Social, Cultural and Industrial Milieu
a) Post-War social conditions
b) cinematic technology: 16mm & TV
c) Cinemathque Francaise
d) Cahiers du Cinema
- committed to questions of form and mise en scene and to the necessity
for a theoretical analysis of the relationship of the artist and the film
product to society
e) Personal Expression
Bazin on the Politiques des Auteurs
a) filmmaker/director as the organizing source of meaning
b) political implications
c) sociological criticism
d) value of Bazin’s critique
Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962”
- personal vision could transcend the hierarchical system in which
they worked
- evaluating films according to the director’s technical competence,
presence of a distinct style, and an interior meaning
Auteurs vs. metteurs en scene
- mise en scene: the staging of the real world for the camera
- true auteurs put forward a coherent world view in their films and
manifest a unique style.
Bazin’s view
- emphasis on the transparency of cinematic language - non-intervention
Formalism vs. Transparency/Reaism
structuralist attack on humanism and personal expression
Significance of Bazin’s Contributions
1. rehabilitating certain products of the popular American cinema
2. reassessment of the merits of the realist–representational aesthetic
Bazin Summary/Review
- rejected the conventional antithesis of silent versus sound cinema
- proposed an alternative dichotomy
- “Directors who believe in the image and those who believe in reality”
Philosophical Premises
- Personalist ideals of spiritual fulfillment and integrated, harmonious
universe (1930s)
Critiques of Bazin’s Theory
a) early critiques (Positif)
b) structuralist critiques - Claim that Bazin denied that film is a
culturally determined language system.
c) more contemporary critiques/assessments - his belief that the cinema
was evolving towards perfection (perfect mimesis)
d) positive assessments - receptiveness to recent trends enabled him
to break out of the strangle hold of dogma
Cinematic Realism and Artifice
- Perfect transparency was, he realized, precluded by the current limitations
of film technology and might indeed never be possible.
- need to enlist artifice to give the illusion of tranparency
- “there is not one but several realisms”