Opening Bazin

Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife

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Edited by Dudley Andrew and Herve Joubert-Laurencin

Type

Studies

Subject

Theory

Keywords

theory, André Bazin

Publishing date

2011

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 384 pages
6 ¼ x 9 inches (16 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-0-19-973389-7

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Book Presentation:
• Features contributions from renowned film scholars such as Tom Gunning, Noa Steimatsky, Colin MacCabe, and others
• Provides a wide-ranging assessment of Bazin and his legacy, showcasing his global influence on postwar film criticism
• Discusses an eclectic group of films and filmmakers, including works by Charlie Chaplin, Chris Marker, Francois Truffaut, and Henri Clouzot

Andre Bazin remains one of the most read, most studied, and most engaging figures ever to have written about film. He is indisputably the cinema's most influential philosopher-critic. Always an important presence within cinema theory, Bazin, who died just over fifty years ago, has seen a massive resurgence of interest among critics, scholars, and students of every persuasion. The journal that he founded in 1951, Cahiers du Cinéma, marked the anniversary year of his death by republishing a dozen of his uncollected essays while Film Comment and Film Quarterly in the US published memorial issues; conferences were held worldwide. Last year also saw the opening of an electronic Bazin archive which consists of his entire output of 2600 pieces on a fascinating array of topics.

These events represent an ideal springboard for a major collection about Bazin. The proposed volume will include essays from the best scholars of French cinema in the US and abroad. The contributors represent a pantheon of several generations of the very best film scholars: Gunning, Frodon, Margulies, Conley, MacCabe, Narboni, Vernet, Finally, Fifty years after his death, André Bazin's full range of articles has been catalogued. Armed with this, 33 scholars from four continents have opened Bazin up in this new century, tracing his lineage, debating his aesthetics, locating him in the rich cultural moment of postwar France, and tracking the effect of his thought around the world. This volume reinforces his preeminence as the most gifted and influential of all writers on film.

About the authors:
Edited by Dudley Andrew, R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature, Yale University, and Herve Joubert-Laurencin

Press Reviews:
"This amazing collection, whose contributors are some of the most distinguished contemporary film scholars, rescues Bazin from the ossified stereotypes that have come to define him in film pedagog?" - realism vs. formalism, depth of field vs. editing, humanism vs. Marxism. It sheds light on the complexities and intricacies of the Bazin oeuvre in all its diversity and delineates the ways in which his work illuminates the definitive impact of film as an art in the 20th century.

"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." - Laura Mulvey, Birbeck, University of London

See the publisher website: Oxford University Press