André Bazin's Film Theory: Art, Science, Religion by Angela Dalle Vacche (review)

The first part of the title of Angela Dalle Vacche's recent book, André Bazin's Film Theory: Art, Science, Religion, immediately prompts a question, which is whether Bazin indeed had what could be called a "theory" of film. I, and many others, would say that he did not, at least if he is compared to other "classical" figures such as Hugo Münsterberg, Siegfried Kracauer, or even Béla Balázs, all of whom made detailed theoretical claims that are more or less plausible but worked out methodically and at length. Dalle Vacche's task, then, is a challenging one if she is looking for a unified theory of film in Bazin's critical writings. Anticipating such an objection, though, she insists that "Bazin's thought is systematic and comprehensive" (3) even if he never produced a single, coherent account of his "theory" with any detailed argument or justification in his lifetime. Dalle Vacche argues not only that he had a theory, though, but goes even further, claiming that, in his many critical essays, "Bazin was the first to systematically bring together theory, criticism and history in regard to film" (2).

Whether he was indeed the first to do so is arguable, but by tracing the links in his critical writings, and building them into (or revealing them as) a theory, Dalle Vacche is making explicit what is otherwise largely implicit in Bazin's many essays. The theory that she finds is an expansive one, as she describes it. "For Bazin, the cinema is comparable to a living organism in a state of evolution. It is a medium gifted with an ontological status, or a photographically genetic way of being grounded in both irrational belief and the physical world" (3). She goes even further, arguing that "Bazin's film theory has cosmological implications," that, for Bazin, the cinema plays an "indispensable role in our lives on the earth" (15). As Dalle Vacche says, emphasizing the broad scope of his theory, "Bazin's famous question—What is cinema?—probes what a human is and why cinema is indispensable for humankind" (3). Indeed, she says, "the interrogation of human ethics is this thinker's most urgent topic, to the point that it overrides his commitment to aesthetics" (3). Not limiting it to the realm of art, then, for Bazin, "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" (15).

Presented in such terms, Bazin's theory is about much more than just "film." If we may say that he is a "realist," that his theory is a theory of cinematic realism, this is understood very broadly as more than merely a style of art-making but indeed something "cosmological." While other notable defenders of Bazin as a theorist also commend his expansive vision, some less sympathetic readers of Bazin see this as a central weakness, questioning whether any "theory" is lost in too broad speculation. Noël Carroll, for example, begins his critique by saying that "Bazin was not an academic theoretician."¹ This in itself would not disqualify the argument that Bazin's writings on film constituted some sort of "non-academic" theory of film. However, Carroll goes out of his way to cast doubt on such a possibility. He contends that "Bazin mobilized a battery of dubious philosophical and metaphysical presuppositions" (97), so that to the extent that a theory could be construed from his criticism, it would not in the end hold up.

Clearly, Carroll is skeptical about the prospects of convincingly and satisfyingly extracting a theory of film from Bazin's collected writings, so he focuses only on the few explicitly theoretical assertions that Bazin made rather than attempting to discover a system implicit in his criticism. Notably, however, he does not see such an exercise as futile. Carroll imagines an approach more favourable to Bazin and more ambitious. One could, he suggests...