About the Book
André Bazin’s writings on cinema are among the most influential reflections on the medium ever written. Even so, his critical interests ranged widely and encompassed the “new media” of the 1950s, including television, 3D film, Cinerama, and CinemaScope. Fifty-seven of his reviews and essays addressing these new technologies—their artistic potential, social influence, and relationship to existing art forms—have been translated here for the first time in English with notes and an introduction by leading Bazin authority Dudley Andrew. These essays show Bazin’s astute approach to a range of visual media and the relevance of his critical thought to our own era of new media. An exciting companion to the essential What Is Cinema? volumes, André Bazin’s New Media is excellent for classroom use and vital for anyone interested in the history of media.
About the Author
André Bazin (1918–1958) was the premier film theorist of the first century of cinema. Primarily associated with the journal Cahiers du cinéma, which he cofounded in 1951, he wrote for many other journals as well.
Editor and translator Dudley Andrew is R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale University. His books include The Major Film Theories, Concepts in Film Theory, André Bazin, Film in the Aura of Art, Sansho Dayu, Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film, and Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture.
Table of Contents
Editor’s Note: About This Collection
Introduction: André Bazin Meets the New Media of the 1950s
PART ONE. THE ONTOLOGY AND LANGUAGE OF TELEVISION
1. The Aesthetic Future of Television
2. In Quest of Télégenie
3. Television Is Unbeatable for Live Coverage
4. Was It Live? Preserve Our Illusions
5. The Talking Head: Must the Commissaire Stand on His Head for TV?
6. Television Is Neither Theater nor Cinema
7. At the Venice Festival, TV Shares the Screen
8. Voice-Overs on TV: Let the Animals Talk
9. Looking at Television
PART TWO. TELEVISION AMONG THE ARTS
10. Long Live Radio! Down with the 8th Art!
11. A Seat at the Theater
12. False Improvisation and “Memory Lapses” on TV
13. To Serve Theater, Let Television Adopt Some Modesty
14. Respect the Spirit of Theater First and Foremost!
15. TV and the Disenchantment of Theater
16. Art on Television: A Program That Loses on All Counts
17. Reporting on Eternity: TV Visits the Musée Rodin
PART THREE. TELEVISION AND SOCIETY
18. A Contribution to an Erotology of Television
19. Censors, Learn to Censor
20. You Can Now “Descend into Yourself”
21. Television, Sincerity, Liberty
22. Information or Necrophagy
23. Television as Cultural Medium and The Sociology of Television
24. Do We Really Need Those Serials?
25. A Superb Clown Made Incoherent by TV
26. TV Can Popularize without Boredom or Betrayal
PART FOUR. TELEVISION AND CINEMA
27. Television and the Revival of Cinema
28. Television and Cinema
29. Is Television a Degradation for Filmmakers?
30. Some Films Are Better on the Small Screen Than the Large
31. Should Television Be Allowed to Chop Films to Pieces?
32. From Small Screen to Widescreen
33. Sacha Guitry Is Confident about TV, Just as He Was about Cinema in 1914
34. Jean Gabin Gets TV’s “Sour Lemon” Prize
35. “The Glass Eye” Will Reveal a New Hitchcock
36. Hitchcock on TV
37. Renoir and Rossellini: Two Top Recruits for Television
38. Renoir and Rossellini Debut on TV
39. Cinema and Television: An Interview with Jean Renoir and Roberto Rossellini
40. About Television: A Discussion with Marcel Moussy and André Bazin
PART FIVE. CINERAMA AND 3D
41. New Screen Technologies
42. Cinerama: A Bit Late
43. Cinerama, a Disappointment
44. Cinema in 3D and Color: Amazing!
45. A New Stage in the Process: Math Equations for 3D
46. Will a War in Three Dimensions Take Place?
47. The Return of Metroscopix
48. The House of Wax: Scare Me . . . in Depth!
49. The Real Crime on La Rue Morgue: They Assassinated a Dimension!
50. The 3D Revolution Did Not Take Place
PART SIX. CINEMASCOPE
51. Will CinemaScope Save the Cinema?
52. CinemaScope and Neorealism
53. CinemaScope: The End of Montage
54. The Trial of CinemaScope: It Didn’t Kill the Close-Up
55. Massacre in CinemaScope
56. Will CinemaScope Bring about a Television Style in Cinema?
PART SEVEN. FINALE
57. Is Cinema Mortal?
Appendix: A Selective Reference Guide to 1950s French Television
Index
