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and that path toward personal expression signposted by Astruc’s idea of the caméra-stylo.
THE EVOLUTION OF FILM LANGUAGE
Only a few months after the publication of Bardéche and Brasillach’s Occupation Histoire du cinéma, André Bazin, writing in a Parisian student magazine, commented upon the waning of cinephilia among young people. He reminded his readers that the coming of sound had alienated intellectuals, and he traced their disenchantment to the fact that they no longer had any influence over an increasingly commercial industry.48 The twenty-five-year-old Bazin did not mention Bardéche and Brasillach, but his indictment pointedly recalls their generation’s despair at the rise of the talkies. His charge that intellectuals of the previous decade had displayed an “absence of all effort at systematic thought in regard to the cinema” might well have been addressed to them.‘9
In 1943 Bazin accepted the commonplace that sound cinema had halted innovation. “The curve of |[cinema’s] stylistic evolution already shows a downward path.”5° After the war, however, the new films from America, Italy, and some French directors suggested that the medium had been reborn. From 1946 until his death in late 1958, Bazin challenged the program of the Standard Version. Naturally he drew upon the ideas circulating among his comrades of la nouvelle critique. But his manner of synthesis and the conclusions he drew were more original, more systematic, and more influential than anything offered by his contemporaries. His framework, which I shall call the Dialectical Version of the Basic Story, offered an optimistic, wide-ranging account of cinema’s stylistic path.
Bazin’s revision starts from the idea that the Basic Story includes not one trend but two. One tendency follows the scenario laid down by the Standard Version: some filmmakers did seek to free cinema from photographic reproduction. The national schools of the 1920s put their faith in manipulations of the image through camera tricks or abstract montage.*! But Bazin finds a second tendency running alongside the first, stretching back to the “primitive” cinema and emerging in the work of Robert Flaherty, F. W. Murnau, and others. These filmmakers put their faith in the camera’s ability to record and reveal physical reality. The result was a realism of time and space that was no less artistic than the stylization yielded by Expressionism and montage.
The coming of sound, then, halted only one tendency, the cinema of excessive artifice. Bazin claims that sound promoted a moderate realism of staging and cutting, continuing the tradition of analytical editing founded by Griffith. The “invisible découpage” seen in all countries’ films of the mid-1930s
ANDRE BAZIN AND THE DIALECTICAL PROGRAM
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