What is Cinema?

WHAT IS CINEMA? Annette Michelson There things are. . . Why manipulate them? -Roberto Rossellini Cinema is a manipulationof reality through image andsound -Alain Resnais all the books on film issued these past two years, in desperate anarchy, from the major publishing houses, the selection ofessays assembled by Mr. Hugh Gray from the critical writings of Andr6 Bazin is, as might have been expected, incomparably the best. It is, in fact, the only book with any claim at all to intellectual distinction, as it alone reflects, however incompletely, a writer's acquaintance and involvement with the central aesthetic issues and intellectual forces of his time. To say this is merely to define once more, of course, the situation of film criticism as it is practiced in this country. One was, nevertheless, hardly prepared for the silence which has greeted this book's appearance, a silence broken mainly until now by an observation on the part of a reviewer for the Sunday Times as to its "brain-crushing difficulty."' It is the sort of observation which tells us somewhat more ofthe reviewer than of the book, and yet the remark does have a certain grim and more general significance. The constraints under which film has evolved in our particular culture have acted so to alienate our intellectuals that the analytic and speculative vigor we encourage in other areas of critical discourse is, for the most part, dismissed, in writing on film, as arrogance or pretension-when not, as in the present case, openly avowed as a threat. Neither the sophistication which has characterized the best literary criticism of our recent past nor the refinement of our current art criticism have begun to inform film criticism. Like art history in the earlier part of this century, it is, for the present, a foreign-language literature. It is, in fact, predominantly French, for Bazin, though exceptionally enterprising and gifted, was by no means unique in his involvement with advanced thinking in the Paris of his youth. 20 0 It was, as well, the Paris of the Liberation and the decade and a half which followed. Bazin was 40 when he died in 1959. Reading these essays, one should remember that they represent a critical enterprise arrested before the extraordinary cinematic renewal of the last ten years through the work of a generation intellectually and, in many instances, personally indebted to Bazin, of men whose thinking partly, though by no means entirely, reflected and inflected the development of the Cahiers Au Cinemawhich Bazin had helped to found. Though hardly "the Aristotle of Cinema," as Mr. Gray sees him, this young Normaliendeveloped, with the younger talents around him, a relationship undoubtedly Socratic. His generosity is apparent in every line, his tone is relentlessly sweet and scrupulously reasonable. The intellectual context of his work was a compound of Sartrean categories and the earlier, gestaltist-influenced phenomenological orientation of Merleau-Ponty, grafted upon a deep-rooted Catholicism of the liberal, Gallican kind. He matured, then, in a milieu infinitely richer than that of James Agee, a vastly over-rated writer with whom, in taste and temperament, he does have some affinity. Bazin's work, for all its limitations-and these are largely my present concern-did not, like Agee's, suffer from a constricting intellectual provincialism. The contradictions of his position were more considerable, and more interesting. The syncretic aspect of his thinking reflects, in fact, the intellectual ecumenism, alternately refreshing and exasperating, of the French Catholic Left, as one encounters it in Esprit,the review in which many of his critical pieces were originally published. It suffered-inevitably, in my view-from the strains involved in the accommodation of a religious sensibility to a secular culture, and its peculiar intellectual pathos-the source of its appeal and weakness, alike-originates in a singular dedication to the art form most intimately and inextricably bound to that secularization process. Bazin's career was not only characteristic of a certain period and its intellectual style; it was more or less co-extensive with it. His work spanned the period of Sartre's ascendancy. He did not live to see the major films of Resnais and Godard, unquestionably the two most powerful...