Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 94
90
Popular Culture Review
description, analysis, and deduction-cum-induction. Indeed, Bazin can be regarded
as the aesthetic link between film critics and film theorists. During his relatively
short writing career, his primary concern was not to answer questions but to raise
them, not to establish cinema as an art but to ask, “What is art?” and “What is
cinema?” Most contemporary newspaper reviews answer the insistent question,
“Is this movie worth the money?” Bazin’s criticism, by contrast, poses the additional
question, “If a film is worth seeing, why is it worth seeing as a filmT^
In theoretical response to the latter question, Bazin paradoxically claims
that, of all art forms, films penetrate reality to the fullest, yet become most filmic
or artful in the process of doing so. To him, a special effect is most effectively
fantastic when it is also the most realistic, and movies are most sacred when working
against the medium’s affinity for religious iconography. A film like Fellini’s I
Vitelloni (1953) reveals the most about the souls of its characters as it focuses
exclusively on their appearances, while an intensely realistic movie like Scarface
seems bom from an artful novel or short story that chose instead to become a film.
In practical response to the question, “If a film is worth seeing, why is it
worth seeing as a film T Bazin displayed his ability to depict different directors’
styles, and to position each style against the greater evolving realism of his time.
For example, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible is “a beautiful work” because of its
clarity of style, despite “renouncing fifteen years of realistic cinema.” Bazin’s
appreciation of this picture’s uniqueness thus paradoxically transcends the fact
that it is the antithesis of his cherished, realistic film essence, for, as he himself put
the matter, “we must make a distinction between the value of the style as such and
the quality of its individual execution.”
The following pieces allow the reader to gauge Bazin’s movement between
the role of theoretician, espousing a transcendent reality for film, and the role of
practicing reviewer. As the latter, he seeks to give a foreign, underestimated, or
overly familiar movie a fresh public perception, while arguing for the application
of a different set of values to the popular cinema—as in his consideration of Marilyn
Monroe’s screen image and metaphorical dimension in the review below of Niagara.
His entwined roles as an analyst, defender, challenger, and expander of common
notions of film remain compelling critical tasks or missions. We miss Bazin’s
capacity to discuss individual films, filmmakers, techniques, and methods. We have
lost his interest in comparing film with other arts, sciences, and philosophies (from
algebra to magnetic fields, geology to theology). We lack his sensitivity and openness
to different kinds of movies. Most of all, we might revive his ability to stimulate
critical thinking about every aspect of cinema, whether in agreement with or
refutation of his own arguments.
More than once, Andre Bazin has been called the Aristotle of cinema for
being the first to try to formulate principles in all areas of this (at the time) unexplored