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“The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.”
― André Bazin
tags: cinema
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“it was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1
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“The preoccupation of Rossellini when dealing with the face of the child in Allemania Anno Zero is the exact opposite of that of Kuleshov with the close-up of Mozhukhin. Rossellini is concerned to preserve its mystery.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1
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“Undoubtedly the novel has means of its own—language not the image is its material, its intimate effect on the isolated reader is not the same as that of a film on the crowd in a darkened cinema—but precisely for these reasons the differences in aesthetic structure make the search for equivalents an even more delicate matter, and thus they require all the more power of invention and imagination from the film-maker who is truly attempting a resemblance. One”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1
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“Reality is not art, but a realist art is one that can create an integral aesthetic of reality.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume I
tags: art, cinema, realism, reality
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“When the essence of a scene demands the simultaneous presence of two or more factors in the action, montage is ruled out.” It can reclaim its right to be used, however, whenever the import of the action no longer depends on physical contiguity even though this may be implied. For example, it was all right for Lamorisse to show, as he did, the head of the horse in close-up, turning obediently in the boy’s direction, but he should have shown the two of them in the same frame in the preceding shot.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1
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“for photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1
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“All films are born free and equal.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume I
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“The role of cinema here is not that of a servant nor is it to betray the painting. Rather it is to provide it with a new form of existence. The film of a painting is an aesthetic symbiosis of screen and painting, as is the lichen of the algae and mushroom.
To be annoyed by this is as ridiculous as to condemn the opera on behalf of theater and music.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume I
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“It was redeemed from sin by Niepce and Lumière. In achieving the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1
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“In point of fact, now that sound has given proof that it came not to destroy but to fulfill the Old Testament of the cinema, we may most properly ask if the technical revolution created by the sound track was in any sense an aesthetic revolution.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1
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“The image - its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism - has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last, the equal of the novelist”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume I
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“The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1
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“Italian cinema is assuredly the only one to salvage, from within the very period it depicts a revolutionary humanism.”
― André Bazin, André Bazin and Italian Neorealism
tags: amazing
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“His chronic physical ill health was paralleled by his constantly surprising moral strength. He would borrow money aloud but lend it with a whisper. In his presence everything became simple, clear, and aboveboard.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2
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“To explain De Sica, we must go back to the source of his art, namely to his tenderness, his love. The quality shared in common by Miracolo a Milano and Ladri di Biciclette, in spite of differences more apparent than real, is De Sica’s inexhaustible affection for his characters.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2
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“It is not the absence of professional actors that is, historically, the hallmark of social realism nor of the Italian film. Rather, it is specifically the rejection of the star concept and the casual mixing of professionals and of those who just act occasionally. It is important to avoid casting the professional in the role for which he is known. The public should not be burdened with any preconceptions.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2
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“Is not neorealism primarily a kind of humanism and only secondarily a style of film-making?”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1
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“The screen uses violence in such a customary fashion that it seems somehow like a devalued currency, which is at one and the same time provoking and conventional.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1
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“In a world already once again obsessed by terror and hate, in which reality is scarely any longer favored for its own sake but rather is rejected or excluded as a political symbol, the Italian cinema is certainly the only one which preserves, in the midst of the period it depicts, a revolutionary humanism.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2
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“Orson Welles started a revolution by systematically employing a depth of focus that had so far not been used. Whereas the camera lens, classically, had focused successively on different parts of the scene, the camera of Orson Welles takes in with equal sharpness the whole field of vision contained simultaneously within the dramatic field. It is no longer the editing that selects what we see, thus giving it an a priori significance, it is the mind of the spectator which is forced to discern, as in a sort of parallelepiped of reality with the screen as its cross-section, the dramatic spectrum proper to the scene. It”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2
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“He loved the cinema, but still more he loved life, people, animals, the sciences, the arts;”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2
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“Potemkin turned the cinema world upside down not just because of its political message, not even because it replaced the studio plaster sets with real settings and the star with an anoynmous crowd, but because Eistenstein was the greatest montage theoretician of his day, because he worked with Tissé, the finest camerman of his day, and because Russia was the focal point of cinematographic thought—in short, because the “realist” films Russia turned out secreted more aesthetic know-how than all the sets and performances and lighting and artistic interpretation of the artiest works of German expressionism. It is the same today with the Italian cinema. There is nothing aesthetically retrogressive about its neorealism, on the contrary, there is progress in expression, a triumphant evolution of the language of cinema, an extension of its stylistics. Let us first take a good look at the cinema to see where it stands today. Since the expressionist heresy came to an end, particularly after the arrival of sound, one may take it that the general trend of cinema has been toward realism.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2
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“Whether the world be good or evil I cannot say, but I am certain that it is men like Bazin who make it a better place. For, in believing life to be good and behaving accordingly, André had a beneficial effect on all who came in contact with him, and one could count on the fingers of one hand those who behaved badly toward him.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2
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“Although we all knew him for a good and honest man, his goodness was nevertheless an endless surprise, so abundantly was it manifest. To talk with him was what bathing in the Ganges must be for a Hindu. Such was his generosity of spirit that I sometimes found myself deliberately running down a common acquaintance just for the pleasure of hearing André defend him.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2
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“depth of focus brings the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality. Therefore it is correct to say that, independently of the contents of the image, its structure is more realistic; (2) That it implies, consequently, both a more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution on his part to the action in progress.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1
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“But realism in art can only be achieved in one way—through artifice.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2
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“the literary critic is guilty of imprudently prejudging the true nature of cinema, based on a very superficial definition of what is here meant by reality. Because its basic material is photography it does not follow that the seventh art is of its nature dedicated to the dialectic of appearances and the psychology of behavior. While”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1
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“It is clear to what an extent this neorealism differs from the formal concept which consists of decking out a formal story with touches of reality. As for the technique, properly so called, Ladri di Biciclette, like a lot of other films, was shot in the street with nonprofessional actors but its true merit lies elsewhere: in not betraying the essence of things, in allowing them first of all to exist for their own sakes, freely; it is in loving them in their singular individuality.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2
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“and de Sica are less spectacular but they are no less determined to do away with montage and to transfer to the screen the continuum of reality.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1
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