Revisiting André Bazin Edited by Douglas Smith (review)

This excellent edited collection adds to a range of scholarly writing on André Bazin (1918–1958) that has appeared over the past fifteen years and represents an important critical return to this film theorist’s work. Swept aside on political grounds immediately after his death and dismissed in the wake of apparently more sophisticated theoretical turns from the 1960s onwards, Bazin has recently enjoyed renewed attention. Douglas Smith provides a helpful editorial introduction to this particular revisiting of Bazin, outlining the various tensions that have informed his legacy with regard to critical and theoretical discourse. Several of the ensuing articles centre on questions of realism, modernism, and modernity. The first two, by Daniel Morgan and Paula Quigley respectively, both question in different ways the opposition between realism and modernism in relation to Bazin’s work, suggesting that his writings reveal a greater connection to modernism than is often assumed. Smith’s contribution later in the volume is a careful reading of Bazin’s response to Henry Koster’s The Robe (1953), which further interrogates the complexity of Bazin’s realism, thereby countering the charges of naivety that were rife during the period when Bazin was sidelined. T. Jefferson Kline’s characteristically meticulous essay probes Bazin’s writings alongside those of Jean Epstein; in so doing he offers a different take on his subject — Bazin as conservative theorist — and highlights the paradox that it was Bazin’s work that spearheaded the presentation of cinema to post-war France rather than the work of Epstein, whose views were more in tune with the modernity of cinema. Other articles attend to well-known writings as well as addressing areas that have received less scrutiny to date. Andy Stafford reconsiders one of Bazin’s most famous arguments concerning the ontology of the photographic image (1945), in order to ask what this might still offer vis-à-vis work on the photographic image in the twenty-first century. Laurent Marie’s fascinating article re-examines the rift between Bazin and Georges Sadoul, another leading French film writer and critic of the post-war period. While the two famously fell out after the publication in Esprit of Bazin’s article ‘Le Cinéma soviétique et le mythe de Staline’ (1950), Marie looks at their critical work in a broader context, and a more complicated relationship between the two writers emerges as a result. Geneviève Sellier’s contribution throws the spotlight on a neglected area of Bazin’s output — his writings for the daily newspaper Le Parisien libéré (1944–58). And the concluding piece, a real highlight of the volume, is Charles Barr’s incisive reading of Bazin’s influence on the anglophone world; using evidence mostly from British publications, Barr shows that this occurred far earlier than is usually noted, thus necessitating a re-evaluation of the lines of influence that constitute film history across different cultures and languages. All of the articles in this collection are models of Bazin scholarship, opening up his work to further questions and sustaining interest in this abidingly important French film critic and theorist.