A priest and his flock
The New Wave at 50: A priest and his flock
When cinephiles think of the critic and co-founder of Cahiers du cinéma André Bazin, a number of given concepts arise: according to his disciple François Truffaut, he “wrote about film better than anybody else in Europe”; he was perhaps the first to form a coherent theory of cinema: he championed the auteur theory, argued for the moral and spiritual superiority of deep-focus realism over the associative poetics of Soviet montage, and identified the nuanced use of genre archetypes as the key to the personal artistry of directors working for hire in the Hollywood system. He is also, of course, the acknowledged ‘father’ of the nouvelle vague, the generous figure who encouraged Truffaut, Goddard, Rohmer, Rivette and Chabrol to think cinema through anew in his magazine and subsequently in practice. (..)
The contrast between Bazin’s theories and nouvelle vague practice is revealing. Since Bazin was an admired father figure, the sons were always likely to rebel – Godard, for instance, wrote a riposte to Bazin’s deep-focus ideas entitled Montage, My Fine Care in 1956 and later used bursts of machine-gunfire to break up a tracking shot in Vivre sa vie. It’s worth remembering, too, that the received idea that the big five New Wave directors were critics first and film-makers later is false: they were already making short films in 1950 when Cahiers was first published; they therefore did not need Bazin to persuade them to switch one for the other.
What they did need Bazin for was the most thorough cinematic thinking that then existed, and a grounding in dialectic argument from a writer who apparently lived and breathed it. (..)
Nick James
*Full text can be found: Sight & Sound, 5′09, 19.-21. p.
Prepared by: Zane Krumina
Seeing the Light