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Documentary is at the core of André Bazin’s powerful views of cinema. This collection, curated by renowned film scholar Dudley Andrew, brings to English-language readers sixty-two articles in which Bazin interrogated films about geography, history, animals, painting, and, especially, distant lands and peoples. Both an advocate and critic of popular science and exotic travelogues, Bazin applauded the creativity of impure forms like docu-fiction and the genre he baptized the “essay film.” Engaging minor short subjects, as well as classic works by Robert Flaherty, Jean Rouch, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker, Bazin’s incisive prose is at once intricately beautiful and playfully entertaining—and his brilliant reflections on both the morality and the aesthetics of documentary remain compelling and urgent today, when spectacles sold as reality flood our screens.
André Bazin (1918–1958), cofounder of the renowned Cahiers du cinéma, was a supremely influential French film critic and theorist.
Dudley Andrew is author of many books, including What Cinema Is! Bazin's Quest and Its Charge, and has edited several collections of writings by and about Bazin. Named a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, he is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and of Film at Yale University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Deborah Glassman has translated numerous scholarly works, including Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives and History of Structuralism, both by François Dosse. Formerly the director of the CIEE-UC film program in Paris, she has worked for decades in France, Tunisia, and other Francophone countries.
Nataša Ďurovičová is a film scholar and translator who works on the history of language transfers in cinema. She recently retired from her position as house editor of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where she also taught the program's translation workshop.
"No one in the Anglophone world has illuminated the range and nuance of André Bazin’s theoretical insights like Dudley Andrew. In this elegantly curated volume of Bazin’s writings on nonfiction film, many of them previously unknown and untranslated, Andrew shows Bazin to be the unacknowledged godfather of contemporary documentary studies."—Michael Renov, Haskell Wexler Endowed Chair in Documentary and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California