Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife

ISBN-13: 9780199733897 / Angielski / Miękka / 2011 / 384 str.

Dudley Andrew

Opis

With the full range of his voluminous writings finally viewable, Andre Bazin seems more deserving than ever to be considered the most influential of all writers on film. His brief career, 1943-58, helped bring about the leap from classical cinema to the modern art of Renoir, Welles, and neorealism. Founder of Cahiers du Cinema, he encouraged the future New Wave directors to confront his telltale question, What is Cinema? This collection considers another vital question, Who is Bazin? In it, thirty three renowned film scholars--including de Baecque, Elsaesser, Gunning, and MacCabe--tackle Bazin's meaning for the 2st century. They have found in his writings unmistakable traces of Flaubert, Bergson, Breton, and Benjamin and they have pursued this vein to the gold mine of Deleuze and Derrida. They have probed and assessed his ideas on film history, style, and technique, measuring him against today's media regime, while measuring that regime against him. They have located the precious ore of his thought couched within striations of French postwar politics and culture, and they have revealed the unexpected effects of that thought on filmmakers and film culture on four continents. Open Bazin; you will find a treasure.

Recenzje

Elegantly moving across disciplines, history, theory and geography, the essays in Opening Bazin construct an invaluable and vivid picture of Bazin as film theorist, film critic and engaged intellectual. It seems throughout to amount to more than the study of one man. However its richness and diversity is derived from those qualities in Bazin himself, so just as the book transcends its subject, he himself returns not only as its generative figure but also as an emblem of the peculiar and elusive nature of the cinema itself.

O autorze

Dudley Andrew: an Officier de l'ordre des arts et des lettres (French Ministry of Culture and Communication) and inductee into the America Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published The Major Film Theories, Concepts of Film Theory, and Andre Bazin, all with OUP as well as books on major filmmakers and 30s French culture (with Princeton, Harvard, and the BFI). Hervé Joubert-Laurencin: a leading authority in France on Bazin as well as a specialist on the work of Pasolini. Publications include Pasolini: Portrait du poete en cineaste (1995 Diffusion Seuil), and La lettre volante: Quatre essais sur le cinema d'animation (1997 Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle)