutual respect. In regard to Pierre Fresnay’s
portrayal of Delannoy’s protagonist, Bazin observes: “Fresnay’s aristocratic
and slightly Southern accent is miraculously transformed here into a gravelly
speech, a kind of barking of the soul.”76
Unable to cope with the islanders’ brutality, the local Catholic priest
betrays his mandate and abandons the community. The local sacristan
decides to act as a substitute priest in an effort to sustain whatever level of
compassion remains in his community. Little by little, he fills the void left
by the duly appointed, but absent, priest. Meanwhile, the islanders realize
that their emotional sufferings have only increased following the departure
of their priest. They have no one to talk to, and their church—the sole site
of communal gathering—looks more and more disheveled after each storm.
One day it rains inside the basin used for baptismal ceremonies. The sac-
ristan interprets this accident as a natural “sign” demanding better care of the
local church. Thus, he begins to assume the full ceremonial role of a regular
priest. Understandably, the islanders quickly realize that they cannot go on.
They need to choose one of themselves to represent a collective mandate that
stands for compassion and forgiveness, while it operates separately from the
punishments of justice.
Eventually these shared needs escalate into the sacristan’s temporary
self-appointment, until the islanders face a new and even worse Catholic
priest dispatched from the church authorities on the mainland. The replace-
ment priest arrives with guards and knows nothing of the local way of life.
Nor does he even care to learn. For Bazin, this second Catholic priest is an
inadequately developed character in comparison to the local sacristan’s com-

plexity. The critic even wonders whether this second weak and institutional
Catholic character amounts to a Protestant anticlerical gesture on the part of
the filmmakers. Thus, he writes:
The adaptation has at least one regrettable weakness: the character of the

priest. . . . The revolt of the islanders, and even more so of the false priest,
is too easily explained by the stupidity of the new priest. Casting Jean
Brochard as the new priest, moreover, . . . was itself an act of heavy-handed
anticlericalism.77
The two entities—the islanders who live like beasts and their legitimate,
yet disinterested, priest—play crucial illustrative roles in Bazin’s argument
that any religion needs both external validation and internal acceptance in
order to achieve and maintain the “regularization of a free union.”78 Bazin
also refers to religion as a purifying bodily organ79 without which a commu-
nity would poison itself. In Protestantism, the Church can reside in one’s own
home, and local churches may institutionalize their own rules through inde-
pendent interpretations of the Scriptures. Bazin is well aware that, due to its
extreme isolation, the situation on the island of Sein is more easily compat-
ible with the do-it-yourself Protestant approach, rather than Catholicism’s
centralized hierarchical model.
In Delannoy’s film, the despondent Catholic priest nearly tramples on the
Eucharist hosts baked by local women. The immanent quality of the sacred,
here, derives from the local flour and local water the women have used to
make these hosts. Bazin points out: “They are merely small pieces of bread.
But even the most irreligious viewer will gasp at the horror of this gesture.”80
The indigenous creation of the hosts endows these objects with a special
aura, fostering fellowship. Instead of developing topics such as this into a
richer and more open-ended narrative of shared experience, as Bazin would
have hoped, Delannoy’s film turns into a closed-off tragedy, unresolvable by
either Protestant or Catholic institutional means. This theological dead-end
becomes undeniable, since no viable choice is possible between the available
options of an unwilling priest and a self-taught one. Neither figure is able to
mediate between the local and the global.
In the end, Bazin is disappointed with Aurenche and Bost for replacing
the original end of the literary source with a much more facile conclusion
equivalent to “a barking of the soul.” In the novel, the Catholic bishop resigns
Religion 133
himself to acceptance of the sacristan’s self-taught ways. In the film, however,

in spite of a spectacular demonstration of the false priest’s independence
during a burial at sea, no condemnation and/or removal of the disrespectful
Catholic clergyman follows. The islanders sheepishly proceed to attend his
mass and defer to his institutional authority. Bazin concludes that the rebel-
lious islanders and their self-appointed sacristan-priest earn the audience’s
sympathy. At the same time, the entrenched presence of the unsympathetic
priest serves the purpose of reinforcing the French secular attitude of con-
tempt toward Catholic institutional hierarchies and their dogmatic ways.
Bazin’s Ontology, Bresson’s Stylistics
“The Ontology of the Photographic Image” is considered Bazin’s most fa-

mous and important essay.81 Yet, in his 1952 essay “Le journal d’un curé
de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson,”82 Bazin’s discussion of
Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951) is an equally foundational work
that translator Hugh Gray is not alone in believing to be the finest piece of
film criticism ever written. Curiously, “Ontology” is an essay on “embalming
duration” in a figurative way that ranges from likeness to resemblance. By
contrast, “Stylistics” deals with how Bresson thins out the protagonist’s face
despite his frequent close-ups. Since less is more, this facial icon of suffering
becomes an abstract conduit of spiritual energy from one character to an-
other, and from Diary to the audience.
Despite this dichotomy between Bazin’s emphasis on photographic pres-
ervation and Bresson’s emptying out of the visual register, the “Stylistics” and
the “Ontology” talk to each other in ways that illuminate Bazin’s immanent
and phenomenological definition of spirituality. In cinema’s lifelike and illu-
sionist context, the word “spirit” is, of course, difficult to pin down, because
it ranges from soul to a human’s last breath. Spirit may also apply to the idea
of an electrified ghost or mobilizing emotion that is consubstantial with the
filmic image’s shadowy status and its quasi-immaterial presence. Whatever
the case may be, Bazin is interested in how a character’s last breath and the
blank frames at the end of a film leave behind themselves a trail of energy that
invites spectators to think through their own ethos in life.
That Bazin’s language in the “Stylistics” derives from the “Ontology” is
clearly demonstrable from one example. In the scene set in the confessional’s
dark space, the lit face of a young woman, Chantal, looks “like a seal stamped
on wax.”83 Bazin’s phrase not only describes the translucent pallor of her flesh
but also evokes her face’s resemblance to a death mask, even though she is so
young. Regardless of her age, Chantal is already an individual in an advanced
state of moral decay. In these circumstances, on one hand, the mutuality be-
tween light and Chantal’s skin color reasserts the physical bond of object and
model in photography. On the other, the worn-out combination of seal and
wax within a mold suggests an egocentric fixity that contradicts the confes-
sional as a place for moving out of oneself.
Bazin’s “seal stamped on wax” fits the young woman’s preoccupation with
death, to the extent that her phantom-like face conveys her suicidal fantasy to
the priest. The critic explains:
Naturally Bresson, . . . is only concerned with the countenance as flesh,

which, when not involved in playing a role, is a man’s true imprint, the most
visible mark of his soul. It is then that the countenance takes on the dignity
of a sign. He would have us be concerned here not with the psychology but
with the physiology of existence.84
Through scars and wrinkles, the countenance records on its fleshy surface
the ravages of time, the traces of aging, the tolls of moral decay and phys-
ical stress. The reason why Bazin returns to his vocabulary of the “Ontology”
and views the girl’s face as a death mask is that Chantal looks like a living
dead. Her face alone speaks much more eloquently than the prose of a book,
where language can be deceiving. The area of the face, with its movements
and expressions, is beyond anyone’s control, even her own. Chantal’s face
reveals her anger and suffering as she struggles with her father’s affair and her
mother’s indifference.
An adaptation of the eponymous novel (1936) by Georges Bernanos
(1888–1948), Diary of a Country Priest features an idealistic young priest,
suffering from severe stomach pains, who is sent to his first parish in the vil-
lage of Ambricourt, in the north of France, where he confronts a hostile and
unwelcoming community.
In Ambricourt, the villagers’ faces are similarly unhappy, albeit for dif-
ferent reasons, because every single character is suffering. Arranged through
a proliferation of close-ups, Bresson’s bleak “gallery of portraits” prominently
includes the priest’s face, whose expression conveys a state of constant pain.
He is always about to vomit due to the relentless spasms in his stomach. After
his own death from cancer, however, the priest’s countenance becomes more
Religion 135
than just flesh, pain, or wax. Despite its literal disappearance from the screen,
Bazin declares that the priest’s young face is the only one that acquires “the
dignity of a sign.” In contrast to other characters, who die of old age (the
Countess) or who choose suicide (Doctor Delbende), the young man’s death
is marked by a black Christian cross on a blank screen. Once his unforget-
table face disappears from the screen, the destiny of all humankind lingers on
through the sign of universal suffering symbolized by the Christian cross.85
Bresson’s abstract, yet Christological, ending continues to invite all kinds of
speculation. As a Christ-like figure, the young priest feels abandoned by God
during his miserable time in Ambricourt. Night after night he experiences
God as increasing silence, absence, and doubt. During his final agony, in a
friend’s filthy apartment in Lille, the young priest realizes that only human
beings can break this silence and make God’s love present in this world, by
changing their attitude toward others. Love moves people toward each other.
Likewise, the images of cinema move within an energetic flow that is both in-
tellectual and emotional in its impact on audiences. Owing to this centrifugal
passage of energy, inside the film and from the film outward, Bazin can claim
that the priest’s cross attains the “dignity of a sign.” The Christian symbol fills
in for a loss of presence, but it also celebrates how this absence creates impor-
tant space for new energy and ethical choices to be carried out by those who
are still living. Needless to say, the “dignity of a sign,” or an absent presence,
enjoys a photographic ontology, to the extent that the cross belongs to Christ
as well as to every other human being.
Even if Bazin were to deal at greater length with Bresson’s adaptation of the
Bernanos novel, he would probably conclude that Diary moves well beyond
the usual dialectic of word and image in film adaptations. This is not a film
based on an exchange between the visual and the verbal. Bresson’s agenda is
much more ambitious than the transformation of the protagonist’s face into
writing.86 Bazin’s “Stylistics” is not an essay on ekphrasis. Its essential con-
cern is not with how the priest’s face becomes visually displaced by images of
written notes and scribbled pages. There is no iconophobia in this film whose
stylistics celebrate, instead, an ontological plurality. The organizational prin-
ciple of Bresson’s Diary and Bazin’s “Stylistics” relies on references to litera-
ture, radio, theater, and film. Diary is a film that rethinks cinema in the light
of other media.
As if all these aesthetic resources were still inadequate to the task, Diary’s
experimental, avant-garde complexity pushes Bazin to call on scientific and
religious references as well. Only in this way can Bazin explain why Bresson’s
Diary attains the level of “pure” cinema by means comparable to De Sica’s

very different purity in Bicycle Thieves (1948), which Bazin mentions in the
“Stylistics.”
Bresson’s project in Diary is to push the remapping of the senses to an
extreme limit, and by so doing, the director prefigures an experiment
in intermediality which proves to be notably inspirational for the future
filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague. One may detect in Bresson’s exhaustive
remapping of the senses an anticipation of Jean-Luc Godard’s permutations
across word, graphics, line, color, sound, objects, silence, and music. Bresson
wants the audible word to become flatly inexpressive or awkwardly spoken.
Verbal exchanges in his film sound as if the microphone were recording
sentences read deadpan from a book, rather than dealing with a combina-
tion of nonprofessional and professional actors delivering their fictional
characters’ lines.
Since a remapping of the senses is at stake, Bazin does not only look at
Bresson’s images but also listens to them. Thus, he concludes that Diary is
comparable to a radio broadcast of off-screen sounds. On one hand, Bresson’s
expansion of the viewer’s listening range depends on an experimental use of
a recitative; on the other, it leads Bazin to imagine Diary as “a silent film with
spoken titles,” and “a text post-synchronized on a monotone.”87 Perhaps one
could argue that sound prevails over a word and image dialectic in order to
sense interiority. So extreme is the remapping of the senses in Bresson’s film
that the question arises as to whether Diary is most accurately described as a
sound film without images, or a sound film without acting, or perhaps a si-
lent film with sentences written by Bernanos and used as spoken intertitles
by Bresson.
Only a few years before Diary, in 1945, Béla Balázs wrote a very lyrical
essay on the face in close-up and soliloquy in silent cinema, paying special
attention to Danish actress Asta Nielsen, and to Maria Falconetti in Carl
Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Based on the original
documents from Joan’s trial, Dreyer’s Passion is heroic.88 Set next to it, Diary
is simply ordinary, radically anonymous in its content. In fact, while we know
the name of the quasi-nonprofessional Swiss actor, Claude Laydu, who plays
him, the young country priest remains nameless in Bresson’s film, as well as
in Bernanos’s novel, which is written in the first person.
Appropriately, Dreyer shows the shadowy image of a Christian cross. This
symbol is stretched over an undulating surface that looks like a flag moving in
the wind.89 In contrast to Bresson’s Diary, Dreyer is dealing with a historical
Religion 137
event, in which both a national flag and the Christian cross are significant.
Joan dies in a public execution in the midst of a war between England and
France. She is a heroine, a martyr, a mad woman, a visionary. In contrast
to Dreyer’s Protestant film, where a local community reads the Scriptures
and decides their interpretations, Diary is a universal, Catholic “passion.” As
such, it observes the structural logic of the Medieval Passion Play. Yet no-
body around the country priest is aware of his agony. Furthermore, in the
desolation of Ambricourt, there is no need for national or political history.
Even though it is rooted in the lives of anonymous people, the allegory of
Christ’s passion is so familiar that it can adapt itself to all situations, without
requiring a key to unlock its presence and significance.
According to Bazin, Bresson’s Way of the Cross becomes an analogy
for every individual’s anonymous and unpredictable journey toward
death: “Each bears his own cross and each cross is different, but all are the
Cross of the Passion.”90 The Way of the Cross is a reminder that no human
being is impervious to suffering and death, even though we all die in a dif-
ferent way, just as we each live in a different way.
In The Passion, Dreyer’s mysticism is generated by the bold photography
which presents readable and mute faces that are expressively rich, while these
very same images strive for a painterly aura. Well aware that Joan is famous
for hearing supernatural voices, Bresson not only avoids Dreyer’s pictorial
mysticism but also rejects supernatural appearances and reduces them to
the priest’s lonely hallucinations. Even when the young man declares that he
has caught a glimpse of the “Divine Countenance,” his delirious words clash
against the immanence of daily life, that is, the rough hands of Seraphita, the
peasant girl who comes to his rescue.
Dreyer’s Passion is a silent film, but its images are filled with words spoken
by expressive and knowing faces, according to a historically accurate script.
The coincidental and mundane noises of daily life have no place inside a
sealed medieval courtroom. This self-contained space allows Dreyer to rule
out all contingency. Any makeup on Falconetti’s face, for example, would dis-
turb the gravity of the legal proceedings and their basis for inclusion in the
historical record.
By contrast, the use of Ambricourt in Bresson’s Diary is centrifugal and
constantly suggesting something contingent beyond its frame. As if he were
looking for answers in a dark and unknown universe, Bresson’s protago-
nist walks around with a shaky lamp on his way to church at night.91 There,
praying and faith are far more difficult than writing.
In his detailed analysis of Diary, Tony Pipolo quotes the young priest’s
feeling of imprisonment: “Behind me there was nothing. Before me, there
was a wall, a blank wall.” Pipolo goes on to say: “We hear this in voice over as
he looks so intently off-screen with what Bresson aptly calls ‘the ejaculatory
force of the eye.’ ” Pipolo continues: “the viewer anticipates, almost physi-
cally, a cut to the object of his glance that we feel certain is just beyond the
frame. But of course nothing in the off-screen space materializes to answer
this shot, not even the cross hanging on the wall, which we see moments later
behind the priest.” Instead of the cross behind him, the young man in voice-
over claims that “there was nothing.” This mental erasure of the cross, Pipolo
remarks, “seems to accentuate the blankness ‘before’ him . . . , precluding the
viewer’s filling in the picture with knowledge of the cross’s presence in the
off-screen space to which he looks.”92 During the film’s conclusion, Bresson’s
empty screen is not only death’s void; it also becomes a blank slate for a new
beginning. In Bresson’s Diary, horror vacuii turns into an open space for indi-
vidual reflection in the face of death.
Bresson’s adaptation of Bernanos’s novel is not only an example of pure
cinema, but also an achievement comparable to Mallarmé’s blank page
or the use of silence in the poetry of Rimbaud.93 Thus, in the “Stylistics,”
Bazin celebrates Bresson’s radical approach on the scale of the very same
Symbolist poets who backed up Paul Valéry’s rise to fame in French intel-
lectual culture during the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast to
Valéry’s elitist social circles, Bazin lives in a completely different world of
cultural activism.
Well known for his disdain of the realist novel and its superfluous details,
Valéry is the flagbearer of mental abstraction, secularism, skepticism, and
purification of language in poetry. Bazin notes that “Valéry condemned the
novel for being obliged to record that ‘the Marquise had tea at five o’clock.’ ”
The film critic later compares Bresson’s excision of Bernanos’s visual details
to “lines drawn across an image to affirm its transparency, as the dust affirms
the transparency of a diamond; it is impurity at its purest.”94
Whereas for Valéry the search for perfection leads to poetry, and only po-
etry, for Bazin the residual impurities of realism are necessary because they
match human imperfections. Given the atheist Valéry’s intense association
with science and his passionate dislike of religion, Bazin’s ironic reference
to this famous poet might be his concise and veiled way of suggesting that
Bresson’s realist adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s Catholic novel proves
Religion 139
Valéry wrong. To be sure, Bresson’s Diary demonstrates that the novel in film
can thrive with the same rigor and purity that Valéry approvingly ascribes to
mathematics.
Significantly, Bresson’s adaptation relies on a “creative fidelity,”95 which in
effect endows Bernanos’s book with a new level of energy. In the “Stylistics,”
Bazin references Kierkegaard’s concept of “repetition” to help demonstrate
that the film’s ending welcomes the eclipse of the protagonist’s face and its
replacement with invisible spectators looking at the screen. Bazin’s allu-
sion to Kierkegaard’s repetition emphasizes, in a quasi-prophetic way, how a
person’s death may, unintentionally, lead to the envisioning of an alternative
moral order.96 Death produces a void open to new thinking.
By rewriting a brief phrase lifted from the Gospel of Saint Luke con-
cerning Christ’s birth: “a grain of sand that gets into and seizes up a piece
of machinery,”97 Bazin relies on Kierkegaard’s repetition to make the point
that every event, small or large, does heavily matter in the order of things.
Whether or not someone is wretched, their death is cause for all of us to ex-
amine how and why we live.
Possibly to offset the Danish philosopher’s irrational penchant for the
supernatural and to underline perceptual rejuvenation, Bazin responds to
Bresson’s eschatological interrogation of death with a zoological image of re-
birth, invoking the “recurrent spasms of childbirth or of a snake sloughing
off its skin.”98
Scandinavian scholar Arne Melberg explains that Kierkegaard’s repeti-
tion, or “moving forward,” is based on an irrational leap of faith toward the
unknown. This concept stands in opposition99 to both Platonic recollection
and the Hegelian notion of synthesis issuing out of thesis and antithesis. In
Kierkegaard, “the now of repetition is always an after. But not only: since the
movement of repetition also makes it new, makes ‘the new.’ ”100 In an un-
canny way, Melberg’s explanation of Kierkegaard’s repetition also clarifies
how and why the nonanthropocentric, equalizing impact of filmic recording
yields a special eye and fulfills Bazin’s definition of the cinema as “objectivity
in time.” In his “Ontology” essay, Bazin claims that every photographic trace
not only repeats, but also adds something new to the order of things, because
every moment in time is different.
Melberg’s comment fits, as well, Bazin’s description of Bresson’s adaptation
process as “creative fidelity,” by means of which mechanical recording and
filming the book “word by word” becomes far more than simple duplication.
By “dreaming” Bernanos’s text over again, and opening the empty screen to
our suspension of disbelief in the soul’s afterlife, Bresson’s adaptation achieves
cinematic reinvention. The film becomes more faithful to the book’s spirit the
more it takes “creative license” with its literal detail and, simultaneously, the
more irrational belief in both art as creativity and religion as spirituality can
challenge the viewer’s rational mind. The present tense of Kierkegaard’s repe-
tition is prophetic, because it becomes a passage into the future, thanks to an
absence. More concretely, a lonely diary can pave the way for the dialogical
text that the film becomes, by addressing the spectator through the voice-
over, written text, and, eventually, death.
To fill this void with the energy of hope, the young priest’s friend, the
defrocked seminarian Louis Dufrety, writes a letter to report the former’s
death to his mentor, the curé de Torcy, and promises to visit in person. In
a film in which literary adaptation takes the form of a surreal dialectic of
recording and dreaming, Dufrety’s straightforward letter, devoid of melo-
drama, stands out in an open-ended current of intellectual and emotional
exchanges. Thanks to a voice-over suspended between Dufrety as the
writer and the curé de Torcy as the reader, we learn that the young priest’s
last spoken words were: “What does it matter? All is grace.” By changing
others, the young priest changes and finds himself. “All is Grace” seals a
peaceful death. The young priest has found solace in his vocation before
dying. By acting like “a grain of sand” inside a machine, the priest’s death
disrupts the laziness of Dufrety’s self-centered and mechanical life.
A blank screen tries to end a narrative that instead goes on searching for
answers in the spectators’ minds. Bresson’s film concludes with the life-
like motions of the cinema converging into the deathlike stillness of pho-
tography. Within this screen of vibrating emptiness, a black cross looms
large. Time as death is the real. Time’s flow is also the reality of Otherness,
contingency, grace, and God.101 Everything becomes equal in front of
cinema’s lens, just as we are all mortals in front of life. In the wake of this
leveling process, the white screen and the white page become alike and
exchangeable.
A strong believer in the power of spiritual legacies, but too much of a
Darwinian to accept the Christian soul, Bazin is neither a mystic nor a spir-
itualist. For the film theorist, what rescues memory in front of death is “the
dignity of signs,” namely, cinematic resurrection. A sign that compensates
for the void, the black cross is a religious symbol that objectively participates
in a social mythology. The cross is not only a reminder of Christ’s crucifixion
Religion 141
but also a symbolic answer to Sartre’s nihilist view of existence. The projected
light lingering on Bresson’s screen reminds us that cinema’s parallel world
straddles empty actuality and ontological fullness. In the wake of this pho-
tographic paradox, there might be much more to death than just the end of
suffering.
5
Epilogue
Wind and Dust
In response to Edgar Morin’s Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire (1956),1 Bazin

notes that the advent of this turn-of-the-century medium fits an ancient
myth: the story of the human ambition to represent life in motion. Thanks to
the cinema, Bazin writes, “civilization has returned as close as possible to the
most archaic and perhaps universal human myth.”2 Is Bazin proposing a phi-
losophy of history that is simultaneously evolutionary and circular? To begin
with, circularity applies to how, from the stereoscope to 3-D immersion, pure
cinema makes itself disappear into the end of cinema. Whether or not the
“end of cinema” corresponds to neorealism, the latter is an ontogenetic phe-
nomenon because it contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Is Bazin’s “end of cinema” a temporary stage within an evolutionary tra-
jectory? Or does he imply that cinema never ends, because this medium dies
and then it regenerates in a new way? Or, even better, in speaking of the end
of cinema during the forties and fifties, is Bazin unknowingly anticipating
the end of photographic cinema and the arrival of new technologies such as
digital imaging?
Bazin’s film theory deserves to be further interrogated from the point
of view of competing philosophies of history; however, all these questions
fall outside the scope of this book, which is limited to metaphors and
allusions on art, science, and religion. This book has explicated two
very different concepts in Bazin’s film theory— anthropocentrism and
anthropomorphism—by suggesting that this film critic’s worldview was
based on an anti-anthropocentric ethos.
Without a doubt, Bazin and Edgar Morin shared a comparable anthropo-
logical approach to the cinema. In regard to the ontology of the photographic
image, Morin and Bazin conceptualize cinematic recording in a similar
way. In her introduction to The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, translator
Lorraine Mortimer says that for Morin: “The image . . . contains the mag-
ical quality of the double, but interiorized, nascent, and subjectivized. The
University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190067298.001.0001
Epilogue 143
double possesses the psychic, affective quality of the image but in an alien-
ated magical form.”3 An advocate of photography as mummification, Bazin
argues that its image is a Double which becomes the Other in relation to a
Self. Of course, the dialectic of Self and Other is central to Bazin’s Personalist
and anti-anthropocentric film theory.4
By dealing with a social technology that combines economic profit with
storytelling, Morin and Bazin agree that the cinema compensates for isola-
tion in modern life through “affective participation.” By so doing, cinema
educates communities to share narratives and values. Cinema’s illusory
doubling of the world depends on irrational belief. The Double, in turn, is
compatible with Mounier’s interest in Otherness. Indeed, the Double, the
Mummy, the Shadow, and the Other are all variations on the modern tension
between substance and appearance.
Anti-Anthropocentric Anthropocosmomorphism
Morin’s priority— the imagination with its emotions— is most com-

patible with Bazin’s irrational belief turning into hope. Furthermore,
the film critic supports the anthropologist’s view that the cinema is an
anthropocosmomorphic medium. Regardless of these points of intersec-
tion, Bazin’s cosmology is quite different from Morin’s. On all accounts, the
film critic is most sensitive to Pascal’s tragic view of humankind struggling
with a silent and unknowable God. With his typical penchant for irresolvable
dilemmas, Pascal maintains that man is too imperfect to master the cosmos
rationally and too self-aware to ignore the irrational appeal of the cosmos.
Through this very same Pascalian paradox, Bazin understands Morin’s
anthropocosmomorphism in an anti-anthropocentric manner. One way or
another, all the surviving films ever made constitute a record of the twen-
tieth century. No such opportunity for the memory of the future and the fu-
ture of memory exists before 1895. Even if, through the cinema, humankind
contributes to the history of the universe, Bazin’s anti-anthropocentric film
theory reminds us that we are never in control or at the center of the world
we live in.
Interested in Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s studies on primitive mentality,5 Morin
turns to Jean Epstein’s film theory, which is keen on cinema’s power to vivify
inert matter and satisfy a modern longing for magic.6 In bringing up the
notion of photogénie, originally coined by early film theorist Louis Delluc,7
Epstein calls attention to the special value that the filmic image confers on
reality.8 Together, Epstein and Morin understand cinema’s impact in an ani-
mistic way. On the contrary, for Bazin, what they call photogénie derives from
the objectifying impact of the camera lens (objectif) on the world, which
is egalitarian and nonanthropocentric rather than animistic, mystical, or
pantheistic.9
Not surprisingly, Morin’s anthropocosmomorphism brings to mind
Bazin’s association of magic and anthropomorphism, where this psycholog-
ical reaction remains inevitable and automatic. Bazin never attributes a moral
consciousness to unthinking nature or unfeeling technology. This is not to
say the French critic does not appreciate analogical interconnections among
beings and things. On the contrary, these very same analogical overlaps help
him raise questions on what demarcates a human from a machine, an an-
imal, a plant, and an object. Most importantly, even though he appreciates
Epstein’s fascination with natural forces and Jean Renoir’s sensualist pan-
theism,10 Bazin never situates God inside nature, nor does he believe in any
utopian cosmic harmony or in Einstein’s singular mathematical reality.
Despite his animistic analogy between the self and the cosmos through
anthropocosmomorphism, Morin never argues for an anthropocentric, su-
perhuman fusion. This very extreme, futuristic, Christological scenario,
instead, propels Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s controversial religious philos-
ophy.11 A Jesuit paleontologist and a geologist, Teilhard stands out as an im-
pressive Darwinian scholar. He contributes to major research expeditions on
the origin of man, from Asia to Africa.
One point of intersection between Bazin and Teilhard de Chardin is the
Abbé Breuil, or Henri Breuil (1877–1961). This Jesuit paleontologist and ar-
chaeologist studied the Paleolithic caves of Lascaux. Discovered by 1940 in
Dordogne, these caves opened to the public eight years later. Bazin mentions
Paleolithic art in his brief history of image-making for his “Ontology of
the Photographic Image” essay. Intrigued with the irrational power of
images, Bazin highlights the magical properties of animals painted on the
walls of the Lascaux caves. Executed before a hunt, these images claim a
propitiatory value.
Indeed Bazin’s phenomenological and Christological film theory should
never be confused with Teilhard’s “noo-sphere”—that is, a strictly mental
universe of disembodied images or displays of artificial intelligences—
through which Gilles Deleuze anticipates today’s way of living with mul-
tiple screens, virtual realities, and neural nets.12 Teilhard de Chardin was
Epilogue 145
trained as a scientist, but was hardly in touch with the arts. His evolutionary
Darwinism, which degenerates into a superhuman reincarnation, greatly
differs from Bazin’s. Bazin mentions Teilhard once in his work, and he does
so probably because Teilhard stands out as a charismatic, yet contested figure
during the fifties.13
A familiar presence in Paris’s most exclusive circles, Teilhard de Chardin
never intersects with the postwar film culture that Bazin spearheads from the
early forties to the late fifties. In contrast to Bazin’s unassuming educational
style, Teilhard’s upper-class origins explain his frequentation at the Collège
de France and his scientific conversations with the atheist Paul Valéry, from
one soirée to the next. In contrast to the institutionally sponsored research
trips (Cambridge, Yale) that Teilhard participates in, Bazin’s writings sustain
the maturation of an ephemeral and promiscuous medium that learns about
itself from scratch.
While Bazin modestly operates under the radar and in the deepest
trenches of working-class culture, Teilhard skyrockets himself into the
Institut Catholique in the Saint Sulpice neighborhood. At the same time,
Teilhard’s futuristic, extraplanetary ideas get him in trouble with the Vatican.
Repeatedly, Bazin states his lack of interest in the Saint Sulpice circles, but
he is flexible enough to make an important exception. He befriends the
Sulpicien priest, Amédée Ayfre (1922–1964), author of several books on
cinema and spirituality.14
Bazin’s stress on the opacity of the world, the ambiguities of quantum
physics, and the randomness of lived experience stand in clear-cut opposi-
tion to Teilhard de Chardin’s teleological trajectory of knowledge, redemp-
tion, and salvation. With him, religion acquires the colors of science fiction.
According to Georges Cuenot’s excellent biography,15 Teilhard de Chardin’s
three evolutionary phases—geogenesis, biogenesis, and noogenesis—do not
stop with the development of an ethical self-consciousness. They presup-
pose an ultrahuman leap into the divine. Teilhard argues for a transhuman
mutation that goes much further than either human biology or Bazin’s em-
phasis on cinema’s ethical impact. Toward the end of his life, the omnivo-
rous Teilhard becomes interested in cybernetics. Bazin, instead, criticizes the
world of artificial intelligence and rejects André Cayatte’s courtroom drama
films, with robot-like characters ruled by their actions’ legal geometry.
In contrast to Teilhard’s exposure to robotics, Morin’s homme imaginaire
is, first and foremost, the film spectator looking at himself as the Other, over
and over again, as if someone new is there each time, whenever a film is
projected against a white screen. Not trained in aesthetics, Morin neglects

to explain the importance of the arts and the sciences in the cinematic ex-
perience. The question, therefore, arises of how can an ethical and spiritual
evolution develop, thanks to the cinema as an impure medium made of art
and science?
When they sit in the dark, spectators become as motionless as plants, and,
as such, they resemble the stillness of photography and painting. Spectators
can also become animals in motion, to the extent that they respond to
nervous stimuli triggered by moving elements on screen, enabling them to
explore the world vicariously, through camera movement. They can also be-
come a gravity-defying machine, like an airplane during an aerial view that
miniaturizes the world; or they can reduce themselves to an insect’s size when
they look at gigantic elements on the screen in close-up.
To be sure, Bazin’s spectator is also shaped by the film theorist’s ranking
of the arts, as a system based on time and literature, over space and painting,
and by his “tree of the sciences”16 with all its interrelated disciplines from bi-
ology all the way down to mathematics. As far as the arts are concerned, liter-
ature, editing, and the thinking mind are on top; theater, camera movement,
and the world are in the middle; painting and the senses are at the bottom.
Bazin’s tree of the sciences reverses the arts’ mind-world-body sequence with
time, space, and the senses ranked in such a way so that language and thought
have priority over the sensuality of pictorial images.
As soon as we move to what Bazin calls “the tree of the sciences,” within the
interfaces of contingency with biology and abstract logic with mathematics,
biology belongs to the top from which it points to the finite and inevitably
frail organisms of all living entities. The chemistry and physics of interaction
with the world are in the middle; and the mathematics of the rational, ab-
stract mind sit at the bottom. This reduction of human logic to such an infe-
rior position is a sobering and anti-anthropocentric gesture that balances the
prominence of literature and thought in Bazin’s system of the arts.
In the cinema, Bazin’s system of the arts and the tree of the sciences comple-
ment each other in such a way that lifelike motion compensates for physical
decay, while the blind spots of subjective perception prevail over the proofs
and the truths of scientific knowledge. In the end, one can live perfectly well
without religion and without spirituality. Yet the irrational remains an una-
voidable component of the human experience, which the cinema addresses
by triggering emotions.
Epilogue 147
The Wild Grass of Saintonge
Bazin’s very first essay, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” and his
very last, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge” (1958),17 deal with art history
and his preference for the Romanesque style over Renaissance perspective.18
In his critical biography, Dudley Andrew clarifies the plan behind a film-
making project that Bazin conceived near the end of his life:
Early in 1957, after some conversations with Pierre Braunberger, the man
who produced so many of the New Wave’s efforts, Bazin decides to make a
short documentary on the Romanesque churches of the Saintonge district
in France, the area in which he had grown up.19
To film silent architectural structures in the Saintonge area (Figures 5.1–5.7),

on the west central Atlantic coast of France, is a project less complicated to
organize than a literary adaptation with sets, props, actors, legal rights, and
dialogue. Between 1957 and 1958 Bazin knows that he does not have much
time to live, nor much energy to work with. He is aware that every single
day makes a difference. This feeling of irreversible countdown might explain
his choice to return to the Saintonge region of his youth, at the very end of
his life. After all, this topic and location date back to when he studied in La
Rochelle and possibly rode a bicycle in his free time to explore the nearby
countryside. Furthermore, his decision to film suggests that he is eager to ex-
perience the cinema from all angles, at least once, before dying.
Of course, Bazin knows very well that the stones of Saintonge make vis-
ible the destructive passage of time, together with the persistence of human
emotions, century after century. Most importantly, this project offers Bazin
the opportunity to visualize for his readers the major coordinates of his film
theory. Thus, his essay on Saintonge is like an intellectual testament written
in the form of a preliminary treatment or scenario.
Notwithstanding the proximity of the Saintonge region to La Rochelle,20
Bazin’s attachment to the Romanesque style of the early Middle Ages may
look suspicious to some readers unfamiliar with his work. As Sarah Wilson
explains:
The Romanesque and medievalist revival of the late 30s was accentuated
during the occupation of France, and was not, of course, unrelated to the
general return to artisanal and pre-industrial values that were being pro-
moted under Vichy.21
In regard to this reactionary movement back to the Middle Ages, Bazin’s po-
litical record is crystal clear. In his critical biography, for example, Dudley
Andrew mentions that the young critic constantly avoided Catholic
collaborators.22 Worth mentioning is that Bazin’s foray into religious art had
nothing to do with the Art Sacré movement, with Père Marie-Alain Couturier
at its center. This high-profile Dominican became a towering figure in the
heart of the Parisian art world. Trained in the craft of stained-glass windows
as a young man, Père Couturier sponsored work by Pierre Matisse and knew
Pablo Picasso personally.
Besides staying away from all political affiliations, Bazin shuns intellectual
elites and upper-class circles. Nothing is more removed from Bazin than the
art galleries and the art magazines resurfacing after the German Occupation.
Without losing his love for abstraction and experiment in film, Bazin knows
that realism and narrative have always been the gospel of the illiterate poor.
Bazin wants his Saintonge documentary to celebrate contemporary life
over the vestiges of the past. Eager to reach a new and larger audience, be-
yond the written page, Bazin focuses on an ethnography of spontaneous vi-
tality. His ideal plan is to shoot the film in the spring, after the pruning of the
linden trees that typically grow along the roads leading to these Saintonge
churches. This timing is already a gesture in favor of new life, the present,
and the future, since the art-historical photographs for this topic are usually
taken in the winter. At that time, the trees are so barren that artistic detail is
easier to grasp from a distance and in context with the rest of the architecture.
Even if Bazin engages in all the preparatory art-historical research neces-
sary for this documentary, art history is not his major topic. Besides prefer-
ring spring over winter, he avoids the specialized architectural and sculptural
language which the French-born Henri Focillon (1881–1943), an expert on
the Saintonge Romanesque, would expect from one of his students in a thesis
on this subject.23
The Saintonge region becomes geographically important during the elev-
enth and twelfth centuries, because this period sees the development of
a pilgrimage route to the Spanish site of Santiago de Compostela, passing
through Saintes, an important town in the Saintonge-Charente-Maritime re-
gion. Despite the common association of medievalism with mysticism, an
Epilogue 149
attentive reading of Bazin’s Saintonge essay discloses that his orientation is

Personalist and more existentially spiritual than traditionally Catholic or in-
stitutionally religious.
In fact, Bazin reminds his readers of two cultural phenomena relevant to
the past and the present of this region: on one hand, he underlines the “fe-
rocity of the wars of religion” which agitated this landscape; on the other,
he pauses on the “relative indifference to religion among the population
of the Charente region.”24 Despite the Middle Ages’ reputation for dark-
ness, suffering in the flames of Hell, and a punitive God, Bazin points out
that Saintonge’s terrifying bestiary comes up against a deeply rooted rural
wisdom based on serenity and moderation.
Without a doubt, after the French Revolution, with the secularization
of all political life, the Saintonge villages witnessed the impact of this new,
anti-ecclesiastical climate of opinion. The silent films of Albert Capellani25
(1874–1931), for example, set in the days of the French Revolution of 1789,
show the persecution of priests in the neighboring and very Catholic region
of Vendée. Released in 1913, Capellani’s Germinal circulates only ten years
after the anticlerical laws of 1903, the expulsion of the orders, and confisca-
tion of Catholic schools.
Despite this wave of lay initiatives fueled by the French government
since the eighteenth-century, even today, the Catholic newspaper La Croix
appears to be a major source of information for the inhabitants of Saintes.
Undaunted by this area’s negative and backward religious reputation,
Bazin’s approach is more anthropological and meteorological rather than
theological or political.
Far away from powerful castles and wealthy towns, his beloved little
churches sit in a fabric of farms, cemeteries, open land, and small villages.
Their presence is barely noticeable, while their modest size makes them look
like barns next to gasoline stations and luncheonettes. The ambition behind
Bazin’s film is to document an anti-conformist and down-to-earth kind of
spirituality. He cares to show how the human element is only one among
many other local aspects.
The film’s protagonist is the wind, or motion itself: the symbiotic en-
counter between wild vegetation and worn-out stones that is provoked by the
weather. Through this project, Bazin returns to a place whose century-old
weathering he can transfigure into the “charm of the stones.”26 Still he avoids
all nostalgic and picturesque temptations. The Saintonge region charms
Figure 5.1–5.7 Views of Saintonge churches, photographed by André Bazin.

Courtesy Janine Bazin and Dudley Andrew.
Epilogue 151
Figure 5.1–5.7 (Continued)
Figure 5.1–5.7 (Continued)
Bazin so much that he wants his camera’s lens to soften the white stones and
move like a caress over the “white robe of the churches.”27
Innumerable tiny churches punctuate the Saintonge countryside. Their
overall effect is comparable to a blanket of white pebbles scattered across the
land. It is as if Bazin were planning an aerial view. These churches’ excep-
tional frequency and humbleness strike a note of contrast with more isolated
and famous places of worship in the Burgundy area, between the important
centers of Poitiers and Angouleme.28
In these much bigger towns, the Romanesque churches have a triangular
space, or tympanum, on top of the central entrance. Thus, there is enough
Epilogue 153
room for a causal narrative with climax, dénouement, and resolution. By con-
trast, in Saintonge, the small church façades cannot sustain such an imposing
threshold. Without an architectural tympanum, they limit themselves to a
few rounds of sculptures. At the same time, these churches—often only as
large as an unassuming chapel—hold on to the rounded shape of the Roman
arch. Characterized by round walls and curvy domes outside, with low
ceilings and billowy naves inside, the typical little Saintonge church looks
young and feminine. By contrast, the thickness of its indoor walls strikes
a note of contrast with the harrowing decay of its external walls, devoured
away by sea salt. Clearly, the windswept harbor of La Rochelle is not far away.
In mixing sacred and profane elements, the sinuous sculptures of
Saintonge feature acrobats, musicians, comedians, craftsmen, farmers,
centaurs, sirens, virgins, madmen, fools, and kings, but also Adam and Eve,
Samson and Delilah, Cain and Abel. In a word, just as Bazin spells out the so-
cial mythologies of different filmic genres, Saintonge’s art relies on a religious
and mythological, vernacular and fantastic potpourri. Here, the cinema is
anticipated by the legends of the Old and the New Testaments. Saintonge’s
sculpture freely draws from famous characters and stereotypes of human be-
havior, by reinventing old and well-known tales.
The sculptors in charge of decorating these churches became the equiva-
lent of oral storytellers wandering from village to village. As if they belonged
to a picture catalogue before Darwin’s evolution, the plant, the beast, and the
human intertwine their extremities in a chain of mutual support, but also
of constant fear and destabilization. The anthropocentric humanism of the
Renaissance looms far away.
In Saintonge, all living creatures seem to need each other, while different
species constantly battle with one another as well. Altogether, interdepend-
ence, competition, mixed breeding, and supernatural occurrences explain
why the farm animal can morph into a dragon with sharp teeth; someone
looking like a peasant can drop his plough and take on Saint Peter’s keys
to Paradise. Mouths spew out flames, and birds acquire fishlike fins. Any
modern understanding of science is still impossible, since magic and al-
chemy cultivate the bizarre, the occult, the monstrous, and the hybrid.
Unraveling like a comic strip, these sculptural reliefs bear witness to human-
kind adrift in superstition. The world of Saintonge is so ancient with magic,
yet so strangely modern due to its sensorial overload, that it becomes a roller
coaster of tears and laughter, cruelty and rebellion, blissful joy and horror.
These sculptures’ equalizing approach is based on metamorphosis, while their
serial unleashing of miracles and catastrophes invokes early medieval chroni-

cles called annals. In these texts, the years go by in an even, list-like, and chron-
ological manner. The annals track natural calamities, good harvests, floods and
plagues, births and deaths, conquests and ceremonies: although every year is
different, each event is uncontrollable and, therefore, absolutely equal in im-
portance to every other; the frequency of horny angels and winged devils re-
mind the viewer that witchcraft rules; medieval chronology is nothing but an
enumeration in space without any temporal differences.
Just as neorealist cinema privileges a quasi-documentary approach to
daily life, likewise Saintonge’s sculptures specialize in the chores, skills,
objects, and tools of nearby farms, cemeteries, hostels, artisanal spaces, and
merchants’ shops. At the same time, these sculptures chronicle the drinking,
burials, lust, music, feasting, and dancing of the nearby inhabitants. By
choosing the Saintonge area over other locations, Bazin privileges local folk-
lore over architectural monumentality:
The sculptor of Saintonge rejects grand dramatic subjects. He’s an observer

of daily life, treating sacred themes and profane life with the same realism.
This is undoubtedly true of all Romanesque sculpture, but perhaps no-
where other than in Saintonge has the artist restricted himself to that zone
of familiarity, far removed from the great terrors and the grand mystical
symbolisms that enliven so many Romanesque capitals and tympanums.
It could be said that a sort of rural wisdom, combined with serenity and
moderation, emerges from Saintonge, in harmony with its history and its
landscape, and has humanized and tempered the medieval religious soul
here.29
The “naive” features of Saintonge’s art bring to mind the simplified, but syn-
thetic approach of children’s drawings. The characters of this elementary
mise-en-scène smile, cry, scream, and frown with their protruding eyes,
teethed or beaked mouths, triangulated faces, and round bellies. Hats and
shoes tell stories dealing with profession, trade, poverty, and wealth. These
sculptures are filled with holes, missing limbs, eroded cheeks. The typical, in-
itially white, stone of Saintonge is malleable as well as friable. These sculpted
performers look like photographic negatives in a state of progressive decom-
position. In both sculpture and photography, time is allegedly frozen when
everything remains indoors. However, due to their constant outdoor expo-
sure, these chains of polymorphous beings slowly disappear into nooks and
Epilogue 155
crannies. The stones crumble into dust. In a similar way, when photographic
glass plates spend too much time in the sun, their transparent skin-like
images peel off and shrivel up into waste.
In contrast to the fully three-dimensional Gothic style, so seriously in-
volved in transcendence, apocalypse, and punishment, Bazin praises the
curvy, Romanesque placidity. Boredom is not an issue in these isolated
dwellings: any accidental visitor can look at a church façade and experience
amusement in front of tongues sticking out, leaping shapes, and grotesque
couplings. In these cases, the realist component is minimal, but the expres-
sive power is at a maximum.
Referring to a specific cultural group, called Combat des Vertus et des Vices,
discussed by historian Monsieur Le Chanoine Tonnellier,30 Bazin lingers on
how wavy folds of dress sit on top of flat arms and legs. Strange flowers and
oversized leaves interrupt the animal menagerie typical of the Romanesque
style. Fancy peacocks, ominous bats, and repulsive lizards run around portals
and down little columns. Without Renaissance perspective to establish hier-
archy inside a mathematical space, any figure can become independent and
float inside a larger scheme, as if a spiritual élan or an inspirational encounter
were a banal matter of fact.
Openly didactic rather than deceptively illusionistic, within the
Romanesque style each emotional state looks like a first-time experience.
The subtleties of irony and hypocrisy, satire and innuendo do not fit in this
theocentric culture that parades a direct connection with Heaven and Hell.
Nothing is fake, while everything is sudden, extreme, irreversible, and au-
thentic. Horror, joy, pain, fear pierce every stone with an abstract intensity
of motive and sincerity of expression. Instead of triggering superficiality and
condescension, the local sculptors’ naive skills guarantee depth and serious-
ness. While the passions stored in these sculptures may seem to challenge
photography’s indifferent automatism, Saintonge’s church façades can be-
come comparable to a cinematic screen.
All around these little churches, a multiplicity of forces takes over: scorching
sun, frantic downpours of rain, blizzards of snow, and thick layers of fog or mist.
No matter the season, a special breed of wild and tenacious grass—one of the
lowest and most stubborn levels of botany—unravels like a snake-like strip of
celluloid falling from the reel onto the ground:
Asleep for centuries in the villages, but not dead, they have become a part
of and absorbed by the life and the vegetation around them. Many of the
churches have been invaded by the greenery—even penetrated by it, like

the chapel at Saint Ouen, whose stones are held in place only by the roots of
ivy and new vines.31
In a state of semi-abandonment and quasi-anonymity that protects them

from ill-advised contemporary restorations, the churches surrender them-
selves to a new form of random or experimental architecture based on the
wild grass redesigning everything it encounters.
The famous French, nineteenth-century architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc
(1814–1879) would scorn any assignment in the region of Saintonge. Famous
for his restoration of the castle of Carcassonne, Viollet-le-Duc focuses only
on large and prestigious projects. Bazin brings his name up in discussing tra-
ditional literary adaptations during the fifties. In front of the unruly greenery
running all over the walls inside and outside, Viollet-le-Duc would enforce
a drastic cleaning.32 No weeds would interfere with his preservationist es-
thetic. Wild grass would undermine the nationalism implicit in Viollet-le-
Duc’s typically French grandeur. In the Saintonge region, villages are too
ordinary and unadorned to justify lawn design at any level. Within this ge-
neral state of calm disarray, seeds and spores can find cracks in the stones.
Thus, they begin a new level of vegetative life in systematic defiance of time
and weather, potential tourist markets, and art historical tours.
Bazin calls all this wild grass “l’herbe folle de l’espérance” (the wild grass
of hope).33 Unexpectedly, the monopoly on narrative action reverses itself
from sculpture to weeds, sprouts, and roots. The emphasis switches from
art to nature. Nothing could be more photographic in method, since, in his
“Ontology” essay, Bazin declares that nature becomes the artist.34 Bergson’s
erratic and discontinuous élan vital, along with Bazin’s preference for contin-
gency over coincidence, are the undisturbed rulers of Saintonge.
Usually associated with stillness due to the fact that they do not have a
nervous system, plants evoke origins, grounding, passivity, and lack of ac-
tion, unless water, air, and wind take over and make the vegetation move.
Here, this rule does not apply. All by itself, wild grass travels as fast as burning
fire or flowing water. In addition, the sounds and cries of farm animals may
disturb the search for a museum-like sterile setting. The most timid flowers,
such as daisies, lavender, and dandelions have just enough color to look re-
bellious, by sticking out of a few tombstones. Occasionally, a tabernacle with
a few votive candles replaces a traffic sign.
Epilogue 157
Like photographs which retain the shapes of objects and leave behind
memories, plants are notorious for their ability to absorb enormous quanti-
ties of solar energy and transform it into the oxygen that sustains the whole
world around them. There cannot be any human life without plants. In short,
greenery is key to our survival. Likewise, photography pushes the imagina-
tion to look back and think forward. Based on air and water, vegetable pho-
tosynthesis is one of the most vital and unobtrusive biological processes the
earth has ever developed. Animals may dominate Saintonge’s sculptures, but
botany looms even larger in Bazin’s film theory. His theme of cinema’s vital
contribution to mass culture seems to resurface through the important roles
played by botany, with oxygen released into the air through photosynthesis.
The codependence of architecture and vegetation strikes Bazin, because
the relentless spreading of wild grass amid the stones keeps these buildings’
physiognomies constantly changing and lifelike. In a similar manner, a film
changes every time it is screened, due to how its audience’s inner sense of
temporality is constantly altering. Although Bazin is adamant that his film
would explain how these churches integrate themselves into the local human
geography of farms and cemeteries, he does not stop there. He is so keen on
movement and change, that he describes how the very profane local poultry
takes over a sacred space reserved only to saints inside the abbey of Trizay:
where the chickens nest in the niches of saints, where the multi-lobed
arches are covered with wire netting to serve as chicken coops, where wood
is stored in the magnificent little apses as if next to the oven, where the
chapter house has become a hay barn. Meanwhile, from one column to an-
other the green beans are drying on wires.35
In this universe of domestic animals and green beans, Bazin’s art histor-
ical and ironic exactitude with polylobes and absidioles leaves no doubt that
modest agriculture is as important as religious architecture.
Possibly thinking of what his filmmaking crew might need to know in ad-
vance for working in this location, Bazin hints at the fact that the smallest
churches look like abandoned private homes. Thus, contemporary visitors
may get a key from some neighbor, either the owner of a nearby farm, or the
guardian of the nearby cemetery. Although Bazin does not go into this degree
of detail, as soon as one opens the door of a small Saintonge church, a sort of
physiochemical microstorm clouds all vision and rushes out of this airtight
time capsule. Inside, religious figures made of wood, straw, and rocks, as
well as shells and worn-out candles, overwhelm all expectations with their
bright irreverent colors so well preserved under seal. Protected within an
undisturbed container, a chromatic wealth of saturated reds, yellows, blues,
and greens survives with the defiance of gaudy crayons for young artists’
picture books.
After his preproduction scouting of the Saintonge area, the film critic’s
personal relationship to this geography warrants further attention. Bazin’s
readings on the Romanesque style go back to 1937, when he spends the
1937–38 school year in the École Normale d’Instituteurs in Versailles. At that
time, this institution is the best preparation for the entrance examination to
the École Normale Supérieure de Saint Cloud. The admission to Saint Cloud
requires written and oral exams. According to film specialist Ludovic Cortade,
one section of Bazin’s written exam gives out the following instructions:
L’Art Gothique en France (les candidats sont invité à visiter et à étudier un

ou plusieurs monuments de leur région. Ils pourront apporter à l’examen
oral des cartes postales les représentant. [Gothic Art in France (Candidates
are urged to visit and study one or more monuments in their region. They
can bring to the oral exam postcards of these monuments.)]36
Cortade also tells us that the required art history reading was: “Chapter
Three” from Louis Réau’s L’art primitif, l’art médiéval. French art historian
Réau owes his reputation to research bridging the gap between Western
and folkloric Eastern European art. The transnational slant of Réau’s work
prepares Bazin for the early medieval “universalism” hovering over the
Saintonge region. Needless to say, medieval universalism fits perfectly into
Bazin’s realist film theory. In fact, the medieval querelle between univer-
salism and nominalism37 anticipates the tension between phenomenological
hermeneutics of faith and poststructuralist hermeneutics of suspicion typ-
ical of the second half of the twentieth century.
A resting point for pilgrims walking from France to Spain, the town of
Saintes is most cosmopolitan around the year 1000. It is the unavoid-
able crossroad for adventurous and determined travelers who walk from
Northern to Southern Europe. Back in these days, the time such a trip takes
might coincide with one’s whole lifespan. Bandits and thieves, pregnancies
and plagues are always competing with the healthy independence and the
communal support required by such a long adventure.
Epilogue 159
The Asian sculptural references included in the church façades lend Bazin
the opportunity to further highlight his film theory’s universalist bent:
That diabolical big-mouthed figure, devouring the column, . . . where the

Marquis de Chasseloup-Loubat seemed, rightfully, to see a resemblance to
Tao Tie, the Chinese glutton. It’s not only from . . . the Middle East via the
Crusades, with the manuscripts, ivories, and fabrics, but even from the Far
East.38
Just as the moving image travels and links different cultures, likewise the
Romanesque style involves a vast geography which, through merchants and
soldiers, monks and artists, spreads itself all over Christian Europe. Its range
of action absorbs images and themes from faraway countries, such as China
and the Arab world.
So wary is Bazin of elitist models that he explains the Romanesque style
through parallels between cinema’s mass appeal and Latin, the shared offi-
cial language of the Middle Ages. The result is that cinema, just like Latin,
becomes the lingua franca of the twentieth century:
We are at the dawn of a sort of artistic technocracy comparable to that of the

Greco-Roman world, or the Christian era when, in the Middle Ages, a re-
nowned theologian could teach equally (depending on the facilities offered
him) in Ghent, Frankfort, Paris, or Perugia.39
Besides percolating in his mind between 1938 and 1945, the Romanesque
art of Saintonge reappears when Bazin reviews Amédée Ayfre’s book,
Dieu au cinéma (1953). Prompted by Ayfre’s choice of examples, Bazin
latches on to a sequence from a little-known Swedish film. Concerned
with witchcraft, greed, and forgiveness, Alf Sjöberg’s Himlaspelet (The
Heavenly Play / Le chemin du ciel, 1942) suggests a metatextual definition
of cinema as a medium capable of tuning into the irrational, Otherness,
and the unknown:
I would have chosen, at the beginning of Chemin du ciel, that curious

traveling shot along a wall pierced by grilled openings behind which
we follow the hesitant steps of a man with a lantern, as he seeks to
find traces of God in a series of naively religious paintings on the wall
opposite.40
Obviously, Sjöberg’s man with a lamp makes an impression on Bazin, be-

cause he looks like an imaginary director or hypothetical spectator for whom
cinema can become a flashlight for secrets or a chandelier for spectacles
through which to illuminate the world we live in.41
While art itself will never reveal the origins of human creativity, the
cinema, at least, can shed some light on reality’s darkness. Furthermore,
cinema’s penchant for a suspension of disbelief speaks to this medium’s emo-
tional power to inspire love. Even if God is love, for those who believe, God
remains “hidden.” Of course, the theme of the Hidden God comes to Bazin
from a Marxist literary critic, Lucien Goldmann. In 1955 this specialist writes
on Pascal’s thought and Racine’s works,42 by underlining how the tragic na-
ture of the human experience results from a condition of quasi-blindness.
One wonders if Bazin has this book in his library. Interestingly, his film
theory argues that, on one hand, cinema’s light can manipulate; on the other,
the nonhuman eye of the camera enjoys a heuristic or revealing potential.
It objectifies everything and it makes time visible through photography and
camera movement in film. Most importantly, this dialectic between human
creativity and technology can lead to unexpected moments of illumination
and perceptual rebirth.
In Le chemin du ciel, the traveling shot explores a discontinuous layout
of openings. They reveal glimpses of “naively religious paintings” on a
pockmarked wall. This scene enables Bazin to recognize the ways in which the
chalky stones of Saintonge geology turn over time into Romanesque ruins:
But some of those harmonies, or at least the material of that stone, will
come through in black and white. I’m thinking especially of the manner in
which the stone has been eaten away, hardening in places, falling into dust
in others, and thus curiously superimposing on the original sculptural or-
namentation the random tracery of wear and wind.43
A mixture of abstraction and figuration, the Romanesque style anticipates

the arabesques of art nouveau and the grotesque combinations of Surrealism.
Art Nouveau and Surrealism, in turn, stand respectively for cinema’s histor-
ical birth at the turn of the century.
Possibly exposed to Émile Mâle’s (1862–1954) and Henri Focillon’s (1881–
1943) writings on the Romanesque through Louis Réau’s familiarity with
these two towering scholars, Bazin’s essay on Saintonge starts with a quote
from Mâle: “Nowhere else in France has Romanesque art found greater
Epilogue 161
appeal.”44 Here Bazin’s choice of Mâle stems from how the latter is the first to
popularize Saint Augustine’s proto-semiology of natural and cultural signs.
In his introduction to On Christian Doctrine, the translator D. W. Robertson
remarks that for Mâle, “the symbolic technique of medieval art” is “essentially
analogous with the symbolic techniques of Scriptural interpretations.”45 In
contrast to Mâle’s allegorical reading of medieval iconography in the light
of spiritual issues, Henri Focillon’s influence on Bazin is more complicated
to chart.
In 1924 Focillon succeeds Mâle as professor of medieval archeology at the
Sorbonne. By 1931, he publishes his groundbreaking book, L’an 1000, l’art
des sculpteurs romans. Focillon argues that art forms change over time. In
addition, since stylistic changes cannot be reduced only to external variables,
he situates formal mutations within the changing use of materials and
techniques.
One thing is for sure: by the mid-thirties, when the discipline of film
studies had not even been born, Erwin Panofsky and Focillon agree
that “cinema is the medium of reality.”46 More specifically, according to
Christophe Gauthier, Focillon is intrigued by how the cinema expresses itself
through the documentary genre at the highest level: “There are some admi-
rable documentary films: Nanook of the North and Moana are examples. But
the cinema as spectacle more often has recourse to fantasy.47
In his essay, “Evolution and Event in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?,” Tom Conley
argues that Bazin’s “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” (1951) and
his “Evolution of the Language of the Western” (1955) were influenced by
Focillon’s art historical theory.48 Without a doubt, Henri Bergson’s Creative
Evolution (1907) is an important source for Focillon’s The Life of Forms
(1934)—a book published one year after the art historian starts teaching
six-week courses at Yale, where in 1938 he receives a Chair in Medieval
Art. Even if the link between Bergson and Focillon is clear, a direct rela-
tionship between Bazin and Focillon cannot be easily established. One can
only acknowledge that Bazin thinks of cinema as a living form which grows,
matures, and evolves. After appointing Focillon in the role of Bazin’s mentor,
Conley unravels the former’s life of forms in four stages: experimental, clas-
sical, radiating, and baroque.
Considering Bazin’s negative views on the baroque in his essay “The
Ontology of the Photographic Image” and his repeatedly scientific, rather
than art-historical, use of the term “radiating,”49 Focillon’s fourfold scheme
does not fit with the systematic and metaphorical language of Bazin’s essays.
Instead of forcing a scheme developed by Focillon for static images into “Les
églises romanes de Saintonge,” the strength of Bazin’s very last piece lies in
its celebration of movement. Likewise, the critic’s appreciation of resilience
and interconnections points to Bergson’s élan vital. The wild grass growing
within the stones of the Saintonge churches is the dominant figure of such
a vital impulse. One could even argue that Bazin’s wild grass stands for all
the genre films ever made, never seen or never discussed, a gigantic mass of
looping celluloid that slowly disintegrates into a vinegar-like smelly powder
of assorted chemicals.
Of course movement means time, space, change, and chance. In a word,
cinema itself, as soon as the elements of recording, editing, and projection
come literally into the picture. Thus Bazin’s focus on the wild grass is more
than just a way to answer his famous question “What is cinema?” By stressing
the humblest roots of this medium, the theorist returns to how impure
cinema oscillates among mass communication, popular culture, and pre-
vious art forms. Through the tenacity of weeds turning into chainlike roots,
Bazin reminds his readers of the direct contact that exists between model
and copy, object and trace in photography.
Finally, the appearance of wild grass as an unintended part of the architec-
ture depends on the contingency of the wind, which, just like time, is an ener-
gizing as well as corrosive force. Bazin speaks of the wind most frequently.
A first example comes from his review of Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique
(1946). In the context of this quasi-documentary film with nonprofessional
actors, Bazin brings up the famous anecdote:
“Look!” shouted the first viewers of the Lumière cinematograph as they

pointed at the leaves on the trees, “look, they’re moving.” The cinema has
come a long way since the heroic days when crowds were satisfied with the
rough rendition of a branch quivering in the wind!50
As if the Farrebique example by itself were too uncouth, Bazin comes up with
a second reference proving that cinema’s wind circulates and touches all. This
meditation on the leaves rustling in the wind emerges from Bazin’s review
of Marc Allegret’s documentary, Avec André Gide (1952). There one can see
the famous writer sitting in a garden with Jean-Paul Sartre: “The first esthetic
emotion ascribed to the cinema is that which moved the spectators in the
Grand Café to cry out ‘the leaves are moving.’ Gide saw it and this simple
spectacle overwhelms us.”51 Just one year later, in one of his 1953 reviews
Epilogue 163
Bazin writes: “the fresh wind that blows over the cinema. As long as such rev-
elations are possible, the cinema will continue to live.”52 As a source of mo-
tion and life, perceptual changes and revealing epiphanies, cinema’s wind can
break down the medium’s stereotypes.
One wonders whether Bazin’s emphasis on the wind is his way of
responding on behalf of the cinema to Paul Valéry’s famous line: “Le vent
se lève! . . . il faut tenter de vivre! [The wind is rising, we must try to live!],”
from his poem Le cimetière marin (1920) (The Graveyard by the Sea). In
Le cimetière marin, the illustrious polymath and incredibly popular Valéry
meditates on human finitude by thinking of his parents buried in the ceme-
tery of his native town, Sète.
Unlike Valery, the ever-sickly Bazin, with tuberculosis and leukemia,
precedes his own parents to the grave in 1958. November 11 is Bazin’s last
day alive. Honored with a public funeral, the entire world of cinema mourns
his premature death. Bazin’s obituary appears in Cahiers du Cinéma and next
to it, Jean Renoir writes: “Bazin was like Ariadne’s mythic thread . . . without
him, the dispersion [in the labyrinth] would have been complete.”53 Renoir’s
overview of film history as a labyrinth takes us all back to the beginning of
Bazin’s career. As a young critic, he earmarks his ideas on photography by
turning to ancient Egypt’s labyrinthine pyramids.54
As for graveyards by the sea, one should keep in mind that in Bazin’s
Saintonge essay, two buildings stand out for their respective involvement
with light and the sea. The first is the tower of Fénioux, made of stones cut
like fish scales (Figure 5.8). This building is not a church or a lighthouse for
ships adrift in the sea, but a “lantern of the dead” standing out in an unmem-
orable rural area. Looking like a piece of art brut, it is an orientation structure
with a small opening on its top where a light points toward a cemetery:
Also in the architecture, let’s not forget those enigmatic lanterns of the dead,
and especially the one at Fénioux, whose little scale-encrusted tower stands
on a bundle of slender columns, erected in the middle of a field where the
sheep graze.55
The second building mentioned by Bazin, Talmont (Figure 5.9), exemplifies

an intriguingly fortified Romanesque church. It looks halfway between a
lighthouse on the edge of the sea and a ship’s prow ready to cast off from the
earth. In this case, the whole planet is reduced to a spectacularly steep cliff.
Religious architecture, here, becomes a leap into the unknown.
Figure 5.8 12th-century lantern of the dead at Fenioux, Charente-Maritime,

France. Classed as a historic monument since 1862. Courtesy Wikimedia
Commons: licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
Unported license.
And how could Bazin not respond to the role assigned to the wind by
the Gospel of Saint John? During the planning stages of Bresson’s film, Un
condamné à mort s’est échappé (A Man Escaped, 1956), the director ponders
on: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot
tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the
Spirit” (John 3:8). At least for a while, Bresson wonders whether an abbrevi-
ated version of this phrase—Le vent souffle où il veut (The wind blows where
it pleases)—might be the right title for his tale of spiritual imprisonment
set in a Nazi jail. There, war and politics intertwine themselves with fears
Epilogue 165
Figure 5.9 Église Sainte-Radegonde de Talmont-sur-Gironde. Fortified church

(11th, 12th, and 16th century) as seen from east with renewed ramparts and
bedrock. Talmont-sur-Gironde, Charente-Maritime, France. Photo: JLPC /
Wikimedia Commons /CC BY-SA 3.0.
due to personal betrayals and emotional insecurities among the prisoners

themselves.56
Once it is transported in the context of Bazin’s film theory as a whole, this
very same wind takes on a special trajectory. On one hand, it links the cinema
with wild grass, meteorological weather, and cosmological time. On the
other, it spells out the paradoxical combination of human free will and God’s
providence.
There is still more to tell in regard to the wind as a spiritual trope and as a
metaphor for the cinema in general. In Bazin’s language, Bergson’s élan vital
is more than just wild grass. It becomes a “souffle vital.”57 In his anthropology
of religion, Régis Debray (1940–), a colleague of Edgar Morin, points out that
the “spirit” of spirituality is comparable to breath. Significantly, the verb “to
breathe” in Greek is pneuma. Yet pneuma also means soul, besides the scientific
fact that energy or energheia depends on deep breathing and oxygen intake.58
We may never know for sure whether the universe we belong to is the one
and only exception ever to have been born out of energy, time, space, and
matter. Perhaps different universes coexist in the cosmos at large, in such a

way that they possibly build on the cinematic idea of parallel worlds. As far as
this planet is concerned, the photographic cinema of the twentieth century
is a spiritual mind-machine that allows for creativity and helps us to orient
ourselves as ethically responsible human beings.
In the end, what matters most is that the very last word of Bazin’s essay on
“Les églises romanes de Saintonge” is vent:
Je pense notamment à la façon dont elle s’est laissée ronger, durcissant par
place, tombant à d’autres en poussière et superposant ainsi curieusement au
grouillement de la sculpture originale les entrelacs hasardeux de l’usure et du
vent. (I’m thinking especially of the manner in which the stone has been
eaten away, hardening in places, falling into dust in others, and thus curi-
ously superimposing on the original sculptural ornamentation the random
tracery of wear and wind.)59
Wondering about the future of the medium to which he has dedicated

his entire life, Bazin’s essay on the churches of Saintonge reads like a fare-
well to his readers and colleagues in Paris. With his typewriter on his bed,
maybe Bazin was thinking of the flight into dust of all things and of his own
imminent death.
Notes
André Bazin's Film Theory: Art, Science, Religion

Angela Dalle Vacche
Print publication date: 2020

Print ISBN-13: 9780190067298
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2020
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190067298.001.0001
(p.167) Notes
Angela Dalle Vacche
Chapter 1
(1.) For a detailed biography of Bazin, see Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (1978),
rev. ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013).
(2.) Dudley Andrew, “Edgar Morin: Cinema, the Very Image of Human
Complexity,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, eds. Paisley
Livingston and Carl Plantinga (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), 408–421.
(3.) For a negative view of Bazin’s work, in regard to neorealism as a postwar

liberalism, see Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 398–399. Also, in regard to lack of
coherence in Bazin’s work, see Noël Carroll, “Cinematic Representation and
Realism: André Bazin and the Aesthetics of Sound Film,” Philosophical Problems
of Classical Film Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 94–
171.
(4.) Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New
York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1960).
(5.) Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man (1956), trans. Lorraine
Mortimer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 72.
(6.) On Bazin and Sartre, see Andrew, André Bazin, 47.
(7.) Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), trans. Carol

Macomber (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 42; Martin Heidegger,
Being and Time (1927), trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2010), 114.
Page 1 of 31
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use.
Subscriber: Columbia University; date: 19 December 2021
Notes
(8.) On Bazin and Merleau-Ponty, see Mauro Carbone, “Le philosophe et le

cinéaste: Merleau-Ponty et la pensée du cinéma,” in La chair des images:
Merleau-Ponty entre peinture et cinéma (Paris: Vrin, 2011), 85–127.
(9.) See Oliver Gaycken, Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science
(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015); James Leo Cahill, Zoological
Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2019); Inga Pollmann, Cinematic Vitalism: Film Theory and the
Question of Life (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018); Scott Curtis,
The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science and Early Cinema in Germany (New
York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015).
(10.) Andrew, André Bazin.
(11.) André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945), in What Is
Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004), 10.
(12.) Emmanuel Mounier, Refaire la Renaissance (1932), preface by Guy Coq

(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974).
(p.168)
(13.) Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism (1949), trans. Philip Mairet (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).
(14.) Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 15.
(15.) Kracauer, Theory of Film, 107.
(16.) Concerning Lotte Eisner and German Expressionism, see Bazin’s review,
“L’écran démoniaque,” France Observateur 132 (20 November 1952).
(17.) André Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality” (1948), in What Is Cinema? vol. 2,
essays selected and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004), 38.
(18.) Edgar Morin, L’homme et la mort dans l’histoire (Paris: Corea, 1951).
(20.) André Bazin, “Montage interdit,” in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? I. Ontologie et

langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969), 119. See also Luchino Visconti, “Towards
Anthropomorphic Cinema,” in Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-Realism, ed.
David Overbey (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1978), 83–85. This essay by Visconti
has nothing to do with Bazin’s psychological notion of anthropomorphism in
relation to animals. Visconti’s anthropomorphism describes the mobilization of
Page 2 of 31
Notes
the Fascist statue into the local, nonprofessional actors of La Terra Trema
(1948). Bazin finds this film to be too painterly, despite its neorealist casting. On
Visconti’s pictorialism and emphasis on the human figure in Senso (1954), see
also Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian
Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 134–147. See also
André Bazin, “Le petit journal du cinéma,” Cahiers du Cinéma 56 (1 February
1956): “Quant à l’esthétique, je ne manque pas de questionner Visconti sur sa
position à l’égard du néoréalisme.”
(21.) André Bazin, “Les périls de Perri,” Cahiers du Cinéma 83 (May 1958).
(22.) Annette Michelson, “Review of André Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 1,”
Artforum 6:10 (Summer 1968), 67–71. At the beginning of her review, Michelson
juxtaposes two statements: “Things are . . . why manipulate them?”—Roberto
Rossellini, and “Cinema is a manipulation of reality through image and sound.”
—Alain Resnais.
(23.) Sergei Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature: Film and the Structure of Things
(1939–1947), trans. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge, UK, and New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), 216–382.
(24.) Antoine De Baecque, Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema, trans.

Jonathan Magidoff and Ninon Vinsonneau (New York, NY: Columbia University
Press, 2012), 56–60.
(25.) On Fuller and the liberation of Falkenau, see also Philip Watts, Allegories of
the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and
Intellectuals in France (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
(26.) Bazin, “Montage Interdit,” 127: “Quand l’essentiel d’un événement est
dépendant d’une présence simultanée de deux ou plusieurs facteurs de l’action,
le montage est interdit.”
(27.) André Bazin, “Première disillusion,” Parisien Libéré 1492 (1 July 1949); and
his “La Dame du Lac,” Parisien Libéré 1120 (21 April 1948). On the dialectic of
subject and object in relation to Hollywood stardom, see Dudley Andrew, “André
Bazin: Dark Passage into the Mystery of Being,” in Thinking in the Dark: Cinema,
Theory, Practice, (p.169) eds. Murray Pomerance and R. Burton Palmer (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 136–149.
(28.) Bazin, “Première désillusion.”
(29.) André Bazin, “Le journal d’un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of
Robert Bresson,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, 139.
(30.) Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 14–16.
Page 3 of 31
Notes
(31.) The expression “freedom and necessity” comes from Bazin, “Stylistics of
Robert Bresson,” 134.
Chapter 2
(1.) André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?
vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 9–16.
(2.) André Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” in Qu’est-ce que le

cinéma? I. Ontologie et langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969), 17. Enrie’s 1931
photograph follows a former one taken by Enrie’s friend, the Turinese lawyer
Secondo Pia in 1898.
(3.) Philip Rosen, “Belief in Bazin,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and
Its After-Life, ed. Dudley Andrew with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 107–118.
(4.) Sir David Brewster, “Photogenic Drawing or Drawing by the Agency of

Light,” Edinburgh Review 76 (January 1843), 309–344.
(5.) Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” 11–19.
(6.) Charles Sanders Peirce’s definitions of “index” and “icon” are found in “On
the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation (1885),” The
Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1 (1867–1891), ed. Nathan
Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992),
225–228.
(7.) Bazin’s emphasis on recording in photography and cinema justifies his

phrase that these two media, in a basic sense, harness energy from the cosmos
and, for this reason, they show “a fragment of the universe.” This phrase comes
up in “Le cinéma et la peinture,” La Revue du Cinéma 19:20 (Fall 1949), 116: “la
photographie et a fortiori le cinéma nous montrent toujours un fragment de
l’univers” (emphasis is Bazin’s). Please note that the untranslated French text of
“Le cinéma et la peinture” from La Revue du Cinéma is different from the essay
“Peinture et Cinéma,” published in volume 2 of Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (1969).
(8.) Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 18: “The aesthetic
qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities.”
(10.) Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the
Contemporary Imaginary (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
Page 4 of 31
Notes
(11.) André Bazin, “Continent perdu,” France Observateur 296 (12 January 1956):
“La présence de la caméra, et donc la présence de l’homme, sont une donnée a
priori
(p.170)
du spectacle, elles impliquent qu’on ne saurait rien nous montrer que cette
présence contredise.”
(12.) André Bazin, “Every Film Is a Social Document,” trans. Paul Fileri, in Film
Comment 44:6 (2008), 40–41; “Tout film est un documentaire social,” Lettres
Françaises 166 (25 July 1947).
(13.) The contrast between medieval and Renaissance realism comes up on the
cover of Travail et culture: Bulletin de la culture populaire (June–July 1946), with
a reference to Fernand Léger on this very same topic.
(15.) Jonathan Friday, “Photography and the Representation of Vision,” Journal of

Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59:4 (2001), 351–362.
(16.) Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic

Apparatus,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip
Rosen (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986), 286–298.
(17.) Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting

and Poetry (1766), trans. Ellen Frothingham (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005).
(18.) Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” reprinted in Clement

Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, ed. J. O’Brian (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 85–93.
(19.) André Bazin, “Bambi,” Parisien Libéré 1131 (5 May 1948).
(20.) André Bazin, “La nuit est mon royaume,” Parisien Libéré 2228 (12
November 1951): “Les aveugles ont toujours tenté les cinéastes, pour de bonnes
et de mauvaises raisons. [ . . . ] Le regard sans objet de l’aveugle est plus
pénétrant que le nôtre, obscurci par le monde, car il semble qu’il sache voir au-
delà des apparences, à travers les êtres et les choses. Il est un peu comme notre
conscience en dehors de nous.”
(21.) André Bazin, “A la recherche du temps perdu: Paris 1900,” Écran Français
118 (30 September 1947): “réalisent le paradoxe d’un passé objectif, d’une
mémoire extérieure à notre conscience.”
(22.) Paula Amad, “Film as the ‘Skin of History’: André Bazin and the Specter of
the Archive and Death in Nicole Védrès’s Paris 1900” (1947), Representations
130:1 (Spring 2015), 84–118.
Page 5 of 31
Notes
(23.) André Bazin, “A la recherche du temps perdu: Paris 1900,” Écran Français
118 (30 September 1947): “Proust trouvait sa récompense du temps retrouvé
dans sa joie ineffable de s’engloutir dans son souvenir. Ici, au contraire, la joie
esthétique nait d’un déclivement, car ces ‘souvenirs’ ne nous appartient pas.”
(24.) Andy Masaki Bellows and Marina McDougall, with Brigitte Berg, eds.,
Science Is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé, trans. Jeanine Herman
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 145–146. See also André Bazin, “On Jean
Painlevé,” in What Is Cinema?, trans. and annotated by Timothy Barnard
(Montreal: Caboose, 2009), 21–23.
(25.) Bellows et al., Science Is Fiction, 145–146.
(26.) André Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” in What Is Cinema, vol. 2, trans.
Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 37.
(27.) André Bazin, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” in What Is Cinema?
vol. 1, 41–52.
(p.171)
(28.) Dudley Andréw, “Malraux, Bazin, and the Gesture of Picasso,” in Opening
Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its After Life, ed. Dudley Andréw with Hervé
Joubert-Laurencin (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011), 153–166. See
also André Bazin, “Le film d’art est-il un documentaire comme les autres?,”
Radio Cinéma Télévision 75 (24 June 1951).
(29.) André Bazin, “La peinture vue par un trou de serrure,” Arts 340 (4 January
1952): “pour utiliser la peinture, le cinéma la trahit et cela sur tous les plans.
L’unité dramatique et logique du film établit des chronologies ou des liens fictifs
entre des oeuvres parfois très éloignées dans le temps et dans l’esprit.”
(30.) On cinema in relation to the arts and science, see Angela Dalle Vacche,
“The Difference of Cinema in the System of the Arts,” in Opening Bazin Postwar
Film Theory and Its After Life, ed. Dudley Andréw with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 142–152.
(31.) André Bazin, “Sur les films de peinture: Réponse à Bourniquel,” Esprit
161:11 (1949), 818: “il est évident que l’écran ne cesse de fausser l’équilibre de
la composition, le rapport des valeurs et qu’il est au surplus irrémédiablement
infirme des couleurs. Mais au lieu de lui imputer ces impuissances, ne peut-on
au contraire s’étonner qu’en partant d’une matière radicalement modifiée dans
ses structures spécifiques le film nous restitue pourtant une oeuvre qui existe
indubitablement avec sa logique et son unité? Imagine-t-on de casser une
horloge en petits morceaux et de la remonter autrement? Si le film, quelque mal
qu’on en pense, existe tout de même, c’est donc que l’oeuvre d’art ne saurait se
Page 6 of 31
Notes
comparer à une mécanique de précision et qu’elle ne cesse pas d’exister même

lorsqu’elle est attaquée dans ses éléments ou dans sa structure.”
(32.) See note 7.
(33.) André Bazin, “L’espace dans la peinture et le cinéma: À propos de van

Gogh,”Arts 210 (15 April 1949), 1.
(34.) Bazin, “La peinture vue par un trou de serrure”: “Il ne les faut point juger
seulement en référence à la peinture qu’ils utilisent mais par rapport à
l’anatomie et à la biologie de cet être esthétique nouveau-né de la conjonction de
la peinture et du cinéma.”
(35.) André Bazin, “Painting and Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, 168.
(36.) Bazin, “La peinture vue par un trou de serrure,” Arts 340 (4 January 1952).
(38.) Bazin, “Sur les films de peinture,” 819.
(39.) On fossilization, see Jane B. Reece, ed., Campbell Biology, 9th ed. (Boston,
MA: Benjamin Cummings/Pearson, 2011), 556.
(40.) André Bazin, “Quand Rubens et van Gogh font du cinéma,” Parisien Libéré
1474 (6 June 1949): “un mouvement virtuel, d’une espace de rotation suspendue
dans l’immobilité de la peinture et qui attend de la sensibilité de celui qui
contemple la toile une délivrance imaginaire.” On the art documentary in
Belgium, see also Steven Jacobs, Art and Cinema: The Belgian Art Documentary
(booklet included in 3-DVD boxed set) (Ghent: Cinematek, 2013).
(41.) Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction” (1935–1936), in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and
introd. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, NY: Schocken Books,
1969), 217–252.
(p.172)
(42.) Clement Greenberg, “The Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), in Kitsch: The
World of Bad Taste, by Gillo Dorfles (New York, NY: Universe Books, 1970), 116–
126.
(43.) Bazin, “L’espace dans la peinture et le cinéma: À propos de Van Gogh.”
(44.) Bazin, “L’espace dans la peinture et le cinéma: À propos de Van Gogh,” 7.
Page 7 of 31
Notes
(45.) Bazin, “Le cinéma et la peinture,” 116: “la photographie et a fortiori le

cinéma nous montrent toujours un fragment de l’univers” (emphasis is Bazin’s).
(46.) Bazin, “Painting and Cinema,” 166.
(47.) On still life and the cinema, see Angela Dalle Vacche, “Alain Cavalier’s
Thérèse: Still Life and the Close-Up as Feminine Space,” in Cinema and Painting:
How Art Is Used in Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 221–247.
(48.) Bazin, “Quand Rubens et Van Gogh font du cinéma.”
(49.) Bazin, “Sur les films de peinture,” 818.
(50.) Dudley Andrew, “Malraux, Bazin, and the Gesture of Picasso,” in Opening
Bazin, 156.
(51.) Bazin, “Sur les films de peinture: Réponse à Bourniquel,” 818: “l’efficacité
du film vient de ce que Resnais ne nous montre jamais un tableau dans son
ensemble, cadre compris. Grâce au montage, au cadrage cinématographique,
l’intérieur du tableau, aux mouvements de la caméra et à certaines astuces de
montage qui parviennent à donner l’illusion parfaite d’une troisième dimension
picturale par l’utilisation de deux tableaux traitant une même scène de deux
points de vue différents, l’oeuvre de Van Gogh cesse en quelque sorte d’être une
série de tableaux pour devenir un univers illimité, résultat de la fusion de toute
son oeuvre, et où le cinéaste nous promène aussi librement que dans la réalité.”
(53.) Bazin, “La peinture vue par un trou de serrure.”
(54.) Bazin, “Le cinéma et la peinture,” 119 (caption): “Un des meilleurs
travelling réalisés par Alain Resnais dans Van Gogh. La caméra se meut
exactement dans l’univers du peintre. À la première image, on voit l’ensemble
du tableau. À la seconde, on s’est réapproché de la porte. Puis, dans le même
mouvement, sans transition, on pénètre à l’intérieur du café: troisième image,
qui est celle d’un autre tableau. La caméra continue d’avancer pour s’arrêter
devant une table (quatrième image).”
(55.) André Bazin, “La vie passionnée de Vincent van Gogh,” Éducation
Nationale 6 (February 1957): “Il ne s’agit pas de nous expliquer pourquoi Van
Gogh était ‘fou’ et quel était le rapport nécessaire entre cette folie et sa
prédilection pour le jaune, par example, mais de nous faire approcher au plus
près de ce point d’incandescence spirituelle où la transmutation nous sera
rendue sensible par son rayonnement.”
Page 8 of 31
Notes
(56.) Bazin, “La vie passionnée de Vincent van Gogh,” Éducation Nationale 6: “Je
pense surtout à des scènes d’intérieurs hollandais, correspondant à la série des
mangeurs de pommes de terre, ou au décor du café d’Arles qui inspira
l’hallucinant tableau nocturne.”
(57.) Bazin, “La vie passionnée de Vincent van Gogh: La peinture à l’huile,”
Parisien Libéré 3855 (1 February 1957): “Le film n’est d’ailleurs pas loin de la
réussite dans sa première partie, celle qui nous relate . . . l’extraordinaire
expérience spirituelle et humaine du jeune pasteur suffragant dans les mines du
Borinage. Vincente Minnelli a su avec un
(p.173)
réalisme qui n’est pas sans rappeler parfois la leçon du premier cinéma
soviétique, évoquer . . . l’effroyable misère des mineurs.”
(58.) Bazin, “La vie passionnée de Vincent van Gogh,”: “C’est ainsi par exemple
que le père Tanguy nous est montré surmonté de son comique petit chapeau
rond comme si cette coiffure lui était habituelle, alors qu’il est plus probable que
Van Gogh inventa cet accoutrement amusant. De même père Roulin et son fils se
promènent dans les rues comme s’ils descendaient des tableaux. C’est faire
ressembler la nature à l’art, selon le mot de Wilde, qui n’est vrai qu’a posteriori.
Van Gogh a transformé notre vision des tournesols, mais avant qu’il ne les
peigne les tournesols n’étaient pas encore ‘des Van Gogh.’ ”
(59.) André Bazin, “A Bergsonian Film: The Picasso Mystery,” in Color, the Film
Reader, eds. Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (New York, NY, and London:
Routledge, 2006), 57–62.
(60.) Bazin, “Le film d’art est-il un documentaire comme les autres?”
(61.) André Bazin, “The Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” What Is Cinema? vol. 1,
142.
(62.) Bazin, “The Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 143.
(63.) Bazin, “The Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 142.
Chapter 3
(1.) On natural selection and the box office, see André Bazin and Jean-Charles
Tachella, “Les secrets d’Orson Welles,” Ecran Français 169 (21 September
1948): “La première règle du cinéma est faire rester les gens dans leur
fauteuil.” (The first rule of cinema is to keep people in their seats.)
(2.) Bazin’s view of nature based on natural selection emerges from his review of
the Russian scientific documentary Sables de mort (1943), in Écran Français 56
(24 July 1946). Set in central Asia and filmed by Alexander Zgouridi, this film
was screened at the 1947 Venice Film Festival. See “Le cinéma en gondole:
Films vus à Venise,” Écran Français 115 (9 September 1947): “Quant à la mort
Page 9 of 31
Notes
de la tendre gerboise aux yeux de fiffette sous l’étreinte scintillante du boa des
sables, elle suggère après les tendres baisers au cadavre, préliminaires à la
déglutition, on ne sait quel monstrueux coït digestif.” (As for the death of the
young desert rat in the sparkling grip of the sand boa, it suggests, after tenderly
kissing the corpse before swallowing it, some kind of monstrous digestive
coitus.)
(3.) André Bazin, “Cinéma français: Demain la crise?,” Carrefour 632 (24
October 1956). Bazin states that cinema is “un organisme déjà affaibli et
virtuellement malade” (an organism already enfeebled and ill).
(4.) Reviewing Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution (1957), in “Témoin à
charger,” Parisien Libéré 4185 (24 February 1958), Bazin states: “C’est que le
cinéma ne se suffit pas de cette algèbre policière, il lui faut un peu d’humanité.
Billy Wilder l’a mieux compris que réalisé.” (That thriller algebra is not enough
for the cinema; it needs a little humanity. Billy Wilder understood it better than
he directed it.) However, in discussing Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (1941), Bazin
speaks of a “sobriété mathématique (mathematical (p.174) austerity)”: “Chasse
à l’homme,” Parisien Libéré 1487 (25 June 1949). Bazin’s discussion of suspense
as an aspect of modernity brings together the policier and neorealism. In his
negative review of Alex Joffé’s Les Fanatiques (A Bomb for a Dictator, 1957) in
France Observateur 392 (14 November 1957), he states: “Naturellement, ce
genre de scénario doit compenser ou étayer le côté en quelque sorte
géométrique et déterminé de ces structures policières par un contrepoint
d’incidents réalistes qui ont pour double fonction de faire entrer la vie dans la
mécanique et de mettre celle-ci en péril en bloquant les rouages. C’est par là
que le néo-réalisme pouvait renouveler le suspense.” (Naturally, this type of
scenario must compensate for the somewhat specific geometric side of these
policier structures with a counterpoint of realistic incidents that have a dual
function of bringing life to the engine and also endangering it by jamming the
gears. Thus neorealism can revive the suspense.)
(5.) André Bazin, “La cybernétique d’André Cayatte,” in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?
III: Cinéma et sociologie (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1960), 169–176.
(6.) Herbert Spencer, Principles of Biology (1864) (Sacramento, CA: Franklin

Classics, 2018)).
(7.) André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans.
Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 22. This is an extract
of an essay originally published in Critique 6 (1 November 1946).
(8.) Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and
the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8:3–4 (Fall 1986), 381–386.
Page 10 of 31
Notes
(9.) André Bazin, “De la politique des auteurs,” Cahiers du Cinéma 70 (1 April
1957): “le résultat mille fois plus hasardeux encore en cinéma qu’en peinture ou
en litérature.”
(10.) André Bazin, “Le monde du silence,” in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? I:

Ontologie et langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969), 59: “la réalisation
matérielle par ces surhommes subaquatiques rencontre en nous-mêmes de
secrètes, profondes et immémoriales connivences.” This essay was originally
published as: “Le monde du silence,” France Observateur 303 (1 March 1956).
(11.) Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” 22.
(12.) Bazin, “Le monde du silence,” in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? I, 59–64. See
also “Le monde du silence: À quoi rêvent les poissons?,” Parisien Libéré 3558 (17
February 1956), and “Le monde du silence: Icare sous-marin,” Radio Cinéma
Télévision 319 (February 1956).
(13.) Bazin, “Le monde du silence,” 59–60: “la beauté de ces images relève d’un
magnétisme bien plus puissant et qui polarise toute notre conscience [ . . . ] nous
ne sommes qu’un grain abandonné avec quelques autres sur la plage océane.”
(14.) André Bazin, “Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2,
158.
(15.) Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907), trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola,
NY: Dover Publications, 1998), 132–133.
(16.) André Bazin, “Le nouveau style américain: Le cinéma est-il majeur?,” Écran
Français 60 (21 August 1946).
(17.) André Bazin, “Quand les microbes jouent les vedettes,” Parisien Libéré 953
(10 October 1947).
(p.175)
(18.) Bazin, “Le monde du silence,” 60: “Cette libération des chaines terrestres
est aussi bien symbolisée au fond par le poisson que par l’oiseau, mais
traditionnellement, [ . . . ] le rêve de l’homme ne se déployait guère que dans
l’Azur. Sec, solaire, aérien. [ . . . ] C’est finalement la science plus forte que notre
imagination qui devait, en révélant à l’homme ses virtualités de poisson, réaliser
le vieux mythe du vol, bien davantage satisfait par le scaphandrier autonome
[ . . . ] pour se trouver non plus dans la situation fugace et périlleuse du
plongeur, mais dans celle de Neptune, maître et habitant de l’eau. L’homme enfin
volait avec ses bras!”
Page 11 of 31
Notes
(19.) Bazin, “Le monde du silence,” 60: “L’homme . . . est un animal marin qui
porte sa mer à l’intérieur.”
(20.) On calculus as the mathematics of the moderns, see Pete A. Y. Gunter,

“Introduction,” in Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 32.
(21.) Andrew C. Papanicolaou and Pete A. Y. Gunter, eds., Bergson and Modern
Thought: Towards a Unified Science, Models of Scientific Thought, vol. 3
(London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1987), 11.
(22.) No wonder Albert Einstein shows great respect for poet Paul Valéry.
Valéry’s admiration for Mallarmé rests on the poem “A Throw of Dice Will Never
Abolish Chance” (1897), which is a linguistic attempt to erase chance from
language. See André Bazin on Einstein, in “Au carrefour du siècle,” Parisien
Libéré 1322 (15 December 1948). Contingency is a crucial aspect of Bazin’s film
theory; for example, see “De la politique des auteurs”: “le résultat mille fois plus
hasardeux encore en cinéma qu’en peinture ou en litérature.”
(23.) André Bazin, “Portrait d’un assassin: Un bon cadre,” Écran Français 230
(28 November 1949). In this article, Bazin quotes Jean Renoir as saying:
“Einstein et Oppenheimer travaillent à Princeton dans la plus complète
indifférence à l’utilisation de leurs travaux scientifiques comme ils le pourraient
faire à Florence ou à Paris.” (At Princeton, Einstein and Oppenheimer work with
complete indifference to the use of their scientific labors, just as they might in
Florence or Paris.)
(24.) André Bazin, “Le journal d’un cure de campagne and the Stylistics of
Robert Bresson,” What Is Cinema? vol. 1, 142.
(25.) On time as clock, see Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the
Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), trans. F. I. Pogson (Mineola, NY: Dover,
2001), 109.
(26.) The five Platonic solids are the tetrahedron, octahedron, cube,
icosahedron, and dodecahedron. On Euclid and Plato, see Mario Livio, The
Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, the World’s Most Astonishing Number (New
York, NY: Broadway Books, 2003).
(27.) Bazin, “La cybernétique d’André Cayatte,” 174–175: “Les tiers et leur
comportement sont la résultante d’un quadrilatère des forces, dont la branche
longue serait l’époque, la societé, le milieu, la conjoncture historique, et la
branche courte la mode d’éducation familiale. [ . . . ] il s’agit toujours de
ramener le réel à une organisation intelligible et sans mystère, animée par le
ressort de la logique et régularisée par le balancier du pour et du contre.”
Page 12 of 31
Notes
(28.) Bazin, “La cybernétique d’André Cayatte,” 176: “Or ce qui distingue le réel
de l’abstraction, l’événement de l’idée, le personnage vraisemblable d’une
simple équation
(p.176)
psychologique, c’est la frange de mystère et d’ambiguité qui résiste à toute
analyse. [ . . . ] En d’autres termes, l’abstraction n’est légitime au cinéma que
dans les modes de récits qui la désignent comme telle. . . . André Cayatte nous
propose un univers juridique et mécaniste peuplé d’automates. Nous attendons
la révolte des robots.”
(29.) Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? vol.
1, 13. In discussing director and actor So Yamamura’s Les bateaux de l’enfer
(Kanikôsen / The Crab Cannery Ships, 1953), reviewed in “Les bateaux de
l’enfer,” Parisien Libéré 3870 (19 February 1957), Bazin returns to his metaphor
of the snowflake for each photographic negative and sets it in contrast to
Eisenstein’s emphasis on collective events: “Eisenstein . . . ne voyait les
événements que dans leur réalité collective: le crystal de neige ne compte guère
pour lui au prix de l’avalanche.”
(30.) Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001),
27–28.
(31.) André Bazin, “Du réalisme dans les films policiers,” France Observateur
259 (28 April 1955). See also André Bazin, “On ne meurt pas comme ça,” Écran
Français 54 (7 September 1946), and “Le film policier n’est pas un genre mais
obéit à une loi: la logique (1–2),” Radio Cinéma Télévision 91 (11 October 1951).
(32.) André Bazin, “La police est photogénique dans [La Dernière Rafale],”
Parisien Libéré 1509 (21 July 1949): “Il n’y a plus depuis longtemps dans le film
américain de vrais et de faux [?], seulement des formes identiques issues de la
même matrice platonicienne.”
(33.) André Bazin, “ ‘M’ le maudit ‘Remade’ in Hollywood,” Parisien Libéré 2309
(15 February 1952): “on ne nous a pas épergné le coup inévitable de la
psychanalyse et du complex d’Oedipe mal liquidé. Hollywood a décidément bien
peur du mystère. Mais il n’y a point de poésie sans mystère.”
(34.) André Bazin, “La grande horloge,”, Parisien Libéré 1439 (28 June 1949):
“une mécanique bien montée, mais . . . le mouvement d’horlogerie invisible et
silencieux qui entraine implacablement la mise-en-scène compte parmi ce qu’on
peut faire de mieux dans le genre.”
(35.) André Bazin, “Le style c’est le genre,” Cahiers du Cinéma 43 (1 January
1955): “L’intérêt essentiel est centré sur l’algèbre policière, [ . . . ] c’est comme
Page 13 of 31
Notes
si un autre film renaissait de cette révélation.” (The major interest is the police
investigation. [ . . . ] it is as if another film grows out of this one’s resolution.)
(36.) Bazin, “Le style c’est le genre”: “La catharsis est totale parce que l’art
dépensé dans le film n’est ni au-dela ni en deçà de son sujet. Le genre est
accompli à la perfection et c’est cette perfection, l’absence totale de reste
dramatique, qui défend l’esprit après l’avoir si rudement secoué. . . . Chaque
genre, fût-ce le plus modeste, comme le policier ou le vaudeville, a sa noblesse
et engendre sa catharsis dès l’instant qu’il est un genre vrai, c’est-à-dire qu’il a
son style propre et que ce style est exactement accompli.”
(37.) Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Celle qui n’était plus (Paris: Denoël,
1952).
(38.) Belgian author Georges Simenon (1902–1989) created the character of

Paris police inspector Maigret, who figured in many romans policiers written
between the 1930s and the 1970s, some of which were made into films.
(39.) Bazin, “Le style c’est le genre.”
(40.) Bazin comments on the “stylized realism” of Story of a Love Affair in this
review: “Chronique d’un amour,” Parisien Liberé 2163 (28 August 1951).
(p.177)
(41.) On this point, see André Bazin, “The House of Wax: Scare Me . . . in
Depth!,” in André Bazin’s New Media, ed. and trans. Dudley Andrew (Oakland:
University of California Press, 2014), 251–253.
(42.) Bazin, “Du réalisme dans les films policiers,”: “L’exactitude documentaire,
cautionnant le mythe, renforce sa crédibilité et entretient la confusion utile avec
la réalité auquelle il se substitue.”
(43.) André Bazin, “Colline 24,” Parisien Libéré 3307 (29 April 1955):
“extraordinaire sentiment de véracité que procure la séquence du cambriolage
traitée comme un documentaire chirurgical.”
(44.) On Dassin’s Rififi as an example of pure cinema, see André Bazin, “Du Rififi
chez les hommes,” Parisien Libéré 3295 (15 April 1955).
(45.) André Bazin, “Colline 24”: “ce reportage reconstitué est à la fois exacte et
périmé. La technique qu’il décrit a été utilisée.”
(46.) André Bazin, “Du Rififi chez les hommes,” Parisien Libéré 3295 (15 April
1955): “J’aime l’admirable finale du retour de Jean Servais, agonisant au volant
de sa voiture, uniquement soucieux après tant de vaines tueries de ramener à sa
Page 14 of 31
Notes
mère un enfant vivant et qui joue inconsciemment avec un revolver de cow-boy.

Cette séquence aurait pu être conventionelle et grandiloquente, la simplicité des
moyens et la sincérité du sentiment en font quelque chose de bouleversant.”
(47.) André Bazin, “Note sur De Sica,” Cahiers du Cinéma 33 (1 March 1954);
André Bazin, “Un film miraculeux: Miracle à Milan,” Parisien Libéré 2238 (24
November 1951); André Bazin, “Miracle à Milan: Cinéma, poésie, justice, et
charité,” Radio Cinéma Télévision 98 (2 December 1951); André Bazin, “Un film
de De Sica: Miracle à Milan,” France Observateur 82 (6 December 1951): “Totò
urbaniste baptise les rues et les places 4 fois 4 font 16, 9 fois 9 font 81, parce
que ces froids symboles mathématiques sont plus beaux pour lui que des noms
mythologiques.”
(48.) On the novel, published by Bompiani in 1943, and on the ban of the film
Miracle in Milan in the Soviet Union, see Dario Tomasi, “Vittorio De Sica and
Cesare Zavattini, verso la svolta,” in Storia del Cinema Italiano 1949–1953, ed.
Luciano De Giusti (Venice: Marsilio, 2003); see also Franco Pecori, Vittorio De
Sica (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980).
(49.) Bazin, “Un film miraculeux.”
(50.) André Bazin, “Vie et mort de la surimpression,” Qu’est-ce que le cinema? I,

27–30.
(51.) Andre Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2, 21.
(52.) “Things are . . . why manipulate them?” Rossellini’s comment is cited by

Annette Michelson, “Review of André Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 1,” Art Forum
6:10 (Summer 1968): 67–71.
(53.) Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” 30: “aesthetic geology.”
(54.) André Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en scène,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2, 64–
66.
(55.) Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en scène,” 62–63.
(56.) Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” 36.
(58.) André Bazin, “Bicycle Thief,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2, 60.
(p.178)
Page 15 of 31
Notes
(60.) Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en scène,” 67.
(65.) Bazin, “Bicycle Thief,” 57.
(66.) Zeno’s paradox is an example of spatial, point-by-point thinking that rejects

the flow of time. If everything is motionless at every instant of time, and time is
made of instants, then motion is impossible. Bergson’s duration opposes Zeno’s
paradox.
(67.) Bazin, “Bicycle Thief,” 60.
(68.) An asymptote is a line that the curve of a function tends toward as the
independent variable of the curve approaches some limit (usually infinity).
(69.) André Bazin, “Umberto D: A great work,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2, 82.
(72.) Bazin, “Umberto D: A Great Work,” 82.
(73.) Henri Bergson, “The Life and Work of Ravaisson,” in The Creative Mind,
trans. Mabelle L. Audison (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007), 195.
(76.) Bazin, “The Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 134. Other references to Faraday
can be found in Bazin’s review of René Clement’s Gervaise (1956): “Gervaise de
René Clement,” Éducation Nationale 25 (4 October 1956), and in his review of
Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1947): “La soif du mal,” France Observateur 422 (4
June 1958).
Chapter 4
(1.) Régis Debray, Dieu, un itinéraire: Matériaux pour l’histoire de l’Éternel en
Occident (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacobs, 2001).
(2.) André Bazin, “Le troisième homme,” Parisien Libéré 1588 (21 October 1949).
Page 16 of 31
Notes
(3.) André Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur-en-scène,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 73.
(4.) Leslie Diana Sawchenko, “The Concept of the Person: The Contributions of
Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Mounier to the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur” (MA
thesis, Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, Alberta, 2013),
48.
(5.) André Bazin, “Charlie Chaplin,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1 (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2004), 152–153.
(6.) In this study, I do not deal with Bazin and censorship, but the Yale André
Bazin Archive warrants further examination on this topic. See, for example, “Le
Vatican: L’Humanité et la censure,” France Observateur 302 (23 February 1956).
Interestingly, as far as the intersection of cinema and religion is concerned,
Bazin saw Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and, in regard to its
mysticism, he
(p.179)
declared, “I was bored.” “Le jeu des pronostics a commencé,” Parisien Libéré
3944 (17 May 1957).
(7.) André Bazin, “Vie et mort de la surimpression,” in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?

I: Ontologie et langage (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969), 27–30.
(8.) André Bazin, “À propos de Pourquoi nous combattons: Histoire, documents et

actualités,” in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? I, 31–36: “loin de faire faire aux sciences
historiques un progrès vers l’objectivité, le cinéma leur donne, par son réalisme
même, un pouvoir d’illusion supplémentaire” (36).
(9.) Bazin, “Vie et mort de la surimpression,” 27: “L’opposition que certains

voudraient voir entre la vocation d’un cinéma consacré à l’expression presque
documentaire de la réalité et les possibilités d’évasion dans le fantastique et le
rêve offertes par la technique cinématographique est, dans son fond, artificielle.
[ . . . ] L’un est inconcevable sans l’autre. [ . . . ] Le fantastique au cinéma n’est
permis que par le réalisme irrésistible de l’image photographique. [ . . . ] Ce qui
plait en effet au public dans le fantastique cinématographique, c’est évidemment
son réalisme, je veux dire la contradiction entre l’objectivité irrécusable de
l’image photographique et le caractère incroyable de l’événement.”
(10.) André Bazin, “Cinéma et théologie,” Esprit 176:2 (February 1951), 237–
245: “Comme le cinéma tient déjà en lui-même du miracle, il était tout indiqué
pour faire pleuvoir les roses sur la terre et jaillir les sources du sable
aride” (238).
(11.) André Bazin, “La fille des marais,” Radio Cinéma Télévision 68 (6 May
1951): “Ces êtres sont ce qu’ils sont, et s’ils sont, de surcroit, les signes de la
Page 17 of 31
Notes
grâce, la grâce n’impressionne pas la pellicule. Mais seulement l’esprit de ceux

qui ont des yeux pour voir.”
(12.) André Bazin, “Lourdes et ses miracles,” Parisien Libéré 3483 (22 November
1955); André Bazin, “ Lourdes et ses miracles,” France Observateur 289 (24
November 1955).
(13.) Sarah Wilson, “Catholics, Communists and Art Sacré,” Yumpu, 5, accessed
January 10, 2018, http://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/4025117.
(14.) Wilson, “Catholics, Communists and Art Sacré,” 6. See also Sarah Wilson,
“Art and Politics of the Left in France: 1935–1955” (PhD diss., Courtauld
Institute of Art, University of London, 1991).
(15.) Sarah Wilson, “Art and Politics of the Left in France: 1935–1955.”
(16.) John Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left: 1930–1950
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 9.
(17.) Robert A. Ventresca, Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius the XII
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 149.
(18.) Marc Coppin, La Côte d’Opale en Guerre d’Algérie 1954–62 (Villeneuve-

d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2012), 134–136.
(19.) Léon Poliakov, Bréviaire de la haine: Le III Reich et les juifs (Paris:
Calmann-Lévy, 1951).
(20.) André Bazin, “Le ghetto concentrationnaire,” Cahiers du Cinéma 9

(February 1952), 58–60.
(21.) Bazin, “Le ghetto concentrationnaire”: “Je doute que le réalisateur Radok
ait consciemment voulu le style de son film. [ . . . ] qu’il s’agit surtout d’un
regain d’influence peut-être individuel de l’esthétique expressioniste qui a
toujours été latent
(p.180)
sinon explicite dans le cinéma tcheque. L’étonnant c’est qu’ici les
caractéristiques les plus contestables de l’expressionisme retrouvent
paradoxalement une justification profonde, une virginité réaliste.”
(22.) André Bazin, “Ghetto Terenzin,” France Observateur 87 (10 January 1952):
“En sorte que l’on a, devant le film, le sentiment probablement justifié d’une
fidélité documentaire à sa réalité objective et mentale.”
(23.) Jiri Cieslar, “Living with the Long Journey: Alfred Radok’s Daleká cesta,”
Central European Review (CER) 9:20 (4 June 2001), http://www.ce-review.org/
01/20/kinoeye20_cieslar.html.
Page 18 of 31
Notes
(24.) Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar

Paris (1919–1933) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
(25.) On Italian Catholicism in contrast to French secularism and French

Catholicism, see André Bazin, “Le petit monde de Don Camillo,” Parisien Libéré
2406 (1 June 1952), and “Le retour de Don Camillo,” Parisien Libéré 2724 (17
June 1953).
(26.) Leo Goretti, “Irma Bandiera, Maria Goretti: Gender Role Models for
Communist Girls in Italy (1945–56),” Twentieth Century Communism 4:4 (May
2012), 14–37.
(27.) André Bazin, “Un saint ne l’est qu’après,” in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? IV:
Une esthétique de la Réalité: Le néo-réalisme (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1962), 60:
“complètement subordonnée à la matière la plus modeste et la plus prosaïque.”
(28.) Bazin, “Un saint ne l’est qu’après,” 61–62: “l’assiduité au catéchisme et la

ferveur de la première communion sont les seuls jalons, banals, d’une piété
commune. [ . . . ] Admettons même que l’influence morale de l’éducation
chrétienne ne se borne pas à fournir un alibi aux véritables mobiles inconscients,
la conduite de Maria n’est pas encore convaincante.”
(29.) Bazin, “Un saint ne l’est qu’après,” 61: “Et ce martyre même, . . . . Un
quelconque crime passionel. . . . Il n’est pas un trait de ce crime qui ne souffre
une explication naturelle. La résistance de la fille peut n’être qu’une pudeur
physiologique exacerbée, un réflexe de petite bête qui a peur.”
(30.) Bazin, “Un saint ne l’est qu’après,” 63: “cette vie de saint ait déçu, du
moins en France, plus encore les chrétiens que les incroyants. [ . . . ] Mais c’est
justement le mérite de Genina d’avoir fait une hagiographie qui ne prouve rien
et surtout pas la sainteté de la sainte . . . de la considérer autrement que de
l’extérieur et comme la manifestation ambiguë d’un fait spiritual rigoureusement
indémontrable.”
(31.) Bazin, “Un saint ne l’est qu’après,” 64: “Ce n’est pas, ce ne doit pas être
une sainte que nous voyons vivre, mais la petite paysanne Maria Goretti. Les
objectifs ne sont pas les yeux de la foi; le micro n’aurait pas pu enregistrer les
Voix de Jeanne d’Arc.”
(32.) Bazin, “Un saint ne l’est qu’après,” 63: “un saint n’existe pas au présent,
seulement un être qui le devient et qui d’ailleurs jusqu’à sa mort risque de se
damner.”
(33.) André Bazin, “Il Bidone ou le salut en question,” in Qu’est-ce que le

cinéma? IV, 130–131: “Picasso . . . est un gentil, un tendre, un sentimental,
toujours riche de bonnes intentions et prêt à s’apitoyer sur les autres ou sur lui-
même, mais le destin de Picasso est probablement sans espoir. Il vole parcequ’il
Page 19 of 31
Notes
‘a l’air d’un ange’ [ . . . ] Incapable de réagir vraiment, de remonter les pentes

intérieures, Picasso est promis à l’obscurité et à la déchéance définitive, en dépit
de sa gentillesse et
(p.181)
de son amour pour sa femme et son enfant. Picasso n’est pas méchant, mais il
est perdu.”
(34.) Bazin, “Il Bidone ou le salut en question,” 130: “leurs actes ne les jugent
pas plus objectivement que subjectivement par le mal ou le bien qu’ils opèrent
ou la pureté des intentions. La pureté de l’être se situe plus profondément, elle
se définit essentiellement pour Fellini par la transparence ou l’opacité de l’âme,
ou encore, si l’ont veut, une certaine perméabilité à la grâce. [ . . . ] La
conversation avec la fillette paralytique . . . a introduit en même temps le trouble
dans son âme, elle lui a fait apercevoir non pas tant le mensonge accidentel des
ses actes, que l’imposture essentielle de sa vie.”
(35.) Bazin, “Il Bidone ou le salut en question,” 132: “les événements ne sont
jamais en effet, chez Fellini, que les instruments combien accidentels du
tâtonnement des âmes.”
(36.) André Bazin, “Il Bidone après La Strada,” Parisien Libéré 3572 (5 March
1956): “Mais, à la différence de Gelsomina, du Fou, et de Zampanò, son héros
est trop loin de l’esprit d’enfance pour se frayer la voie vers la Lumière. Il
mourra, tâtonnant encore dans l’ignorance de son âme.”
(37.) André Bazin, “Cabiria,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2, 85.
(38.) Bazin, “Cabiria,” 89.
(39.) Bazin, “Il Bidone ou le salut en question,” 130: “Ainsi, pouvons-nous croire
Augusto sauvé, comme Zampanò.”
(40.) Bazin, “Il Bidone après La Strada”: “La Strada est l’histoire de deux
pauvres êtres disgraciés dans leur corps et dans leur intelligence, mais dont
l’amour, . . . , finit par révéler à eux-mêmes l’âme et son destin.”
(41.) On Chaplin’s miming mimesis like no one else, see André Bazin, “Si Charlot
ne meure . . . .” Cahiers du Cinéma 17 (November 1952), 2–5: “l’inimitable
imitation de Charlot.”
(42.) André Bazin, “La Strada: Le chemin de la poésie,” Parisien Libéré 3270 (17
March 1955).
(43.) André Bazin, “La Strada,” in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? IV, 124: “L’écran se
borne à nous montrer la roulotte mieux et plus objectivement que ne pouvait le
faire le peintre ou le romancier. Je ne dirai pas que la caméra l’a tout platement
photographiéê, le mot même de photographie serait de trop, elle nous la montre
Page 20 of 31
Notes
tout simplement, ou mieux encore, elle nous permet de la voir. [ . . . ] Rien de ce

que nous révèle Fellini ne doit un supplément de sens à la manière de la
montrer. Mais cette révélation pourtant n’existe que sur l’écran.”
(44.) Bazin, “La Strada,” 124: “qui ne triche pas avec la réalité.”
(45.) Bazin, “La Strada,” 123: “seul le cinéma pouvait . . . conférer à

l’extraordinaire roulotte motocycliste de Zampanò la force de mythe concret
auquel atteint ici cet objet insolite et banal tout à la fois.”
(46.) Karl Schoonover, “Histrionic Gestures and Historical Representation:

Masina’s Cabiria, Bazin’s Chaplin, and Fellini’s Neorealism,” Cinema Journal
53:2 (Winter 2014), 94.
(47.) Bazin, “Charlie Chaplin,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, 150.
(48.) Bazin, “La Strada: Le chemin de la poésie”: “Son interprétation qui évoque
d’abord évidemment Charlot, apparait une seconde vision beaucoup plus
personelle . . .
(p.182)
l’inoubliable visage de Gelsomina.” On the similarities and differences between
Chaplin and Masina, see Schoonover, “Histrionic Gestures.”
(49.) André Bazin, “ . . . et le dernier Fellini,” France Observateur 366 (16 May
1957): “Quant à Julietta [sic] Masina, son interprétation n’était pas ce que je
préférais dans La Strada. Ses progrès m’ont paru ici incroyables. Cette fois, son
interprétation remplit pleinement le personage et le personage remplit le film.”
(50.) Bazin, “Charlie Chaplin,” 152.
(52.) Donna Kornhaber, Charlie Chaplin, Director (Evanston, IL: Northwestern

University Press, 2014), 168–180.
(55.) Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en scène,” 72–73.
(56.) (Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en scène,” 70.
(57.) Angela Dalle Vacche, “Directing Children on Screen: The Problem of Self-
Consciousness,” in François Truffaut, eds. Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 403–419.
(58.) Schoonover, “Histrionic Gestures,” 110.
Page 21 of 31
Notes
(59.) Schoonover, “Histrionic Gestures,” 108.
(60.) The Criterion DVD of Nights of Cabiria has a special feature on this
character.
(61.) André Bazin, “Les nuits de Cabiria,” Parisien Libéré 4073 (16 October
1957): “Cabiria petite soeur spirituelle du Poverello d’Assisi.”
(62.) Bazin, “Cabiria: The Voyage to the End of Neorealism,” in What Is Cinema?
vol. 2, 84, footnote.
(63.) Bazin, “ . . . et le dernier Fellini.”
(64.) André Bazin, “Le 7eme art tel qu’on l’écrit: Avant-garde et mysticisme au
cinéma” Parisien Libéré 2807 (23 September 1953): “qui ne réduise pas la
religion à une simple propagande morale ou sociale, et le cinéma au rang de son
instrument.”
(65.) André Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, “Notes sur Cannes,” Cahiers du
Cinéma 34 (April 1954), 30–38.
(66.) Antoine De Baecque, Truffaut, A Biography, trans. Catherine Temerson

(New York: Knopf, 1999), 92.
(67.) André Bazin, “Lola Montès,” Éducation Nationale 4 (26 January 1956):
“Mais Ophuls est . . . un cinéaste baroque. Non seulement par sa prédilection
fétishiste pour les angelots de bois doré et le pseudoréalisme tourmenté du style
Jésuite mais, plus sérieusement, pour sa façon d’exprimer l’essentiel par la
prolifération de l’accessoire.”
(68.) André Bazin, “Des cailloux du Petit Poucet au chemin de la vie: L’enfance et
le cinéma,” Écran Français 233 (19 December 1949): “Ce n’est pas un hasard si
les innombrables enfants de Jésus de la renaissance italienne ne sont tout que
petits mômes échappés de Lilliput. Petits hommes déjà tout armés de sourires,
de clin d’oeil et d’intelligence (des Shirley Temple avant la lettre).”
(69.) André Bazin, “Le metteur-en-scène Max Ophuls est mort,” Parisien Libéré
3901 (27 March 1957): “Spirituellement de l’Autriche c’était sans doute une
prédilection pour le style baroque, lequel ne se manifeste pas seulement par de
vols d’angelots joufflus
(p.183)
jusque dans les églises normandes du Plaisir, mais de façon plus profonde dans
le style même de sa mise-en-scène.”
(70.) Bazin, “Lola Montès”: “choisit sciemment l’Enfer parce qu’il est dans son
personage! Peut-être aussi, après tout, parce qu’elle aime le Diable et qu’il le lui
rend bien. N’allons donc pas la plaindre. Au demeurant je parle de métaphore
Page 22 of 31
Notes
non le symbole. Le cirque reste un cirque, mais on reconnaît les grands

metteurs-en-scène à ce que la réalité dépasse chez la réalité.”
(71.) François Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in The

French New Wave: Critical Landmarks, eds. Ginette Vincendeau and Peter
Graham (London: Palgrave, 1999). Originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma,
1954, http://www.newwavefilm.com/about/a-certain-tendency-of-french-cinema-
truffaut.shtml.
(72.) Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.”
(73.) Dudley Andrew, Film in the Aura of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1984), 106.
(74.) André Bazin, “Cinéma et théologie,” Esprit 19 (February 1951), 237–245.
(75.) Bazin, “Cinéma et théologie,” 240: “il semble que si la sensibilité

protestante n’est pas indispensable à la réalisation d’un bon film catholique, elle
a des chances d’être un atout.”
(76.) Bazin, “Cinéma et théologie,” 47: “On ne sait par quel miracle le
grasseyement aristocratique et légèrement méridional de Fresnay arrive à se
muer ici en un parler rocailleux, une sorte d’aboiement de l’âme.”
(77.) Bazin, “Cinéma et théologie,” 244: “L’adaptation présente au moins une

faiblesse regrettable: le personage du prêtre. [ . . . ] La revolte de l’île et plus
encore celle du faux recteur est trop facilement explicable par la sottise du
nouveau curé. Le faire interpréter de surcroit par Brochard . . . était déjà d’un
anti-cléricalisme maladroit.”
(78.) Bazin, “Cinéma et théologie,” 241: “la régularisation d’une union libre.”
(79.) Bazin, “Cinéma et théologie,” 242: “Privé de son organe religieux, la

Société s’empoisonne, son sang pourrit.”
(80.) Bazin, “Cinéma et théologie,” 243: “Ce ne sont en effet que de petits
morceaux de pain. Mais le spectateur le plus mécréant aura le souffle coupé par
l’horreur du geste.”
(81.) André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is

Cinema? vol. 1, 9–16.
(82.) André Bazin, “Le journal d’un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of
Robert Bresson,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, 125–143.
(83.) Bazin, “Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 133.
Page 23 of 31
Notes
(85.) On this film, see Raymond Durgnat, “Bresson and Bazin: Two Strains of
Christian Realism?,” in Robert Bresson, ed. James Quandt (Toronto:
Cinematheque of Ontario, 2011), 419–428.
(86.) Noa Steimatsky, The Face on Film (New York: Oxford University Press,
2017), 235–257.
(87.) Bazin, “Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 138–139.
(p.184)
(88.) On The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), see David Bordwell, The Films of Carl-
Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 66–95.
(89.) Steimatsky, The Face on Film, 250.
(91.) Andrew, Film in the Aura of Art, 126–127.
(92.) Tony Pipolo, Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010), 84.
(94.) Bazin, “Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” 127 and 131.
(95.) On Gabriel Marcel’s creative fidelity, see Sawchenko, “The Concept of the
Person.”
(96.) Arne Melberg, “Repetition (in the Kierkegaardian Sense of the Term),”
Diacritics 20:3 (Fall 1990), 71–87.
(99.) Melberg, “Repetition (in the Kierkegaardian Sense of the Term),” 73.
(100.) Melberg, “Repetition (in the Kierkegaardian Sense of the Term),” 74.
(101.) On Bresson’s screen at the end of Le journal, powerful insights come from
Seung-Hoon Jeong, “Multiple Indexicality and Multiple Realism in André Bazin,”
The Major Realist Film Theorists: A Critical Anthology, ed. Ian Aitken
(Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2016), 94–109.
Page 24 of 31
Notes
Chapter 5
(1.) Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Mortimer
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). See also Edgar Morin,
l’homme et la mort dans l’histoire (Paris: Corea, 1951).
(2.) André Bazin, “L’homme imaginaire et la fonction magique du cinéma,”

France Observateur 331 (13 September 1956): “la civilisation est revenue au
plus près du mythe humain le plus archaïque et peut-être le plus universel.”
(3.) Lorraine Mortimer, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Edgar Morin, The Cinema

or the Imaginary Man, xxiii.
(4.) On Edgar Morin, see Dudley Andrew, “Edgar Morin,” in The Routledge
Companion to Philosophy and Film (New York: Routledge, 2009), 408–421.
(5.) Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, The “Soul” of the Primitive (New York: Macmillan, 1928).
(6.) André Bazin was well aware of Jean Epstein’s films and writings on the
cinema. He writes: “Le seul moment où nous avons senti cette année souffler
l’esprit du cinéma fut la retrospective Epstein, non pas tant à cause des
fragments de films présentés par Henri Langlois, que de la ferveur, de la piété
des allocutions de Jean Cocteau, Abel Gance, Charles Spaak et Jean
Dreville” (“Pour un festival à trois dimensions,” Cahiers du Cinéma 23 [May
1953]). Bazin also uses Epstein’s term photogénie, see “Bilan d’un festival,”
Écran Français 106 (8 July 1947): “photogénie de ses paysages et de ses
interprètes.”
(p.185)
(7.) On Louis Delluc’s photogénie, see Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First
Wave 1915–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 95.
(8.) On Epstein, see Christophe Wall-Romana, Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema

and Film Philosophy (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013);
Sarah Keller and Jason Paul, eds., Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New
Translations (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2012).
(9.) André Bazin, “L’intelligence des objets,” France Observateur 271 (21 July
1955): “la poésie de l’objet est la véritable matière du film.”
(10.) André Bazin, “Naissance de la couleur,” Parisien Libéré 2262 (21 December
1951).
(11.) André Bazin, “Bus Stop, de Joshua Logan,” France Observateur 338 (1
November 1956): “L’efficacité purement cinématographique demeurent pour eux
l’alpha et l’oméga.”
Page 25 of 31
Notes
(12.) Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image (1985), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
(13.) Bazin, “Bus Stop, de Joshua Logan.”
(14.) Amédée Ayfre, Conversion aux images? (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1964).
(15.) Georges Cuenot, Teilhard de Chardin: A Biographical Study (Baltimore,

MD: Helicon, 1965).
(16.) André Bazin, “Un musée des ombres: Magie blanche, magie noir,” Écran
Français 182 (21 December 1948): “l’arbre de science de la photographie.”
(17.) André Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge: Projet de film d’ André
Bazin,” Cahiers du Cinéma 100 (October 1959), 55–61. Bazin’s piece was
published posthumously.
(18.) Even though his preference for the Romanesque is unique, André Bazin is
not the first to relate the Middle Ages to the cinema. For example, Élie Faure,
inspired by Erwin Panofsky, compares a film’s complex organization to a
medieval cathedral. On this point, see Eva Kuhn, “La cinéplastique d’Élie Faure
ou du cinéma et de la plasticité des arts,” Regards Croisés 5 (2016), 62–73;
Muriel van Vliet, “L’esprit des formes est un—Élie Faure: Pour une estétique
révolutionnaire,” Regards Croisés 5 (2016), 74–85.
(19.) Dudley Andrew, André Bazin, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013), 204.
(20.) André Bazin, “Le salaire du péché,” France Observateur 347 (31 January
1957).
(21.) Sarah Wilson, “Art and Politics of the Left in France: 1935–1955” (PhD
diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1991), 3. See also Romy
Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars
(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1995); Michele Cone,
French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art before, during, and after Vichy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
(22.) Andrew, André Bazin, 41.
(23.) Elizabeth Lawrence Mendell, Romanesque Sculpture in Saintonge (New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940). The author of this monograph studied
at Yale with Henri Focillon. On Henri Focillon and the life of forms in relation to
Henri Bergson, one of Bazin’s philosophical influences, see Andrei Molotiu,
“Focillon’s Bergsonian Rhetoric and the Possibility of Deconstruction,” In—
Page 26 of 31
Notes
Visible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies 3 (Winter 2001). http://
www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue3/molotiu.htm.
(p.186)
(24.) Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 58.
(25.) For a cinematic overview of the French regional landscapes, see André
Bazin, “Le Tour de France du cinéma,” Écran Français 209 (27 June 1949).
(28.) For Bazin, the early medieval church of Torcello is comparable to the
humble but resilient atmosphere of a small church in Saintonge: “J’aimerais
mieux vous parler d’une admirable excursion à Torcello, ville morte de la lagune,
ou subsiste, au milieu des marécages, une prodigieuse basilique du XII siècle et
qui tire de cette solitude bouleversante une pureté austère qu’on cherche en
vain dans Venise.” (“La France est très bien placée au Festival de Venise,”
Parisien Libéré 1543 [30 August 1949]).
(29.) Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 57–58: “Le sculpteur

saintongeais répugne aux grands sujets dramatiques, c’est un observateur de la
vie quotidienne, traitant avec le même réalisme la vie profane et les thèmes
sacrés. Ce fait est sans doute commune à toute la sculpture romane, mais nulle
part, peut-être plus qu’en Saintonge, l’artiste ne s’est tenu dans cette zone
d’humanité familière, à distance des grandes terreurs et aussi des grands
symbolismes mystiques qui animent tant de chapiteaux ou de tympanes romans.
On dirait que une sorte de sagesse paysanne, associée à ce génie de la mesure
et de la sérénité qui se dégage de la Saintonge, en harmonie avec son histoire
comme avec son paysage, a humanisé et tempéré ici l’âme religieuse
médiévale.”
(30.) Paul Tonnellier (1886–1977) was an ordained priest, historian, and

archaeologist who wrote a series of monographs on the churches of Saintonge.
He was a founder and first director of the Académie of Saintonge, and a canon
(chanoine) of the Church.
(31.) Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 59: “Endormies dans les
villages depuis des siècles, mais non point mortes, elles se sont laissé investir et
comme absorber par la vie d’alentour et jusqu’à la vie végétale. Nombreuses
sont les églises envahies de verdure, si même elles n’en sont pas absolument
pénétrées comme cette chapelle de Saint Ouen dont les pierres ne tiennent plus
que par les racines de lierre et de la vigne vierge.”
Page 27 of 31
Notes
(32.) Bazin compares the literary adaptations of Pierre Bost and Jean Aurenche
to Viollet-le-Duc’s philosophy of restoration.
(33.) André Bazin, “Les nuits de Cabiria: L’herbe folle de l’espérance,” Parisien
Libéré 4073 (16 October 1957).
(34.) André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is

Cinema? vol. 1, 15.
(35.) Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 60: “où les poules couvent dans
les niches des saints, où les arcs polylobes aveuglés de grillage pour servir de
poulailler, où le bois est entreposé dans les magnifiques absidioles en cul de
four, où la salle capitulaire est devenue la grange à foin, cependent que d’un
chapiteau à l’autre les haricots achèvent de sécher sur des fils de fer.”
(36.) E-mail from Ludovic Cortade, March 20, 2009. See also Louis Réau,
Iconographie de l’art chrétien (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955).
On the connections among Louis Réau, Emile Mâle, and Henri Focillon, see A.
Frolow, “Revue de Louis (p.187) Réau. Iconographie de l’art chretien,” Revue
de l’Histoire de Religions 50:2 (1956), 229–232.
(37.) Universalism argues that human beings share the features of art, thought,
and language, whereas nominalism denies the existence of all universals and
abstract features. On universalism, see Bazin, “Le Tour de France du cinéma” :
“L’immense audience du cinéma exige que le singulier y prenne valeur
d’universalité simple et directe.” See also André Bazin, “Le langage de notre
temps,” in Regards neufs sur le cinéma (Paris: Peuple et Culture, 1954).
(38.) Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 58: “Cette étrange figure de
grand’goule diabolique, dévoreur de colonne, . . . où le marquis de Chasseloup-
Laubat estime avec vraisemblance reconnaître un avatar du T’ao T’ie, le glouton
chinois. Ça n’est donc pas seulement l’Arabie . . . et le Proche-Orient par les
Croisades, les manuscrits, les ivoires et les tissus, mais à travers l’ Orient,
l’Extrème Orient même.”
(39.) André Bazin, “L’auteur de la Grande Illusion n’a pas perdu confiance dans la
liberté de création,” Écran Français 230 (28 November 1949). On the Middle
Ages and the cinema, see also André Bazin, “Peut-on s’intéresser au cinéma? ”
Misc B: Bulletin Intérieur: Maison des Lettres, December 1, 1942: “la diffusion
du cinéma est le plus grand fait esthético-social qui se soit produit depuis le
moyen-age. [ . . . ] Nous sommes à l’aurore d’une sorte de technocratie
artistique comparable à celle du monde gréco-latin ou chrétien quand, au moyen
âge, un théologien renommé professait indifféremment (et au grés des facilités
qu’on lui offrait) à Gand, Francfort, à Paris ou à Pérouse.”
Page 28 of 31
Notes
(40.) André Bazin, “Livres de cinéma: Amédée Ayfre, Dieu au cinéma,” Cahiers
du Cinéma 25 (7 July 1953): “J’aurais choisi, je crois, au début du Chemin du
Ciel, ce curieux travelling latéral le long d’une muraille percée d’ouvertures à
grilles, derrière lesquelles on suit la marche hésitante d’un homme qui, avec une
lanterne, cherche à reconnaître sur le mur opposé, à travers une suite de
peintures naïvement religieuses, les traces de Dieu.” See also Mélisande
Leventopoulos, “D’André Bazin à Amédée Ayfre: La circulation du Personnalisme
dans la cinéphilie chrétienne,” COnTEXTES 12 (20 September 2012), http://
journals.openedition.org/contextes/5513; on Catholicism and the cinema, see
also Mélisande Leventopoulus, “Une église moderne en images: La cause
cinématographique du Père Raymond Pichard (1947–1954),” 1895 63 (Spring
2011), 70–89. Père Raymond Pichard produced Georges Rouquier’s Lourdes et
ses miracles (1955). For a thorough overview of Catholic cinephilia, see
Mélisande Leventopoulos, Les catholiques et le cinéma: La construction d’un
regard critique (France 1895–1958) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes,
2015).
(41.) André Bazin, “Theatre and Cinema, Part Two,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1,
107.
(42.) Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées
of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine (1964), trans. Philip Thody (London and
New York: Verso, 2016).
(43.) Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 61: “Mais quelque chose même
de ces harmonies, ou du moins de la matière de cette pierre, pourra passer dans
le noir et le blanc. Je pense notamment à la façon dont elle s’est laissée ronger,
durcissant par place,
(p.188)
tombant à d’autres en poussière et superposant ainsi curieusement au
grouillement de la sculpture originale les entrelacs hasardeux de l’usure et du
vent.”
(44.) Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 55: “Nulle part en France, l’art
roman n’a connu plus de séduction.”
(45.) Augustine of Hippo, Saint, On Christian Doctrine, trans. and intro. D. W.

Robertson Jr. (New York, Liberal Arts Press, 1958), xiii.
(46.) Tom Levin, “Iconology at the Movies: Panofsky’s Film Theory,” in Angela
Dalle Vacche, ed., The Visual Turn: Film Theory and Art History (Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers, 2002), 85–114.
(47.) Christophe Gauthier, “Une branche nouvelle sur l’arbre des formes?
Focillon, Élie Faure et le cinéma,” in Histoire du cinéma, problématique des
sources, eds. Irene Bessier and Jean Gili (Paris: INHA-Université de Paris1-
Page 29 of 31
Notes
Maison des sciences de l’homme-AFRHC, 2004), 295–310: “Il existe

d’admirables films documentaires: Nanook, Moana en sont des exemples. Mais
le cinéma comme spectacle a recours le plus souvent a l’affabulation.”
(48.) Tom Conley, “Evolution and Event in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?,” in Opening
Bazin, ed. Dudley Andrew with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011, 32–41. See also Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms, trans.
George Kubler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
(49.) The word “radiating” appears in André Bazin, “La vie passionée de Vincent
van Gogh,” L’Éducation Nationale 6 (February 1957): “mais de nous faire
approcher au plus près de ce point d’incandescence spirituelle où la
transmutation nous sera rendu sensible par son rayonnement” (Emphasis mine).
(50.) André Bazin, “Farrebique ou le paradoxe du réalisme,” Esprit 132 (1 April

1947).
(51.) André Bazin, “André Gide,” France Observateur 96 (13 March 1952): “La
première émotion esthétique due au cinéma est bien celle qui faisait s’écrier aux
spectateurs du Grand Café ‘les feuilles bougent!’ Gide vit et ce simple spectacle
nous comble.”
(52.) André Bazin, “Les enfants de l’amour,” France Observateur 185 (26
November 1953): “du vent nouveau qu’il fait lever sur le cinéma. Tant que de
telles révélations seront possibles, le cinéma sera vivant.”
(53.) Obituary for André Bazin, Cahiers du Cinéma 90 (December 1958): “Il
[Bazin] a été le fil d’Ariane . . . sans lui la dispersion eut été la plus complète.”
(54.) Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 9: “The religion of

ancient Egypt, aimed against death [ . . . ] But pyramids and labyrinthine
corridors offered no certain guarantee against pillage.”
(55.) Bazin, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge,” 58: “Aussi bien dans
l’architecture n’aurons nous garde d’oublier non plus les énigmatiques lanternes
des morts et surtout celle de Fénioux qui dresse, au milieu du champ où paissant
les moutons, sur un faisceau de colonettes, son petit clocher d’écailles.”
(56.) André Bazin, “Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou le vent soufflé où il
veut,” Parisien Libéré 3791 (11 November 1956); André Bazin, “Un condamné à
mort s’est échappé,” Éducation Nationale 32 (November 1956).
(57.) Bazin’s breathing metaphor is important. On this point, see André Bazin,
“La cybernétique d’André Cayatte,” Cahiers du Cinéma 36 (1 June 1954); André
Bazin, “Le (p.189) toit,” Parisien Libéré 3800 (29 November 1956): “le souffle
humain du néoréalisme”; André Bazin, “The Quiet Man,” Parisien Libéré 2536 (8
Page 30 of 31
Notes
November,1952): “Le film est gonflé comme une voile au souffle d’une poésie
pleine de tendresse et d’humour.”
(58.) The idea of energy as breathing is pervasive in Régis Debray, Dieu, un

itinéraire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2001). See also a review by Jean-Louis Schlegel,
“Régis Debray: Dieu. Un itinéraire,” Esprit (May 2002), http://
www.esprit.presse.fr/article/schlegel-jean-louis/regis-debray-dieu-un-
itineraire-8649?folder=5.

(p.190)
Page 31 of 31
Bibliography
Primary Sources: Articles and Essays by André Bazin,

cited in each chapter
Chapter 1 Introduction: The Soul of Cinema

“Ontologie de l’image photographique.” Confluences (1 January 1945).
“Sables de mort: Un admirable documentaire.” Écran Français 56 (24 July 1946).
“La Dame du Lac.” Parisien Libéré 1120 (21 April 1948).
“Première désillusion.” Parisien Libéré 1492 (1 July 1949).
“Le journal d’un cure de campagne et la stylistique de Robert Bresson.” Cahiers du Cinéma
3 (1 June 1951).
“L’Écran démoniaque.” France Observateur 132 (20 November 1952).
“Le 7eme art tel qu’on l’écrit: Avant-garde et mysticisme au cinéma.” Parisien Libéré 2807
(23 September 1953).
“El et Luis.” France Observateur 213 (10 June 1954).
“Le petit journal du cinéma.” Cahiers du Cinéma 56 (31 January/1 February 1956).
“Les périls de Perri.” Cahiers du Cinéma 83 (May 1958).
“Montage interdit.” In Qu’est- ce que le cinéma? I. Ontologie et langage, 117–129.
Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969.
Chapter 2 Art
“A Bergsonian Film: The Picasso Mystery.” In Color: The Film Reader, edited by Angela
Dalle Vacche and Brian Price, 57–62. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006.
“À propos de réalisme.” Information Universitaire 1188 (8–15 April 1944). This is an early
version of “Ontologie de l’image photographique.” Confluences (1 January 1945).
“Le réalisme cinématographique et l’école italienne de la Libération.” Esprit 141 (1
January 1948).
“Tout film est un documentaire social.” Lettres Françaises 166 (25 July 1947).
“À la recherche du temps perdu: Paris 1900.” Écran Français 118 (30 September 1947).
“Bambi.” Parisien Libéré 1131 (5 May 1948).
“L’espace dans la peinture et le cinéma: À propos de van Gogh.” Arts 210 (15 April 1949).
“Film d’Art: Quand Rubens et van Gogh font du cinéma.” Parisien Libéré 1474 (10
June 1949).
“Le cinéma et la peinture: Van Gogh.” La Revue du Cinéma 19:20 (Fall 1949).
“Sur les films de peinture: Réponse à Bourniquel.” Esprit 161 (1 November 1949).
“Le journal d’un curé de campagne et la stylistique de Robert Bresson.” Cahiers du Cinéma
3 (1 June 1951).
“Le film d’art est-il un documentaire comme les autres?” Radio Cinéma Télévision 75 (24
June 1951).
“Théâtre et Cinéma, II.” Esprit 180–181 (July–August 1951).
192 Bibliography
“La nuit est mon royaume.” Parisien Libéré 2228 (12 November 1951).
“La peinture vue par un trou de serrure.” Arts 340 (4 January 1952). Reprinted as “Painting
and Cinema.” In What Is Cinema? vol. 1, 164–169. Essays selected and translated by
Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
“In Defense of Mixed Cinema.” In What Is Cinema? vol. 1,  53–75.
“Continent perdu.” France Observateur 296 (12 January 1956).
“La vie passionnée de Vincent van Gogh.” Éducation Nationale 6 (2 July 1957).
“La vie passionnée de Vincent van Gogh: La peinture à l’huile.” Parisien Libéré 3855 (1
February 1957).
Chapter 3 Science
“Sables de mort: Un admirable documentaire.” Écran Français 56 (24 July 1946).
“Le nouveau style américain: Le cinéma est- il majeur?” Écran Français 60 (21
August 1946).
“Le mythe du cinéma totale et les origines du cinématographe.” Critique 6 (November
1946). Reprinted as “The Myth of Total Cinema.” In What Is Cinema? vol. 1,  17–22.
“Entomologie de la pin-up girl.” Écran Français 77 (17 December 1946).
“On ne meurt pas comme ça.” Écran Français 54 (10 July 1946).
“Le cinéma en gondole.” Écran Français 115 (9 September 1947).
“Quand les microbes jouent les vedettes.” Parisien Libéré 953 (10 October 1947).
“Les secrets d’Orson Welles.” Écran Francais 169 (21 September 1948).
“Au carrefour du siècle.” Parisien Libéré 1322 (15 December 1948).
“Chasse à l’homme.” Parisien Libéré 1487 (25 June 1949).
“La grande horloge.” Parisien Libéré 1489 (21 July 1949).
“La police est photogénique.” Parisien Libéré 1509 (28 June 1949).
“Portrait d’un assassin: Un bon cadre.” Écran Français 230 (28 November 1949).
“Le journal d’un curé de campagne et la stylistique de Robert Bresson.” Cahiers du Cinéma
3 (1 June 1951).
“Chronique d’un amour.” Parisien Liberé 2163 (28 August 1951).
“Le film policier n’est pas un genre mais obéit à une loi: La logique (1–2).” Radio Cinéma
Télévision 91 (14 October 1951).
“Un film miraculeux: Miracle à Milan.” Parisien Libéré 2238 (24 November 1951).
“Miracle à Milan: Cinéma, poésie, justice, et charité.” Radio Cinéma Télévision 498 (2
December 1951).
“Un film de De Sica: Miracle à Milan.” France Observateur 82 (6 December 1951).
“La peinture vue par un trou de serrure.” Arts 340 (4 January 1952).
“‘M’ le maudit ‘Remade’ in Hollywood.” Parisien Libéré 2309 (15 February 1952).
“L’amour mène la danse. Il la mène bien.” Parisien Libéré 2341 (24 March 1952).
“Le style c’est le genre.” Cahiers du Cinéma 43 (1 January 1955).
“Note sur De Sica.” Cahiers du Cinéma 33 (1 March 1954)
“Du rififi chez les hommes.” Parisien Libéré 3295 (15 April 1955).
“Du réalisme dans les films policiers.” France Observateur 259 (28 April 1955).
“Colline 24.” Parisien Libéré 3307 (29 April 1955).
“Le monde du silence: À quoi rêvent les poissons?” Parisien Libéré 3558 (17
February 1956).
“Le monde du silence: Icare sous-marin.” Radio Cinéma Télévision 319 (26 February 1956).
“Le monde du silence.” France Observateur 303 (1 March 1956).
“Gervaise de René Clément.” Éducation Nationale 25 (4 October 1956).
Bibliography 193
“Cinéma français: Demain la crise?” Carrefour 632 (24 October 1956).

“Le salaire du péché.” France Observateur 347 (31 January 1957).
“Les bâteaux de l’enfer.” Parisien Libéré 3870 (19 February 1957).
“De la politique des auteurs.” Cahiers du Cinéma 70 (1 April 1957)
“Les fanatiques.” France Observateur 392 (14 November 1957).
“Témoin à charger.” Parisien Libéré 4185 (24 February 1958).
“La soif du mal.” France Observateur 422 (4 June 1958).
Chapter 4 Religion
“Le troisième homme.” Parisien Libéré 1588 (21 October 1949).
“Des cailloux du Petit Poucet au chemin de la vie: L’enfance et le cinema.” Écran Français
233 (19 December 1949).
“Cinéma et Théologie.” Esprit 176 (February 1951).
“La fille des marais.” Radio Cinéma Télévision 68 (6 May 1951).
“Ghetto Terezin.” France Observateur 87 (10 January 1952).
“Le ghetto concentrationnaire (Daleka Cesta).” Cahiers du Cinéma 9 (1 February 1952).
“Le petit monde de Don Camillo.” Parisien Libéré 2406 (9 June1952).
“Si Charlot ne meure . . . .” Cahiers du Cinéma 17 (November 1952).
“Le retour de Don Camillo.” Parisien Libéré 2724 (17 June 1953).
“Le 7eme art tel qu’on l’écrit: Avant-garde et mysticisme au cinéma.” Parisien Libéré 2807
(23 September 1953).
“Notes sur Cannes.” Cahiers du Cinéma 34 (1 April 1954). (Published with Jacques
Daniel-Valcroze.)
“La Strada: Le chemin de la poésie.” Parisien Libéré 3270 (17 March 1955).
“Lourdes et ses miracles.” Parisien Libéré 3483 (22 November 1955).
“Lourdes et ses miracles.” France Observateur 289 (24 November 1955).
“Lola Montès.” Éducation Nationale 4 (26 January 1956).
“Le Vatican: L’Humanité et la censure.” France Observateur 302 (23 February 1956).
“Il Bidone après La Strada.” Parisien Libéré 3572 (5 March 1956).
“Le metteur-n-scène Max Ophuls est mort: Une perte cruelle pour le cinéma.” Parisien
Libéré 3901 (27 March 1957).
“De la politique des auteurs.” Cahiers du Cinéma 70 (April 1957).
“. . . et le dernier Fellini.” France Observateur 366 (16 May 1957).
“Le jeu des pronostics a commencé.” Parisien Libéré 3944 (17 May 1957).
“Les nuits de Cabiria: Herbe folle de l’espérance.” Parisien Libéré 4073 (16 October 1957).
Chapter 5 Epilogue
“Peut-on s’intéresser au cinéma?” Misc B: Bulletin Intérieur de la Maison des Lettres (1
December 1942).
“Farrebique ou le paradoxe du réalisme.” Esprit 132 (1 April 1947).
“Bilan d’un festival.” Écran Français 106 (8 July 1947).
“Un musée des ombres: Magie blanche, magie noire.” Écran Français 182 (21
December 1948).
“Le Tour de France du cinéma.” Écran Français 209 (27 June 1949).
“La France est très bien placée au Festival de Venise.” Parisien Libéré 1543 (30 August 1949).
“L’auteur de la Grande Illusion n’a pas perdu confiance dans la liberté de création.” Écran
Français 230 (28 November 1949).
“Naissance de la couleur.” Parisien Libéré 2262 (21 December 1951).
194 Bibliography
“André Gide.” France Observateur 96 (13 March 1952).

“L’Homme tranquille (The Quiet Man).” Parisien Libéré 2536 (8 November 1952).
“Pour un festival en trois dimensions.” Cahiers du Cinéma 23 (1 May 1953).
“Livres de cinéma: Amédée Ayfre, Dieu au cinéma.” Cahiers du Cinéma 25 (1 July 1953).
“Les enfants de l’amour.” L’Observateur d’aujourd’hui 185 (26 November 1953).
“Le langage de notre temps.” In Regards neufs sur le cinéma, edited by Jacques Chevalier.
Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1953.
“La cybernétique d’André Cayatte.” Cahiers du Cinéma 36 (1 June 1954).
“L’Intelligence des objets.” France Observateur 271 (21 July 1955).
“Il Bidone après La Strada.” Parisien Libéré 3572 (5 March 1956).
“L’homme imaginaire et la fonction magique du cinema.” France Observateur 331 (13
September 1956).
“Bus Stop, de Joshua Logan.” France Observateur 338 (1 November 1956).
“Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou le vent soufflé où il veut.” Parisien Libéré 3791 (19
November 1956).
“Un condamné à mort s’est échappé.” Éducation Nationale 32 (22 November 1956).
“Le toit.” Parisien Libéré 3800 (29 November 1956).
“Le salaire du péché.” France Observateur 347 (31 January 1957).
“La vie passionée de Vincent van Gogh,” Éducation Nationale 6 (7 February 1957)
“Les nuits de Cabiria: Herbe folle de l’espérance.” Parisien Libéré 4073 (16 October 1957).
“Les églises romanes de Saintonge: Projet de film d’André Bazin.” Cahiers du Cinéma 100
(1 December 1959).
Primary Sources: Compilations of essays by André Bazin

Bazin, André. André Bazin: Selected Writings 1943–1958. With an essay by Jacques
Aumont. Translated with annotations by Timothy Barnard. Montreal: Caboose, 2018.
Bazin, André. Le cinéma français de la libération à la Nouvelle Vague (1945–58). Edited by
Jean Narboni. Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1983.
Bazin, André. Ecrits complets. 2 vols. Compiled and annotated by Hervé Joubert-
Laurencin, with Pierre Eugène and Gaspard Nectoux. Paris: Editions Macula, 2018.
Bazin, André. Essays on Chaplin. Edited and Translated by Jean Bodon. Preface by
François Truffaut. New Haven, CT: University of New Haven Press, 1985.
Bazin, André. French Cinema of the Occupation and the Resistance: The Birth of a Critical
Aesthetic. Translated by Stanley Hochman. New York, NY: Frederick Ungar, 1981.
Bazin, André. Jean Renoir. Edited and with an Introduction by François Truffaut.
Translated by W. W. Halsey II and William H. Simon. New York, NY: Simon and
Schuster, 1973.
Bazin, André. Orson Welles. Paris: Chavane, 1950.
Bazin, André. Orson Welles: A Critical View. (1950). Foreword by François Truffaut.
Profile by Jean Cocteau. Translated by Jonathan Rosenbaum. New York, NY: Harper
and Row, 1978.
Bazin, André. Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? I. Ontologie et langage. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969.
Bazin, André. Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? II. Le cinéma et les autres arts. Paris: Éditions du
Cerf, 1969.
Bazin, André. Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? III. Cinéma et sociologie. Paris: Éditions du
Cerf, 1960.
Bibliography 195
Bazin, André. Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? IV. Une esthétique de la réalité: Le néo-réalisme.
Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1962.
Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? vol. 1. Essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray.
Forewords by Jean Renoir and Dudley Andrew. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004.
Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? vol. 2. Essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray.
Forewords by François Truffaut and Dudley Andrew. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004.
Secondary Sources
Abel, Richard. French Cinema: The First Wave 1915–1929. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1984.
Aitken, Ian. European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Alpers, Svetlana. Art of Describing. Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Amad, Paula. “Film as the ‘Skin of History’: André Bazin and the Specter of the Archive
and Death in Nicole Védrès’s Paris 1900 (1947).” Representations 130:1 (Spring
2015): 84–118.
Ames, V. M. “Existentialism and the Arts.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 9
(1951): 252–256.
Andrew, Dudley. André Bazin. Rev. ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Andrew, Dudley. “André Bazin.” In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 1, edited by Michael
Kelly, 228–232. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Andrew, Dudley. “André Bazin: Dark Passage into the Mystery of Being.” In Thinking in
the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice, edited by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer,
136–149. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016.
Andrew, Dudley, ed. and trans. André Bazin’s New Media. Oakland: University of
California Press, 2014.
Andrew, Dudley. “Edgar Morin.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film,
408–421. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009.
Andrew, Dudley. The Major Film Theories: An Introduction. New York, NY: Oxford
Andrew, Dudley. “Malraux, Bazin, and the Gesture of Picasso.” In Opening Bazin: Postwar
Film Theory and Its Afterlife, edited by Dudley Andrew with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin,
153–166. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Andrew, Dudley. “The Ontology of a Fetish.” Film Quarterly (Summer 2008): 62–66.
Andrew, Dudley, ed., with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin. Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory
and Its Afterlife. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Andrew, Dudley. What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and Its Charge. Chichester, West Sussex,
UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Angles, Auguste. “Sartre versus Baudelaire.” Yale French Studies 1:2 (1948): 119–124.
Atherton, John. “Americans in Paris.” In A New History of French Literature, edited by
Denis Hollier, 908–913. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Augustine of Hippo, Saint. On Christian Doctrine. Translated and with Introduction by D.
W. Robertson Jr. New York, NY: Liberal Arts Press, 1958.
196 Bibliography
Ayfre, Amédée. Conversion aux Images? Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1964.

Baldwin, Thomas. Introduction to The World of Perception, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
1–28. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2008.
Barash, Moshe. The History of Blindness. New York, NY: Routledge, 2001.
Barkan, Leonard. Nature’s Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975.
Barnard, G. William. Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011.
Barnard, Timothy. Découpage. Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Caboose. 2014.
Baskin, Wade. Jean- Paul Sartre: Essays in Existentialism. New York, NY: Citadel
Press, 1993.
Baudry, Jean- Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.”
In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, edited by Philip Rosen, 286– 298. New York,
NY: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Beaujour, Michel. “Sartre and Surrealism.” Yale French Studies 30 (1963): 86–95.
Bellows, Andy Masaki, and Marina McDougall, with Brigitte Berg, eds. Science Is
Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé. Translations by Jeanine Herman. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2001.
Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image before the Era of Art.
Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” (1935–
1936). In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited and with an Introduction by
Hannah Arendt, 217–252. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York, NY: Schocken
Books, 1969.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. (1907). Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Mineola,
NY: Dover Publications, 1998.
Bergson, Henri. L’énergie spirituelle: Essais et conferences. Paris: Les Presses
Universitaires, 1919.
Bergson, Henri. “The Life and Work of Ravaisson.” In The Creative Mind: An Introduction
to Metaphysics, translated by Mabelle L. Audison, 187–216. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007.
Bergson, Henri. Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays. Translated by Wildon Carr. New York,
NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1929.
Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. (1889).
Translated by F. L. Pogson. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001.
Bergson, Henri. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. (1932). Translated by R. Ashley
Audra and Cloudesley Brereton, with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter. Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977.
Bernard, Philippe, and Henri Dubief. The Decline of the Third Republic, 1914–1938.
Translated by Anthony Forster. Cambridge, UK, and New York, NY: Cambridge
Boileau, Pierre, and Thomas Narcejac. Celle qui n’était plus. Paris: Denoël, 1952.
Bordwell, David. The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1981.
Bordwell, David. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997.
Bowler, Peter J. The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the
Decades around 1900. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.
Bibliography 197
Brewster, Sir David. “Photogenic Drawing or Drawing by the Agency of Light.” Edinburgh
Review 76 (January 1843): 309–344.
Brooke, Peter. Albert Gleizes: For and against the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale
Brown, William. “Heidegger’s Destruction of Book X of Confessions.” Science et Esprit 61:1
(2009): 29–37.
Cahill, James Leo. Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Calhoon, Kenneth S. “Blind Gestures: Chaplin, Diderot, Lessing.” MLN 115
(2000): 381–402.
Canales, Jimena. The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That
Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Canguilhem, Georges. Knowledge of Life. Edited by Paola Marrati and Ted Meyers.
Translated by Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg. New York, NY: Fordham
Carbone, Mauro. “Le philosophe et le cinéaste: Merleau-Ponty et la pensée du cinéma.” In
La chair des images: Merleau-Ponty entre peinture et cinéma, 85–127. Paris: Vrin, 2011.
Carbone, Mauro. “The Philosopher and the Moviemaker: Merleau- Ponty and the
Thinking of Cinema.” In Chiasmi International: Merleau-Ponty: Philosophy and Moving
Pictures 12, 47–70. Paris: Vrin, 2010.
Carroll, Noël. “Art, Film and Ideology: A Response to Blaine Allan.” In Theorizing the
Moving Image, 398–399. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Carroll, Noël. “Cinematic Representation and Realism: André Bazin and the Aesthetics
of Sound Film.” In Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory, 94–171. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Cary, Philip. Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Chadwick, Henry. Augustine of Hippo: A Life. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford
Charlton, D.G., ed. France: A Companion to French Studies. (1979). 2nd ed. London and
New York, NY: Methuen, 1983.
Chateau, Dominique. Sartre et le cinéma. Biarritz: Séguier, 2005.
Chimisso, Cristina. Gaston Bachelard: Critic of Science and the Imagination.
London: Routledge, 2013.
Cieslar, Jiri. “Living with The Long Journey: Alfred Radok’s Daleka cesta,” Central European
Review (CER) 9:20 (4 June 2001). http://www.ce-.eview.org/01/20/kinoeye20_cieslar.
html.
Cone, Michele. French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art before, during, and after Vichy.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Conley, Tom. “Evolution and Event in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?” In Opening Bazin: Postwar
Film Theory and Its Afterlife. Edited by Dudley Andrew, with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin,
32–41. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Connelly, John. The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1935–1965. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Contat, Michel. “Sartre et le cinéma.” Magazine Littéraire 103–104 (September 1975).
Coppin, Marc. La Côte d’Opale en Guerre d’Algérie 1954–1962. Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses
Universitaires du Septentrion, 2012.
198 Bibliography
Cortade, Ludovic. “André Bazin: Une ontologie négative du cinéma?” French Forum 42:2
(Fall 2017): 313–326.
Coski, R. Christopher. “Condillac: Language, Thought, and Morality in the Man and
Animal Debate.” French Forum 28:1 (Winter 2003): 57–75.
Cuenot, Claude. Teilhard de Chardin: A Biographical Study. Baltimore, MD: Helicon, 1965.
Curtis, Scott. The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany.
New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Dalle Vacche, Angela. “Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse: Still Life and the Close-Up as Feminine
Space.” In Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film, 221–247. Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1996.
Dalle Vacche, Angela. “Cézanne and the Lumière Brothers.” In Film, Art, New Media: Museum
without Walls?, edited by Angela Dalle Vacche, 39–56. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Dalle Vacche, Angela. “The Difference of Cinema in the System of the Arts.” In Opening
Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife, edited by Dudley Andrew with Hervé
Joubert-Laurencin, 142–152. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Dalle Vacche, Angela. “Surrealism in Art and Film: Time and Face.” In Global Art Cinema,
edited by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, 181–197. New York, NY: Oxford
Dalle Vacche, Angela, ed. The Visual Turn: Film Theory and Art History. Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection. Introduction by
Sir Julian Huxley. New York, NY: Signet, 1958.
Daston, Lorraine, and Gregg Mitman, eds. Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on
Anthropomorphism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Davies, Katherine, and Toby Garfitt, eds. God’s Mirror: Renewal and Engagement in French
Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century. New York, NY: Fordham
De Baecque. Antoine. Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema. Translated by
Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff. New York, NY: Columbia University
Press, 2012.
De Baecque, Antoine. “Un saint en casquette de velours.” In La cinéphilie: Invention d’un
regard, histoire d’une culture 1944–1968, 33–62. Paris: Fayard, 2003.
De Baecque, Antoine. Truffaut: A Biography. Translated by Catherine Temerson.
New York, NY: Knopf, 1992.
Debray, Régis. Dieu, un itinéraire: Matériaux pour l’histoire de l’Éternel en Occident.
Paris: Editions Odile Jacobs, 2001.
Debray, Régis. Vie et mort de l’image: Une histoire du regard en Occident.
Paris: Gallimard, 1992.
De Broglie, Louis. An Introduction to the Study of Wave Mechanics. (1930). Sacramento,
CA: Andesite Press, 2017.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. 1985.
Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Dubois, Philippe. L’acte photographique et autres essais. Paris-Bruxelles: Nathan-Labor,
1983.
Du Plessis, S. I. M. The Compatibility of Science and Philosophy in France 1840–1940. Cape
Town, South Africa: A. A. Balkema, 1972.
Bibliography 199
Durgnat, Raymond. “Bresson and Bazin: Two Strains of Cinematic Realism?” In Robert

Bresson, edited by James Quandt, 419–428. Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario, 2011.
Earnshaw, Steven. Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York, NY: Continuum,
2006.
Eisenstein, Sergei. Nonindifferent Nature: Film and the Structure of Things. Translated
by Herbert Marshall. Cambridge, UK, and New York, NY: Cambridge University
Press, 1987.
Fautrier, Pascale. “Le cinéma de Sartre.” fabula-LhT 2 (December 2006). Accessed 14 June
2015. http://fabula.org/lht/2/fautrier.html.
Feyerabend, Paul. The Tyranny of Science. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011.
Fischer, Lucy. Cinema by Design: Art Nouveau, Modernism, and Film History. New York,
Focillon, Henri. The Life of Forms in Art. Translated by George Kubler. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1992.
Ford, Charles. Children in Cinema. London: Allen &Unwin, 1939.
Friday, Jonathan. “Photography and the Representation of Vision.” Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 59:4 (2001): 351–362.
Frolow, A. “[Review of] Louis Réau. Iconographie de l’art chrétien.” Revue de l’Histoire des
Religions 50:2 (1956): 229–232.
Gallagher, Tag. The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini. New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1998.
Gamwell, Lynn. Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual. Princeton,
Gauthier, Christophe. “Une branche nouvelle sur l’arbre des formes? Focillon, Élie Faure
et le cinéma.” In Histoire du cinéma, problématique des sources, edited by Irene Bessier
and Jean Gili, 295–310. Paris: INHA-Université de Paris 1-Maison des sciences de
l’homme-AFRHC,  2004.
Gaycken, Oliver. Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Gifford, Paul. “Paul Valéry and French Catholicism: Recognizing the Context of Renewal.”
In God’s Mirror: Renewal and Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the
Mid-Twentieth Century, edited by Katherine Davies and Toby Garfitt, 50–68. New York,
NY: Fordham University Press, 2015.
Gifford, Paul, and Brian Stimpson, eds. Reading Paul Valéry: Universe in Mind. Cambridge,
UK, and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Golan, Romy. Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars. New
Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1995.
Goldmann, Lucien. The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal
and the Tragedies of Racine. [1964]. Translated by Philip Tody. London and New York,
NY: Verso, 2016.
Goretti, Leo. “Irma Bandiera, Maria Goretti: Gender Role Models for Communist Girls in
Italy (1945–56).” Twentieth-Century Communism 4:4 (May 2012): 14–37.
Greenberg, Clement. “The Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” (1939). In Kitsch: The World of Bad
Taste, edited by Gillo Dorfles, 116–126. New York, NY: Universe Books, 1970.
Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” In Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays
and Criticism, vol. 4, edited by J. O’Brian, 85–93. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1986.
Grosoli, Marco. “André Bazin: Film as Social Documentary.” New Readings 11
(2011): 1–16.
200 Bibliography
Grosoli, Marco. “La Tela del Tomiside: André Bazin: Riletto attraverso l’integralità del
corpus.” PhD diss., University of Bologna, Italy, 2010.
Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-
Garde.” Wide Angle 8:3–4 (Fall 1986): 381–386.
Gunter, Pete A. Y. “Bergson, Mathematics, Creativity,” Process Studies 28:3–4 (Fall–Winter
1999): 268–288.
Gunter, Pete A. Y. Introduction to Creative Evolution, by Henri Bergson. Translated by
Arthur Mitchell. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983.
Harrington, Anne. Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to
Hitler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Hassan, Feroz. “Surviving Politics: André Bazin and Aesthetic Bad Faith.” PhD diss.,
University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor, 2017.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. (1927). Translated by Joan Stambaugh; Revised by
Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010.
Hellman, John. Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left 1930–1950. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1981.
Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in
Modern Art. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.
Hodgkinson, Simon. “Rapt in Plastic: Word and Image in the Criticism of André Bazin.”
MPhil thesis, University of Kent, 1999.
Hollier, Denis, ed. A New History of French Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Houser, Nathan, and Christian Kloesel, eds. “[from] On the Algebra of Logic: A
Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation (1885).” In The Essential Peirce: Selected
Philosophical Writings, vol. 1 (1867–1893), 225–228. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1992.
Howells, Christina. Sartre’s Theory of Literature. London: Modern Humanities Research
Association, 1979.
Jacobs, Steven. Art and Cinema: The Belgian Art Documentary. Ghent: Cinematek,
2013.
Jeong, Seung-Hoon. “Multiple Indexicality and Multiple Realism in André Bazin.” In
The Major Realist Film Theorists: A Critical Anthology, edited by Ian Aitken, 94–104.
Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
Johae, Antony. “Towards an Iconography of Crime and Punishment.” In Dostoevsky and
the Christian Tradition, edited by George Pattison and Diane Oenning Thompson,
172–188. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, Galen A., ed. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting.
Translation editor: Michael B. Smith. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1993.
Joret, Blandine. “Today, Icarus: On the Persistence of the Myth of Total Cinema.” PhD
diss., University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2015.
Joubert-Laurencin, Hervé. Le sommeil paradoxal: Écrits sur André Bazin. Montreuil:
Éditions de l’Oeil, 2014.
Judt, Tony. Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–56. New York: New York University
Press, 2011.
Keller, Sarah, and Jason Paul, eds. Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations.
Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2012.
Bibliography 201
Kelly, Michael. “‘Catholicisme ondoyant’: Catholic Intellectual Engagement and the

Crisis of Civilization in the 1930s.” In God’s Mirror: Renewal and Engagement in French
Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century, edited by Katherine Davies
and Toby Garfitt, 28–49. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2015.
Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Keshavjee, Serena. “Natural History, Cultural History, and the Art History of Élie Faure.”
Nineteenth-Century Worldwide 8:2 (Autumn 2009). www.19thc-artworldwide.org/
autumn09/natural-history-cultural-history-and-the-art-history-of-elie-faure.
Khilnani, Sunil. “French Marxism—Existentialism to Structuralism.” In The Cambridge
History of Twentieth Century Political Thought, edited by Terence Ball and Richard
Bellamy, 299–318. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Kornhaber, Donna. Charlie Chaplin, Director. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 2014
Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York,
Kragh, Helge. “The Beginning of the World: Georges Lemaître and the Expanding
Universe.” Centaurus 30:2 (July 1987): 114–139.
Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of
Aesthetics. Part I.” Journal of the History of Ideas 12:4 (October 1951): 496–527.
Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of
Aesthetics. Part II.” Journal of the History of Ideas 13:1 (January 1952): 17–46.
Kuhn, Eva. “La cinéplastique d’Élie Faure ou du cinéma et de la plasticité des arts.” Regards
Croisés 5 (2016): 62–73.
Kumar, Manjit. Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality.
New York, NY: Norton, 2011.
Kwinter, Stanford. Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist
Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
Larson, Barbara, and Sabine Flach, eds. Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural
History. Farnham, Surrey, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.
Lebeau. Vicky. Childhood and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books, 2008.
Leenhardt, Roger. Chroniques du cinéma. Paris: Éditions de L’Etoile/ Cahiers du
Cinéma, 1986.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim.Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry.
(1766). Translated by Ellen Frothingham. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005.
Leventopoulos, Mélisande. Les catholiques et le cinéma: La construction d’un regard cri-
tique (France, 1895–1958). Rennes: Presses Universitaire de Rennes, 2015.
Levin, Tom. “Iconology at the Movies: Panofsky’s Film Theory.” In The Visual Turn: Film
Theory and Art History, edited by Angela Dalle Vacche, 85–114. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. The “Soul” of the Primitive. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1928.
Ligneul, André. Teilhard and Personalism. Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1968.
Livio, Mario. The Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, The World’s Most Astonishing Number.
New York, NY: Broadway Books, 2003.
Maclean, Caroline, The Vogue for Russia: Modernism and the Unseen in Britain 1900–
1930. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
Mannoni, Laurent. Histoire de la Cinémathèque Française. Paris: Gallimard, 2006.
202 Bibliography
Marcel, Gabriel. The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1: Reflection and Mystery. Translated by G. S.
Fraser. London: Harvill Press, 1951.
Marcel, Gabriel. The Mystery of Being, Vol. 2: Faith and Reality. Translated by René Hague.
London: Harvill Press, 1951.
Margulies, Ivone. Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke
Martinet, Alexis. Le cinéma et la science. Paris: CNRS Editions, 1994.
Meisel, Martin. Chaos Imagined: Literature, Art, Science. New York, NY: Columbia
Melberg, Arne. “Repetition (in the Kierkegaardian Sense of the Term).” Diacritics 20:3
(Fall 1990): 71–87.
Mendell, Elisabeth Lawrence. Romanesque Sculpture in Saintonge. New Haven, CT: Yale
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945). In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics
Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith,
59–75. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communism Problem.
(1947). Translated by John O’Neill. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1990.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception. New York, NY: Routledge, 2004.
Michelson, Annette. “[Review of] André Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 1.” Art Forum 6:10
(Summer 1968): 67–71.
Mitman, Gregg. Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife in Film. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Molotiu, Andrei. “Focillon’s Bergsonian Rhetoric and the Possibility of Deconstruction.”
In–Visible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies 3 (Winter 2001). http://
www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue3/molotiu.html.
Mondzain, Marie-José, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary
Imaginary. Translated by Rico Franses. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2005.
Monod, Jacques. Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern
Biology. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse. New York, NY: Knopf, 1971.
Morin, Edgar. The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man. 1956. Translated by Lorraine Mortimer.
Morin, Edgar, L’homme et la mort dans l’histoire. Paris: Corea, 1951.
Morris, Frances, ed. Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945–55. London: Tate
Gallery, 1994.
Mounier, Emmanuel. “Le conflit de l’anthropocentrisme et du théocentrisme dans
la philososophie de Descartes.” Les Etudes Philosophiques 21:3 (July– September
1966): 319–324.
Mounier, Emmanuel. “Les devoirs du pluralisme.” Esprit 9:99 (April 1941): 361–367.
Mounier, Emmanuel. Introduction aux existentialismes. Paris: Denoel, 1947.
Mounier, Emmanuel. “La pensée engage.” Esprit 9:101 (June 1941): 594–595.
Mounier, Emmanuel. Personalism. (1949). Translated by Philip Mairet. Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989.
Mounier, Emmanuel. Refaire la Renaissance. Preface by Guy Coq. (1932). Paris: Editions
du Seuil, 1974.
Mousalimas, S. A. “The Concept of Participation in Lévy-Bruhl’s ‘Primitive Mentality.’”
Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (JASO) 21:1 (1990): 33–46.
Bibliography 203
Munier, Roger. “The Fascinating Image.” Diogenes 10:38 (June 1962): 85–94.

Naas, Michael. Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion,
Science, and the Media. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012.
Nord, Philip G. France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era. Princeton,
Norihide. Mori. “The Image and the Real: A Consideration of Sartre’s Early Views on Art.”
Aesthetics 16 (2012).
Obituary for André Bazin. Cahiers du Cinéma 90 (December 1958).
Papanicolaou, Andrew C., and Pete A. Y. Gunter, eds. Bergson and Modern
Thought: Towards a Unified Science. Models of Scientific Thought, vol. 3. London:
Harwood Academic Publishers; New York, NY: Routledge, 1987.
Parkinson, Gavin. Surrealism, Art, and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics,
Epistemology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
Pascal, Blaise. Pascal’s Pensées. (1670). Translated by W. F. Trotter. New York, NY: E.P.
Dutton, 1958.
Paul, Harry W. “The Issue of Decline in Nineteenth-Century French Science.” French
Historical Studies 7:3 (Spring 1972).
Pecori, Franco. Vittorio De Sica. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. “On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of
Notation” (1885). In The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1 (1867–
1891), edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, 225–228. Bloomington: Indiana
Penelhum, Terence. “Pascal’s Wager.” Journal of Religion 44:3 (1964): 201–209.
Picolet, Guy. “[Review of] L’hypothèse de l’atome primitif. L’hypothèse de l’atome primitif
et le problème des amas de galaxies, Georges Lemaître et son œuvre; bibliographie des
travaux de Georges Lemaître Éditions ‘Culture et Civilisation’ (‘Epistèmè’) by Georges
Lemaître, et al.” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences 28:1 (January 1975): 91–93.
Pipolo, Tony. Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Poliakov, Léon. Bréviaire de la haine: Le III Reich et les Juifs. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1951.
Pollmann, Inga. Cinematic Vitalism: Film Theory and the Question of Life.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018.
Quicke, Andrew. “Phenomenology and Film: An Examination of a Religious Approach
to Film Theory by Henri Agel and Amédée Ayfre.” Journal of Media and Religion 4:4
(2005): 235–250.
Quigley, Paula. “Realism and Eroticism: Re-Reading Bazin.” Paragraph 36:1 (March
2013): 31–49.
Réau, Louis. Iconographie de l’art chrétien. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955.
Reece, Jane B., ed. Campbell Biology. 9th ed. Boston, MA: Benjamin Cummings/
Pearson, 2011.
Ricciardi, Alessia. “Immanent Miracles: From De Sica to Hardt and Negri.” MLN 122:5
(December 2007): 1138–1165.
Rifkin, Steven, J. “André Bazin’s Ontology of the Photographic Image: Representation,
Desire, Presence.” PhD diss, Carleton University, Ontario, Canada, 2011.
Robinson, Judith. “Language, Physics and Mathematics in Valéry’s Cahiers.” Modern
Language Review 55:4 (October 1960): 519–536.
Robinson-Valéry, Judith. “The Fascination of Science.” In Reading Paul Valéry: Universe
in Mind, edited by Paul Gifford and Brian Stimpson, 70–84. Cambridge and New York,
NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
204 Bibliography
Rohdie, Sam. “Jean-Paul Sartre, Hollywood, Citizen Kane and the Nouvelle Vague, Part
I. ” Screening the Past 38 (25 December 2013): www.screeningthepast.com/2013/12/
jean-paul-sartre-hollywood-citizen-kane-and-the-french-nouvelle-vague/.
Rosen, Philip. “Belief in Bazin.” In Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife,
edited by Dudley Andrew with Hervé Joubert- Laurencin, 107– 118. New York,
Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Rosen, Philip, ed. Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. New York,
Rostand, Jean. Le problème biologique de l’individualité. Alençon: Poulet-Malassis, 1955.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “A propos de John Dos Passos et 1919.” (1938). In Situations I, February
1938–September 1944, 18–31. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. rev. 2010.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “A propos de Le bruit et la fureur: La temporalité chez Faulkner.” (1939).
In Situations I, 70–81. Paris: Gallimard, 1947, rev. 2010.
Sartre, Jean Paul. Being and Nothingness. (1943). Reprint edition translated by Hazel E.
Barnes. New York, NY: Washington Square Press, 1993.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism. (1946). Translated by Carol Macomber.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
Sartre, Jean Paul. “The Humanism of Existentialism.” In Essays in Existentialism, 31–62.
New York, NY: Citadel Press, 1993.
Sartre, Jean Paul. The Imaginary: Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination.
Translated by Jonathan Webber. London: Routledge, 2010.
Sartre, Jean Paul. Nausea. (1938). Translated by Lloyd Alexander. New York, NY: New
Directions, 2013.
Sartre, Jean Paul. No Exit: A Play in One Act. Adapted from the French by Paul Bowles.
New York, NY: Samuel French, 1958.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “La recherche de l’absolu.” Temps Modernes 28 (1948): 1153–1163.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre. (1964). Translated by
Bernard Frechtman. New York. NY: Vintage, 1981.
Sawchenko, Leslie Diana. “The Concept of the Person: The Contributions of Gabriel
Marcel and Emmanuel Mounier to the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur.” MA thesis,
Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, Alberta, 2013.
Schlegel, Jean-Louis. “[Review of] Regis Debray: Dieu. Un itineraire.” Esprit (May
2002): http://www.esprit.presse.fr/article/schlegel-jean-louis/regis-debray-dieu-un
itineraire-8649?folder=5.
Schoessler, Steven. Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris (1919–1933).
Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005.
Schoonover, Karl. “Histrionic Gestures and Historical Representation: Masina’s Cabiria,
Bazin’s Chaplin, and Fellini’s Neorealism.” Cinema Journal 53:2 (Winter 2014): 93–116.
Schoonover, Karl. “[Review of] The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man and The Stars by
Edgar Morin.” Senses of Cinema 39: www.sensesofcinema.com/2006/book-reviews/
edgar_morin/
Schwartz, Louis-Georges. Mechanical Witness: A History of Motion Picture Evidence in
U.S. Courts. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Scott, David. “The ‘Concept of Time’ and the ‘Being of the Clock’: Bergson, Einstein,
Heidegger and the Interrogation of the Temporality of Modernism.” Continental
Philosophy Review 39:2 (June 2006): 183–213.
Bibliography 205
Sellier, Philippe. Pascal et Saint Augustin. (1970). Paris: A. Michel, 1995.

Singh, Devin. “Iconicity of the Photographic Image: Theodore of Stoudios and André
Bazin.” In Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity, edited by
Roland Betancourt and Maria Taroutina, 237–253. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2015.
Spencer, Herbert. Principles of Biology (1864). Sacramento, CA: Franklin Classics, 2018.
Steimatsky, Noa. The Face on Film. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Taylor. Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. (1955). Translated by Bernard
Wall. Introduction by Sir Julian Huxley. New York, NY: Harper, 1959.
Thévenard, Pierre, and Guy Tassel. Le cinéma scientifique français. Paris: La Jeune
Parque, 1948.
Tomasi, Dario. “Vittorio De Sica e Cesare Zavattini, verso la svolta.” In Storia del Cinema
Italiano 1949–1953, edited by Luciano De Giusti. Venice: Marsilio, 2003.
Toulmin, Stephen. The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of
Nature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Trotter, David. Cinema and Modernism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
Truffaut, François. “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.” In The French New
Wave: Critical Landmarks, edited by Ginette Vincendeau and Peter Graham, 39–63.
London: Palgrave, 1999. Originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1954.
Ungaro, Jean. André Bazin: Généalogies d’une théorie. Paris: Harmattan, 2000.
Valdés, Zoé, Dominique Delouche, and Jean-Max Méjean. Giulietta Masina: La muse de
Fellini. Grandvilliers: La Tour Verte, 2013.
Van Vliet, Muriel. “L’esprit des formes est un— Élie Faure: Pour une esthétique
révolutionnaire.” Regards Croisés 5 (2016): 74–85.
Vaughan, Hunter. “André Bazin.” In Film Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers, ed-
ited by Felicity Colman, 100–108. Montreal [Quebec]: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 2009.
Ventresca. Robert A. Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Virtanen, Reino. L’imagerie scientifique de Paul Valéry. Paris: J. Vrin, 1975.
Visconti, Luchino. “Towards Anthropomorphic Cinema.” In Springtime in Italy: A Reader
on Neo-Realism, edited and translated by David Overbey, 83–85. Hamden, CT: Archon
Books, 1978.
Wall-Romana, Christophe. Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy.
Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013.
Watson, James D. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of
DNA. Introduction by Sylvia Nasar. New York, NY: Touchstone, 1968.
Watts, Philip. Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of
Writers and Intellectuals in France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Weiner, Susan, ed. The French Fifties (Issue 58 of Yale French Studies). New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
Wilson, Emma. Cinema’s Missing Children. London: Wallflower Press, 2003.
Wilson, Sarah. “Art and Politics of the Left in France 1935–1955.” PhD diss., Courtauld
Art Institute, University of London, 1991.
Wilson, Sarah. “Catholics, Communists and Art Sacré.” Yumpu 5. 10 January 2018, http://
www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/4025117.
Wilson. Sarah. “In Search of the Absolute.” In Paris Post Wa:. Art and Existentialism 1945–
55, edited by Frances Morris. London: Tate Gallery, 1994.
206 Bibliography
Winock, Michael. “Esprit” des intellectuels dans la cité: 1930–1950. Revised edition.
Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996.
Winock, Michael. “Vichy et le cas Emmanuel Mounier.” L’Histoire 186 (March
1995): 52–59.
Wittmann, Heiner. Aesthetics in Sartre and Camus. The Challenge of Freedom. Translated
by Catherine Atkinson. Frankfurt am Main and New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2009.
Wooldridge, Dean E. Mechanical Man: The Physical Basis of Intelligent Life. New York,
NY: McGraw-Hill,  1968.
Younger, Prakash. Boats on the Marne: Jean Renoir’s Critique of Modernity.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.
Zuccotti, Susan. The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1999.
Index of Names and Films
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on
occasion, appear on only one of those pages.
Figures are indicated by f following the page number.

“À la recherche du temps perdu” Big Clock, The (Bazin), 70–71
(Bazin), 170n23 Boileau, Pierre, She Who Is No More, 72
Allegret, Marc, Avec André Gide,  162–63 Bost, Un recteur de Î’Ile de Sein, 131
“Amédée Ayfre, Dieu aucinéma,” 187n40 Bresson, Robert
André Bazin’s New Media (Andrew), 7, Diary of a Country Priest, 5, 50–51, 66,
147, 148 96, 133, 137–40
Andreotti, Giulio, 83 “Stylistics of Robert Bresson,The,”
Andrew, Dudley, André Bazin’s New 101,  133–41
Media, 7, 147, 148 Un condamné à mort s’est
Antonioni, Michelangelo, Story of a Love échappé,  164–65
Affair,  73–74 Bréviaire de la haine (Poliakov), 106
Aristarco, Guido, 83
Aurenche, Un recteur de Î’Ile de Sein, 131 Cameraman, The (Keaton), 19–20
Avec André Gide (Allegret),  162–63 Capellani, Albert, 149
Ayfre, Amédée, Dieu au cinéma, Germinal, 149
159, 187n40 Capra, Frank, Why We Fight, 102
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 17, 18f
Balázs, Béla, 136 Castle, The (Kafka), 99
Bambi (Disney), 24 Cayatte, André, 55, 67–68
Bedroom in Arles (van Gogh), 40–41 “La cybernétique d’André Cayatte,”
Being and Time (Heidegger), 6 175–76n28
Bellon, Yannick, Paris 1900,  25–26 “Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,
Benjamin, Walter, 35 A” (Truffaut), 129
Bergman, Ingmar, The Seventh Seal, Chabrol, Claude, 1
178–79n6 Chandler, Raymond, 12
Bergson, Henri, 6, 36–37, 55–56 Chaplin, Charlie, 5
antiteleological sensibility, 62 City Lights,  123–24
Creative Evolution, 55–56, 64, 161 De Sica and, 120–21, 122–23
Duration and Simultaneity, 65 Gold-Rush, The, 120
stream of consciousness, 60–61 Kid, The,  121–22
Time and Free Will, 66 Pilgrim, The, 121
Berlinguer, Enrico, 108 Tramp character, 119–20, 121–22,
Bernanos, Georges, Diary of a Country 123, 127
Priest, 50, 66, 138–39 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon,  21
Bicycle Thieves (De Sica), 79, 84, 85, 86, 88, Cielo sulla Palude (Genina), 101,
89–90,  93–94 109–12,  127
208 Index of Names and Films
Cinema, The (Mortimer), 142–43, 184n1 “Note sur De Sica” (Bazin), 177n47

“Cinéma et théologie” (Bazin), reversals and parallels, 93–94
179n10, 183n80 Umberto D, 84, 87, 91–93, 113–14
Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire (Morin), “De Sica: Metteur-en-scène”
142, 184n1 (Bazin),  93–94
Citizen Kane (Welles), 6 De Toth, Andre, House of Wax,  74–75
City Lights (Chaplin), 123–24 Diary of a Country Priest
Cloche, Maurice, Monsieur Vincent, Bernanos’ novel, 50, 66, 138–39
101, 112 Bresson’s film, 5, 50–51, 66, 96, 101,
Clouzot, Henri-Georges 133–36,  137–40
Les diaboliques,  71–73 Dieu a besoin des hommes (Delannoy),
Mystery of Picasso, The, 49, 50, 51–54 101,  131–33
Cocteau, Jean, Le sang d’un poète,  38–39 Dieu au cinéma (Ayfre), 159, 187n40
“Colline 24” (Bazin), 177n43, 177n45 Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques, 1
Congar, Yves, 108 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, Passion of Joan of
Conley, Tom, “Evolution and Event in Arc, The,  136–37
Qu’est-ce que le cinéma,” 161 Duration and Simultaneity (Bergson), 65
“Continent perdu” (Bazin), 169–70n11 “Du réalisme dans les films policiers”
Cortade, Ludovic, 158 (Bazin), 69, 177n42
Cousteau, Jacques, The Silent World, Du rififi chez les hommes (Dassin), 75–77,
61–62,  63 177n44, 177n46
Couturier, Père Marie-Alain, 148
Creative Evolution (Bergson), 55–56, Einstein, Albert, 65–66, 175n22
64, 161 Eisenstein, Sergei, 11
Strike, 80
Darwin, Charles, 55–57, 58, 60 Emmer, Luciano, 36–37
On the Origin of Species, 58 Guerrieri, 33
Dassin, Jules, Du rififi chez les hommes, Picasso, 34
75–77, 177n44, 177n46 Enrie, Giuseppe, Turin Shroud
Da Vinci, Leonardo, 20, 24 photograph, 16
Vitruvian Man, 22, 23f “Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl”
De Baecque, Antoine, 11, 127 (Bazin), 62
Debray, Régis, 165, 187n40 Epstein, Jean, 184n6
de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard, 108 “Evolution and Event in Qu’est-ce que le
Delannoy, Jean cinéma” (Conley), 161
Dieu a besoin des hommes, 101, 131–33 “Evolution of Language in the Western”
La symphonie pastorale, 101, 129–31 (Bazin), 161
Delannoy, Robert, religious “Evolution of the Language of Cinema,
adaptations,  129–33 The” (Bazin), 7, 56–57, 59, 161
De Lubac, Henri, 108
“Des cailloux du Petit Poucet au chemin Faraday, Michael, 4
de la vie: L’enfance et le cinéma” Farrebique (Rouquier), 109, 162
(Bazin), 182n68 Fellini, Federico, 83
De Sica, Vittorio, 81, 83–85, 86–90 Il Bidone, 101, 113–16, 117,
Bicycle Thieves, 79, 84, 85, 86, 88, 180–81n36,  181n40
89–90,  93–94 I Vitelloni, 124
Chaplin and, 120–21, 122–23 La Strada, 101, 116, 117–19, 120,
Miracle in Milan,  77–81 181n43, 181n45, 181–82n49
Index of Names and Films 209
Nights of Cabiria, The, 5, 116, Interior of a Restaurant (Resnais), 46

119–21,  123–27 I Vitelloni (Fellini), 124
symbolism,  116–17
Flaherty, Robert, 57 Joffé, Alex, Les Fanatiques, 173–74n4
Flowers of Saint Francis, The
(Rossellini), 125 Kafka, Franz
Focillon, Henri, 148, 160–62 Castle, The, 99
Life of Forms, The, 161 pessimism,  99–100
Freund, Karl, 110–11 Kast, Pierre, Les désastres de la guerre, 33
Fuller, Samuel, 11 Keaton, Buster, The Cameraman,  19–20
Kierkegaard, Søren, 101, 139
Gauthier, Christophe, 161 Kwinter, Stanford, 68
Genina, Augusto, Cielo sulla Palude, 101,
109–12,  127 Lacombe, Georges, La nuit est mon
Germany Year Zero (Rossellini), 85 royaume, 25
“Ghetto Terenzin” (Bazin), 180n22 “La cybernétique d’André Cayatte,”
Gide, André, La symphonie pastorale, 129 175–76n28
Godard, Jean-Luc, 1 Lady in the Lake (Montgomery), 12–13
God Needs Men (Delannoy), 101, 131–33 “La fille des marais” (Bazin), 179n11
Goldmann, Lucien, Hidden God, 160 “La grande horloge” (Bazin), 176n30
Gold Rush, The (Chaplin), 120 Lamorisse, Albert, White Mane, 12
Greenberg, Clement, 35 L’an 1000, l’art des sculpteurs romans
Guernica (Resnais), 33 (Mâle), 161
Guerrieri (Emmer), 33 Lang, Fritz, M,  69–70
La nuit est mon royaume (Lacombe), 25
Haesaerts, Paul “La nuit est mon royaume”
Rubens,  34–36 (Bazin), 170n20
Visite à Picasso, 52 Laocoön (Lessing), 22–23
Harvest of Hate (Poliakov), 106 “La peinture vue par un trou de serrure”
Heavenly Play, The (Sjöberg),  159–60 (Bazin), 171n29, 171n34
Heaven Over the Marshes (Genina), 101, L’art primitif, l’art médiéval (Réau), 158
109–12,  127 La Strada (Fellini), 101, 116, 117–19, 120,
Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, 6 181n43, 181n45, 181–82n49
Heisenberg, Werner, 65 “La Strada: Le chemin de la poésie”
Heraclitus,  36–37 (Bazin), 181–82n48
Hidden God (Goldmann), 160 La symphonie pastorale
Himlaspelet (Sjöberg), 159 Delannoy’s film, 101, 129–31
House of Wax (De Toth), 74–75 Gide’s letter, 129
La Terra Trema (Visconti), 109, 168n20
Il Bidone (Fellini), 101, 113–16, 117, “L’auteur de la Grande Illusion n’a pas
180–81n36,  181n40 perdu confiance dans la liberté de
“Il Bidone après La Strada” (Bazin), création” (Bazin), 187n39
181n36, 181n40 “La vie passionnée de Vincent van Gogh”
“Il Bidone ou le salut en question” (Bazin), (Bazin), 172–73n58
180–81n35,  181n39 “Le 7eme’ art tel qu’on l’écrit. Avant-
Il Fuoco (Patrone), 123–24 garde et mysticism au cinéma”
Imaginary Man, The (Mortimer), (Bazin), 182n64
142–43,  184n1 Le Brun, Charles, 21
Le chemin du ciel (Sjöberg),  159–60 Malle, Louis, The Silent World, 61–62, 63
Le cimetière marin (Valéry), 163 Mambo (Rossen), 124
“Le cinéma et la peinture” (Bazin), Man Escaped, A (Bresson), 164–65
31, 172n54 Marina, Giulietta, 5
“Le ghetto concentrationnaire” (Bazin), Mauriac, François, 66, 106
179–80n21 “Max Ophuls est mort” (Bazin), 182–83n69
“Le journal d’un curé de campagne and McLaren, Norman, 26–27, 28
the Stylistics of Robert Bresson” Melberg, Arne, 139–40
(Bazin), 49 Méliès, Georges, 101–2
Le monde du silence (Cousteau and Malle), Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 6
61–62,  63 Michelson, Annette, 11, 168n20
“Le monde du silence” (Bazin), Minnelli, Vincente, Lust for Life, 44–45, 46,
174n10, 175n19 47–49,  50
Le sang d’un poète (Cocteau), 38–39 Miracle in Milan (De Sica and
Les batueax de l’enfer (Yamamura), 176n29 Zavattini),  77–81
“Les batueax de l’enfer” (Bazin), 176n29 Moana (Flaherty), 161
Les désastres de la guerre (Kast), 33 Monsieur Vincent (Cloche), 101, 112
Les diaboliques (Clouzot), 71–73 “Montage Interdit” (Bazin), 11–12
“Les églises romanes de Saintonge” Montgomery, Robert, Lady in the
(Bazin), 147–66, 150f, 186n29, Lake,  12–13
186n31, 186n35, 187n38, Morin, Edgar, 5, 142–43, 165
187–88n43,  188n55 Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire,
Les Fanatiques (Joffé), 173–74n4 142, 184n1
“Les secrets d’Orson Welles” Mortimer, Lorraine, The Cinema, or The
(Bazin), 173n1 Imaginary Man, 142–43, 184n1
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Moulin de la Galette (van Gogh), 46–47
Laocoön,  22–23 Mounier, Emmanuel, 8, 99–100, 105–6
“Le style c’est le genre” (Bazin), 176n36 Traité du caractère, 108
L’hippocampe femelle (Painlevé), 27–28 M remake (Losey), 69–70
“L’homme imaginaire et la fonction Murnau, F. W., 57
magique du cinéma” Sunrise,  110–11
(Bazin), 184n2 Mystery of Picasso, The (Clouzot), 49,
Life of Forms, The (Focillon), 161 50,  51–54
Lo Duca, Joseph-Marie, 1 “Myth of Total Cinema, The” (Bazin), 7,
“Lola Montès” (Bazin), 182n67, 183n70 59–60,  81
Lola Montès (Ophuls), 127–29
Long Journey, The (Radok), 100, 106–7 Nanook of the North (Flaherty), 161
Losey, Joseph (M remake), 69–70 Narcejac, Thomas, She Who Is No More, 72
Lourdes et ses miracles (Rouquier), “New American Style: Is the Cinema An
101,  103–4 Adult?” (Bazin), 62–63
Lumière Brothers, 101–2 Nights of Cabiria, The (Fellini), 5, 116,
Lust for Life 119–21,  123–27
Minnelli film, 44–45, 46, 47–49, 50 “Note sur De Sica” (Bazin), 177n47
Stone novel, 45
On Christian Doctrine (Saint Augustine, D.
M (Lang), 69–70 W. Robertson, translation), 160–61
Mâle, Émile, 160–61 “Ontologie de l’image photographique”
L’an 1000, l’art des sculpteurs (Bazin), 169n2
romans, 161 Ontologie et langage (Bazin), 168n20
Index of Names and Films 211
“Ontology of the Photographic Image, Interior of a Restaurant, 46

The” (Bazin), 21, 31, 44, 58, 133– Paris 1900,  25–26
41, 147, 161–62, 176n29, 188n54 Van Gogh, 29, 30, 31, 33, 40–44,
Ophuls, Max, 101, 182n67 45–47,  49
Lola Montès,  127–29 Rififi (Dassin), 69–77, 177n44, 177n46
Origin of Species (Darwin), 58 Rivette, Jacques, 1
Robertson, D. W., On Christian Doctrine,
Painlevé, Jean, 10, 27–28 translation,  160–61
L’hippocampe femelle, 27–28 Rohmer, Eric, 1
marine biology work, 31 Rome: Open City (Rossellini), 85
“Painting and Cinema” (Bazin), 37 Rosen, Philip, 16
Paisà (Rossellini), 28, 85, 87, 96 Rossellini, Roberto, 82, 83–88
Panofsky, Erwin, 161 Flowers of Saint Francis, The, 125
Papanicolaou, Andrew C., 64–65 Germany Year Zero, 85
Paris 1900 (Védrès), 25–26 Paisà, 28, 85, 87, 96
Pascal, Blaise, 127 Rome: Open City, 85
Passion of Joan of Arc, The War Trilogy, 84, 85
(Dreyer),  136–37 Rossen, Robert, Mambo, 124
Patrone, Giovanni, Il Fuoco,  123–24 Rouquier, Georges
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 17 Farrebique, 109, 162
Perri (Disney), 10 Lourdes et ses miracles, 101, 103–4
Picasso (Emmer), 34 Rubens (Storck and Haesaerts), 34–36
Pichard, Père Raymond, 101–2
Pierre, Abbé, 125 Saint Augustine, On Christian
Pilgrim, The (Chaplin), 121 Doctrine,  160–61
Pius XII, 105–6, 107–8, 111–12 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 6, 113, 115–16, 162–63
Plato, on mathematics, 67 Schoonover, Karl, 124
Poliakov, Léon, Bréviaire de la haine, 106 Seventh Seal, The (Bergman), 178–79n6
“Portrait d’un assassin: Un bon cadre” She Who Is No More (Boileau and
(Bazin), 175n23 Narcejac), 72
Potato Eaters, The (van Gogh), 40, 50 Silent World, The (Cousteau and Malle),
Proust, Marcel, 26 61–62,  63
Sjöberg, Alf, Himlaspelet,  159–60
“Quand Rubens et van Gogh fond du Spencer, Herbert, 55–56
cinéma” (Bazin), 171n40 Stone, Irving, Lust for Life, 45
Queffélec, Henri, Un recteur de Î’Ile de Storck, Henri, Rubens,  34–36
Sein, 131 Story of a Love Affair (Antonioni), 73–74
Strike (Eisenstein), 80
Racine, Jean, dépouillement, 127 “Style is the Genre, The” (Bazin), 71
Radok, Alfred, The Long Journey, “Stylistics of Robert Bresson, The” (Bazin),
100,  106–7 101,  133–41
Réau, Louis, L’art primitif, l’art Sunrise (Murnau), 110–11
médiéval, 158 “Sur les films de peinture: Réponse
Reed, Carol, The Third Man, 99 à Bourniquel” (Bazin),
Renoir, Claude, 53 171n31, 172n51
Renoir, Jean, 22, 163
depth of field, 57–58 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 108
Resnais, Alain Terrace in the Luxembourg Gardens (van
Guernica, 33 Gogh),  46–47
Third Man, The (Reed), 99 View of Paris from Vincent’s Room in the
Thourez, Maurice, 105 Rue Lepic (van Gogh), 46–47
Time and Free Will (Bergson), 66 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène,  156
Tonnellier, Monsieur Le Chanoine (Paul), “Virtues and Limitations of Montage, The”
155, 186n30 (Bazin),  28–29
Totò il buono (Zavattini), 79 Visconti, Luchino, 83
“Towards Anthropomorphic Cinema” La Terra Trema, 109, 168n20
(Visconti), 168n20 “Towards Anthropomorphic
Traité du caractère (Mounier), 108 Cinema,” 168n20
Tramp, The (Chaplin), 119–20, 121–22, Visite à Picasso (Haesaerts), 52
123, 127 Vitruvian Man (Da Vinci), 22, 23f
Truffaut, François, 1, 127, 129–30, Von Stroheim, Erich, 57
131, 183n71
“Certain Tendency of the French Wagner, Richard, gesamtkunstwerk, 24
Cinema, A,” 129 Walt Disney animations
Bambi, 24
Umberto D (De Sica), 84, 87, 91–93, 113–14 Perri, 10
Un condamné à mort s’est échappé Watt, Harry, Where No Vultures
(Bresson),  164–65 Fly,  28–29
Un recteur de Î’Ile de Sein (Queffélec), 131 Welles, Orson, 22
“Un saint ne l’est qu’après” Citizen Kane, 6
(Bazin), 180n32 deep focus, 7, 57–58
What Is Cinema? (Bazin), 26–27, 162
Valéry, Paul, 101, 138–39 Where No Vultures Fly (Watt), 28–29
on Einstein, 175n22 White Mane (Lamorisse), 12
Le cimetière marin, 163 Why We Fight (Capra), 102
Vanel, Charles, 72 Wilder, Billy, Witness for the Prosecution,
Van Gogh (Resnais), 29, 30, 31, 33, 40–44, 173–74n4
45–47,  49 Wilson, Sarah, 104–5, 147–48
van Gogh, Vincent Witness for the Prosecution (Wilder),
Bedroom in Arles,  40–41 173–74n4
Moulin de la Galette,  46–47 Wollen, Peter, 17
Potato Eaters, The, 40, 50
Terrace in the Luxembourg Gardens,  46–47 Yamamura, Satoru, Les bateaux de
View of Paris from Vincent’s Room in the l’enfer, 176n29
Rue Lepic,  46–47
Védrès, Nicole, Paris 1900,  25–26 Zavattini, Cesare, 85
“Vie et mort de la surimpression” Totò il buono, 79
(Bazin), 179n9 Umberto D, 84, 87, 91–93, 113–14
Subject Index
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may,
on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.
Figures are indicated by f following the page number.
3-D, 59,  74–75 cinema as, 30–31

cinema reorienting art-making
algebra, 4, 66–67, 72, 73 as,  33–34
animals, 157 egalitarian anthropomorphism, 10
Bazin’s love of, 61–62 film, 9
documentaries, editing, 11–12 love or community, 14–15
animations mind-machine, anthropocentric
avant-garde,  28 with,  13–14
Couzot’s stop-motion, 52 moral stance, 5
McLaren’s,  26–27 motion, destabilizing power, 22
Walt Disney, 10, 24 neorealism, 84
anthropocentric (film) from non-anthropocentric,  9–10
with anti-anthropocentric storytelling, visible world, 10
mind-machine,  13–14 thinker, 8
definition, 8 anti-anthropocentric
Disney animation, Perri, 10 anthropocosmomorphism,  143–4 6
German Caligarism, 9 anti-Platonic, 7, 58–59, 67
as negative, 8 art, 3–4,  16–54
objectification via, 14 Christological ontology, 16–22,
Otherness,  62–63 18f, 98, 99
potential, 11 frame and screen, 34–39
subjectivity in space, 14 impure cinema, 22–25, 23f
anthropocentric humanism, 20, 22 objects of still life and camera lens as
anthropocentrism, 8, 142 object,  39–49
cinema as alternative to, 97 painting as object, cinema as art, 30–34
élan vital, 60 from painting to biology, 49–54
medieval art, early, 20 in perception, self-expression, and
traditional arts, 9–10 imagination,  3–4
anthropocosmomorphism, 5 postwar art documentary, 4, 29–31, 33–
anti-anthropocentric,  143–46 35, 49–50, 51
anthropomorphism, 142 pure cinema, 25–29, 27f
egalitarian, 10 art documentary, 29–30, 32
egalitarian dialect, individual–world, 10 as avant-garde,  30–31
ocean life and man, 63 biology, 31
vocabulary,  62–63 postwar, 4, 29–31, 33–35, 49–50, 51
anti-anthropocentric, 62–63,  68 art history, 31
214 Subject Index
art theory, 6 energy, passage of, 135

asymptote, 91, 92, 178n68 neorealism,  82–83
attractions, 59 painting, 41
auteurist fever, 127–28 photography’s transformation into
automatic transfer, object to image, 16–17 cinema, 22
automatism, photographic, 8–9 Rossellini’s cinema, 86–87
centripetal, 7–8, 24, 37, 41, 44, 122–23
Bazin, André, 2f Charlot, 118, 120–22
biography, Bazin, 1–2 children’s films, editing, 11–12
1950s, mentoring, 1, 2f Christological ontology, 16–22, 18f, 98,
birth and early life, 1 99, 135
as Catholic dissident, 98 cinema
cinema interest, development, 1 as art, 30–34
health, poor, 1, 55–56, 163 as asymptote of reality, 91, 92, 178n68
media and journal contributions, 1 recording in, 17, 169n7
as Personalist, 98 “cinema of reality,” 57–58
politics, 2 “cinema of the image,” 57–58
biology, 4, 55–56 cognition, 7
botany, 157 Combat des Vertus et des Vices, 155
breathing Communists, Catholics and, 104–8
energy as, 165, 188–89n57 concave lens, 21–22
metaphor, 165, 188–89n57 consciousness, 26
stream of, 60–61
Cabiria, 119–21,  123–27 convex lens, 21–22
cache, 37 cosmology, 15, 36–37
Cahiers du Cinéma
auteurist fever, 127–28 Danish School of Quantum Physics, 65–66
Bazin founding, 1 Darwin, Charles, 55–57, 58, 60
Bazin obituary, 163 Darwinian stance, 7
Truffaut in, on adaptation death, 9, 139–41
équivalence,  127–30 awareness of, 9, 101, 138
calculus, 175n20 Catholic iconophilia, 74
Bergson on, 64 cinema and, 98
differential, 4 Fellini’s characters, 115, 116
neorealism,  81–93 life-in-death and death-in-life,  34
phenomenology, 81 in policier, 69
Caligarism, German, 9 religion and, 98
camera obscura,  21–22 in science, 96–97
Catholicism screen image, black, 43–44
Communists and, 104–8 time and, 98
Italian, vs. French secularism and Way of Cross and journey to, 137
Catholicism, 180n25 deductive approach, 47, 83
Catholics, dissident, Bazin as, 98 deep focus, 7
censorship, 178–79n6 defamiliarization, 5
centrifugal,  7–8 dépouillement, 127
anti-anthropocentrism,  68 depth, 35
Bresson’s Diary, 137 determinism, technological, 59
cinema screen, 24, 37, 41, 43, 44 dialectic,  7–8
subject Index 215
École Normale d’Instituteurs, La Rochelle, medium and phenomenal world, 3

55, 56f philosophical depth and moral
École Normale d’Instituteurs, responsibilities, 3
Versailles, 158 spectatorship and free will and
École Normale of Saint Cloud, Paris, 31 universalism, 3
École Normale Supérieure of Saint Cloud, texts, 3
La Rochelle, 1, 158 What is cinema?, 3
editing, 11. See also specific films fingerprint,  16–17
animal documentaries, 11–12 focus, deep, 7
children’s films, 11–12 fossilization, 34, 35–36
excessive, rejection, 11 fourth wall, 13
fourth wall, 13 breaking, 59, 126–27
Lady in the Lake (Montgomery), 12 frame, screen and, 34–39
object, primacy, 13 freedom and necessity, 14
shot-reverse-shot,  13 free will, 61
education, secular, 1
École Normale d’Instituteurs, La geometry, 64
Rochelle, 55, 56f analytic, 91
École Normale d’Instituteurs, Euclidean, 4, 55, 58, 64, 69
Versailles, 158 snowflake and, 67–69
École Normale of Saint Cloud, Paris, 31 German Caligarism, 9
École Normale Supérieure of Saint gesamtkunstwerk (Wagner), 24
Cloud, La Rochelle, 1, 158 God. See also religion
egalitarian belief in, 99
anthropomorphism, 10
cinema, 35, 38, 40 hallucination, 7
entomology, 63 history of art, 31
natural selection, 55 humanism, anthropocentric, 20, 22
objectifying camera lens, 143–44 humanist, 8
summation, 94 humankind, defined, 3
élan vital, 60, 65, 67–68, 156, 165
electromagnetic energy, 4, 94f,  94–96 icon, 17
empreinte digitale,  16–17 iconophilia, 19
end of cinema, 142 illusionism, 57
entomology, 63 lifelike,  19–20
insect-human overlap, 62 imagination, art in, 3–4
equalizing approach, 8–9 immanence, 98, 102
Euclidean geometry, 4, 55, 58, 64, 69 Bazin’s meaning, 102
evocative affinities, 61–64 supernatural and, 101–4
eye, cinema’s special, 9–12 impure cinema, 7, 22–25, 23f
incandescence, 47
Faraday, Michael, 93–97, 94f indeterminacy, principle of, 65
Fenioux, lantern of the dead, 163, 164f indexical status, image, 17, 18f
film theory, Bazin’s. See also specific films inductive approach, 47
and topics insect-human overlap, 62
cinema as living organism, 3 interconnectedness, 118
criticism and history with, 2 irrational belief, 16–17, 101
“idea” of cinema, 3 Italian neorealism, 4–5, 58, 60–61, 81–93
216 Subject Index
jamais vu,  4–5 nature, 31–32. See also specific topics

neorealism
key words, conceptual, 7–9 anti-anthropocentric,  84
kitsch, 35 calculus,  81–93
calculus and, 81–93
La main-tendue, 98 Italian, 4–5, 58, 60–61, 81–93
lantern of the dead, Fenioux, 163 phenomenological, 20
lens,  9–10 non-anthropocentric
concave,  21–22 anti-anthropocentric film from, 9–10
convex,  21–22 medium, 9
as object, 39–49 nonfiction films, 32
lens, camera, 9–10 Nouvelle Théologie, 108
concave,  21–22
convex,  21–22 object
as object, 39–49 camera lens as, 39–49
lifelike illusionism, 19–20 Capra, Frank, 102
light painting as, 30–34
as lumen, 21 primacy, 13
as lux, 21 still life, 39–49
long take, 11 in subject, 13
lumen, 21 objectif (lens). See lens
lux, 21 objectification,  9–10
object-image
magnetism, 94f,  94–96 automatic transfer, 16–17
mathematics. See also specific topics indexical (physical) link, 17
love of, 55 oneself, looking at from outside, 113–17
as metaphor, 65–66 ontology, 83
miraculous,  77–81 Bresson’s stylistics, 21, 31, 44,
Plato, 67 58,  133–41
policier and, 69–77 Christological, 16–22, 18f, 98, 99, 135
in Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution, photographic image, 142–43
173–74n4 Ophuls, Max, 127–29
mind-machine, cinema as, 13–15 Other and Otherness
mineral and mineralogy, 34 anthropomorphism,  62–63
mirror, 24 Bazin’s outreach toward, 67–68
mises-en-scène, 9–10, 24, 40, 57–58. See belief in God, 99
also specific films Bergon’s becoming, 36
mobile framing, 37 edited and camera movement
moral judgment, capacity for, 63–64 for,  14–15
moving image, 5–6 human consciousness and, 32
destabilizing power, 22 insight into, via cinema, 98, 159
time passing, as illusory motion, 6 in realism, 13
multiplication, 50–51, 66, 77–78 Self and, 66, 101–2
mummification, photography as, 142–43 Sjöberg on, 159
time’s flow, 140
naturalism, quantitative, 20 outside, looking at oneself from, 113–17
natural selection
box office and, 173n1 paintbrush,  39–40
nature based on, 173n2 painting, as object, 30–34
subject Index 217
paradox,  7–8 recording, in photograph and cinema,

parallels, 90–91, 93–94, 159 17, 169n7
parallel world, 15 redemption, 117
participant observers, artists as, 21 rejuvenation, perceptual, 5
perception, 7 religion, 3–4, 5, 98–130
art in, 3–4 Bazin’s ontology and Bresson’s
perceptual rejuvenation, 5 stylistics,  133–41
Personalism, 8 belief in God, 99
Personalist, 98 Catholic dissident and Personalist, 98
perspective charts, 20 Catholics and Communists, 104–8
phenomenological,  4–5 Charlot and Cabiria, 117–27
phenomenological realism, 21 Christological ontology, 16–22, 18f, 98,
photograph. See also specific topics 99, 135
iconophilia, 19 cinema and, as human
indexical status, image, 17, 18f need,  100–1
as mummification, 142–43 etymology, 98
reality transfer, 17–19 hope and compassion, 99–100
recording in, 17, 169n7 immanence, 98
time at standstill, 17–19, 18f immanence, supernatural and, 101–4
photographic automatism, 8–9 Italian Catholicism vs.
platonic heavens, 59, 61, 81 French secularism and
Platonic Idealism (Hollywood’s), 59, Catholicism, 180n25
69–70,  75 looking at oneself from
Platonic solids, 67, 175n26 outside,  113–17
policier, 130 “religious film,” 101
mathematics and, 69–77 risk taking, 109–12
politics, 148 Robert Delannoy’s religious
postwar art documentary, 4, 29–31, adaptations,  129–33
33–35, 49–50, 51. See also specific sacred and profane, 100
documentaries Saint Sulpice and Max Ophuls, 127–29
pure,  25–26 as sociology of human behavior, 100
pure cinema, 7, 25–29, 27f resemblance (ressemblance),  16–17
reversals, 22, 34, 93–94
quantitative naturalism, 20 Romanesque, Saintonge and, 5–6, 34, 147–
quantum physics, 4, 65–66 66, 148–50f, 185n18, 185n23
“Les églises romanes de Saintonge”
Radio Cinéma et Télévision, 1 (Bazin), 147–66, 148–50f,
realism,  19–20 186n29, 186n31, 186n35, 187n38,
abstracting, 20 187–88n43,  188n55
definition,  7–8
external, 20 Saintonge, 2, 5–6
heuristic, 10 churches, 147–66, 148–50f
medieval vs. Renaissance, “Les églises romanes de Saintonge”
20, 170n13 (Bazin), 147–66, 148–50f,
phenomenological, 21 186n29, 186n31, 186n35, 187n38,
spatial, 21 187–88n43,  188n55
styles, 176n40 Romanesque, 5–6, 34, 147–66, 148–50f,
temporal, 21 185n18, 185n23
reality transfer, 16–19 Saint Sulpice, 127–29
218 Subject Index
science, 3–4, 7, 55–97 supernatural,  101–4

art and, 31–32 effects, dislike for, 102–3
Bergson, Einstein, and Heisenberg, 64–67 survival of the fittest, 55–56
Darwin and Bergson, 55–61, 56f symbiosis, 32
evocative affinities, 61–64
Faraday, 93–97, 94f Talmont, 163, 165f
geometry and snowflake, 67–69 teatro di varietà,  124–25
mathematics,  77–81 technological determinism, 59
mathematics, policier and, 69–77 television criticism, 1
neorealism and calculus, 81–93 Témoignage Chrétien, 108
screen, 24–25, 31. See also specific topics Temple, Shirley, 128
centrifugal, 24, 37, 41, 43, 44 texts, 3
death image, black, 43–44 time, 98
frame and, 34–39 as cinema’s fundamental
sculpture, 49 preoccupation, 14
Self and Other, 9–10, 60, 66, in creativity, 9
101–2,  142–43 in human existence, 9
self-consciousness,  63–64 Otherness as flow of, 140
self-expression, art in, 3–4 passage, as illusory motion, 6
self-healing capacity,  55–56 real vs. filmic, 11
self-projection,  8 standstill, photographic image,
shot-reverse-shot editing,  13 17–19,  18f
snowflake, geometry and, 68–69 Turin Shroud, 7, 16
social document, film as, 19–20
Soviet montage, 11, 57–58 universalism, 187n37
space, real vs. filmic, 11 universe,  36–37
space-time continuum, 11
still life objects, 39–49 virginité réaliste, 107
stillness, photograph, 17–19, 18f Vitruvian man, 22, 23f
storytelling, manipulation, 10
stream of consciousness, 60–61 Walt Disney animations, 10
subject, object and, 13, 168–69n27 window, 24
subjectivity in space, 14 writings, 1, 2
subject–object split, 16
summation (sommation),  93–94 Zeno’s paradox, 178n66

Angela Dalle Vacche Andre Bazin Film Theory

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Angela Dalle Vacche Andre Bazin Film Theory

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

André Bazin’s Film Theory

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

On December 16, 2018, Hervé Joubert-​Laurencin presented his edition of

Innumerable colleagues and friends offered their insights and support to

probing questions and calming influence, and to all my colleagues in the

Figure 1.1 André Bazin with cat. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. This

To speak of Bazin’s film “theory” means that this thinker developed an

The Structure of the Book

Art is relevant to perception, self-​expression, and the imagination, while sci-

objectification of human behavior onto a self-​conscious and altruistic moral

takes on positive and negative connotations. On one hand, it refers to the

In film studies, recent books have addressed the relationship between

symbiotic relationships; it describes dialogical exchange, but it does so out-

Here Bazin celebrates photography’s equalizing approach. Whether they are

the photographic camera’s nonanthropocentric eye, objectification, and

Bazin’s enthusiasm for cinema’s anti-​anthropocentric potential has been

figure as he is performing this action. Bazin speaks of this moment as “ampu-

anthropomorphic; they cannot independently look at an object or hear a

Bazin uses words such as empreinte digitale (fingerprint), and ressemblance

Figure 2.1 Henri Cartier-​Bresson, Paris. Place de l’Europe. Gare Saint Lazare.

In opposition to Leonardo’s anthropocentric humanism, the twentieth-​

the concave lens sustains the highly individualistic, anthropocentric, and

Like a cultural anthropologist, Bazin pushes the arts of literature, theater,

Figure 2.2 Vitruvian Man. Leonardo Da Vinci, Artist, and Ludwig Heinrich

In contrast to this German aesthetician, however, the French film theo-

use of scale. In contrast to cinema’s fluctuating boundaries, traditional the-

Figure 2.3 Jean Painlevé, L’hippocampe femelle (Female Seahorse), 1931. ©

In the admirable final episode of the partisans surrounded in the

The Postwar Art Documentary

Since the development of cinema has a destabilizing impact on the aestheti-

Painting as Object, Cinema as Event

Although he is primarily trained in the sciences from 1934 to 1937, once

measurement, recording, and experiment. Its importance lies in its heuristic

painting, cinema’s challenge is to bypass painting’s “objecthood,” the fact that

processes—​an anthropology of behavior—​or into an unexpected display of

of Rubens’s energetic art through a graphic solution is not good enough.

there is always a broader universe with metonymic as well as metaphorical

Bazin appropriates Jean Cocteau’s comparison of the screen to a rectan-

the circus. Eventually, these short acts, these attractions characterized by a

The Objects of Still Life and the

Rather than lamenting the destruction of painting’s pictorial space, Bazin

Although Resnais’s camera films drawings and paintings, the artificial

and work into a mental landscape without using any autobiographical

This effect of pseudo-​contingency, of course, speaks to the tension between

Paradoxically, cinema’s external recording of the surfaces painted by Van

Despite Bazin’s critical generosity toward Minnelli, the fundamental and

Vincente Minnelli is so anxious to achieve Art with a capital “A” that he

animated drawings. Instead of symbiosis between frame and screen, here we

From Painting to Biology

Apart from documentaries on painting, Bazin does give thought to other

Resnais’s art documentary remains a minor masterpiece that cannot change

to Bernanos is neither a faithful translation nor a duplicate based on

of Picasso’s creative process, whose deepest inspiration remains a mystery.

and small quantity of celluloid. Thanks to this arrangement, Clouzot steps

Darwin’s secular approach combined with Bergson’s self-​healing creativity

Figure 3.1 École Normale d’Instituteurs de La Rochelle. Courtesy Angela Dalle

persuasive bent of Soviet montage and analytical Hollywood editing, Renoir

Although Bazin associates classical Hollywood cinema with Platonic

Otherness. Under the magnifying lens of the microscope—​one of cinema’s

André Bazin’s Film Theory

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

On December 16, 2018, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin presented his edition of

Art is relevant to perception, self-expression, and the imagination, while sci-

objectification of human behavior onto a self-conscious and altruistic moral

Bazin’s enthusiasm for cinema’s anti-anthropocentric potential has been

Figure 2.1 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. Place de l’Europe. Gare Saint Lazare.

In opposition to Leonardo’s anthropocentric humanism, the twentieth-

processes—an anthropology of behavior—or into an unexpected display of

This effect of pseudo-contingency, of course, speaks to the tension between

Darwin’s secular approach combined with Bergson’s self-healing creativity

Otherness. Under the magnifying lens of the microscope—one of cinema’s

consciousness. Our own self-consciousness and capacity for moral judg-

is subject to precise mathematical measurements because the space-time

In contrast to Cayatte’s geometrical theorems, Bazin’s anti-anthropocentrism

Based on a crime story, She Who Is No More, by Pierre Boileau (1906–

minus sign—a cognitive impairment, if not a metaphorical blindness—

constitutionally doomed to be very short-lived; it carries the seeds of its own

in forms, in the structure of his mise-en-scène. [ . . . ] By contrast, De Sica

factual world of isolation: a half-naked child cries in the twilight. We guess

of different levels of experience and self-consciousness sets into relief how

Louis), and the magician-filmmaker, Georges Méliès. Trained as engineers

By immanence, Bazin means that the possibility of miracles—that is, of ex-

In those days, the expression la main-tendue (the outstretched hand, or reach-

deftly employing distinctive gestures that recall the reactionary Christian-