André Bazin

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André Bazin

André Bazin (born April 18, 1918 in Angers , Maine-et-Loire department ; † November 11, 1958 in Nogent-sur-Marne , Val-de-Marne department ) is considered the most important French film critic after the Second World War and spiritual father of the Nouvelle Vague .

Life

After studying to be a teacher, Bazin worked as a film critic and in the French film club movement from 1943 .

Bazin was very sickly all his life and suffered from tuberculosis , which repeatedly forced him to take it easy. He eventually died of leukemia in 1958 .

reception

With his texts, Bazin established film criticism in France as an intellectually high-quality profession. In 1951, together with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, he founded the magazine Les Cahiers du cinéma , in which François Truffaut , Jean-Luc Godard , Jacques Rivette , Luc Moullet , Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol published, among others .

His most important texts were published in the four anthologies Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? published. In addition, numerous other text collections by Bazin, et al. a. about Charlie Chaplin. Bazin is also the author of monographs on Orson Welles and Jean Renoir . The latter remained a fragment and was supplemented by various Cahiers critics under the direction of Truffaut and published after his death.

Bazin laid the foundation for the later ethical and semiotic theory.

Bazin’s major work, What is film? , indicates that for Bazin, questions are more important than answers. His film theory is not a coherent work, but a collection of essays in which he is constantly reevaluating and critically revising his theory. As a former student of phenomenology, Bazin argues coming from realism, whereby his focus should be better called "functionalism" and not realism. Because films are important not because of what they are, but because of what they do. For him, film is not synonymous with reality, as Siegfried Kracauer saw it.

In other words, psychology becomes a decisive factor alongside, if not above, aesthetics. Because: If the development of film art is so closely related to psychology, then this also applies to the effect of a film.

This tendency reached its climax in Italian neo-realism , which Bazin was close to: Technology receded in favor of an ethical and political - ultimately psychological - effect, so that Bazin was able to ask: “Isn't neo-realism primarily a humanism and only then a directing style? "

For the development of film theory this means the following: The formalists under Vsevolod Pudowkin , Sergei Eisenstein and Béla Balázs saw montage as the heart of realistic filmmaking; Bazin, on the other hand, focuses on the mise-en-scène as essential. For him, mise-en-scène primarily contains depth of field and plan sequences, and therefore technical possibilities to allow the viewer to participate more intensively than would be possible in reality. The viewer, because closer to the action, is forced to recreate his picture of the world from his attention - that is, to interpret it. While the formalists still assumed in their theory that a sequence created in the montage was unambiguous, Bazin gives the viewer back the feeling for the ambiguity of reality through the possibility of interpretation.

Bazin introduces the subjective view into film theory as essential for the viewing and evaluation of films; From an aesthetic point of view, it is always a question of identification.

Works (selection)

  • (with Jean Cocteau), Orson Welles , Paris 1950 - Paperback edition: Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma (Petite Bibliotheque), 2003
  • Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? - Selection of his writings on cinema made by Bazin himself in four volumes :
  1. Ontologie et Langage . Paris 1958.
  2. Le cinéma et les autres arts . Paris 1959.
  3. Cinéma et sociologie . Paris 1961.
  4. Une esthétique de la verité. Le neo-realisme . Paris 1962.

A selection from the four-volume Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? appeared in 1975 under the misleading title Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? Edition définitive . The following German editions are based on this partial edition .

  • André Bazin, What is cinema? : Building blocks for the theory of film , Cologne: Dumont, 1975 - selection from the "Edition définitive"
  • André Bazin, Robert Fischer (Ed.), What is film? , Berlin: Alexander Verlag , 2004 - contains all texts contained in the "Edition définitive".

More texts from Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? (not included in Was ist Film? ) in German:

  • " William Wyler ou le jansenisme de la mise en scène", German "William Wyler or the Jansenist of the staging", in: André Bazin, Filmkritiken als Filmgeschichte , Munich: Hanser, 1978
  • "Le cas Pagnol" German "The Pagnol case" in: André Bazin, Film Critics as Film History , Munich: Hanser, 1978
  • "Le mythe de M. Verdoux", German "The Myth of Monsieur Verdoux" in film review , No. 296 (May 1979) - important essay on Charlie Chaplin's late work

Many of Bazin's texts are not available in German even 50 years after his death.

literature

Web links