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garnered wide praise; even Bardéche and Brasillach’s 1943 Histoire treated it as one of the finest French films of its decade. On the whole, this painter’s son was considered a wealthy amateur lacking a flair for the cinema. Leenhardt complained that La Marseillaise (1938) succumbed to Renoir’s typical carelessness: “diffusion, lack of focus, disorder (especially in the camera movements).”69 La régle du jeu (1939) aroused strong opposition on its initial release, and Renoir’s absence from France during the Occupation made him a marginal, slightly suspect figure.
After the war, however, his reputation began to rise. Revivals of La grande illusion and of La régle du jeu won praise, and both circulated widely among ciné clubs. The official journal of the clubs ran a special issue on Renoir’s work in 1948, and The River (1951) won a major prize at Venice. By the time Cahiers published a special Renoir number in 1952, he had become the nouvelle critique’s candidate for the best director in history. The critics’ campaign succeeded. A 1959 restoration of La régle du jeu (dedicated to Bazin) swept the world, and since the 1960s it has been considered one of the finest films ever made.
In recasting the canon of the Basic Story, Bazin suggests a solution to the problem that vexed the Standard Version as he knew it: What style is most suitable for the sound cinema? He replies that the mature sound cinema assimilated the “revolution” of the long take, the shot in depth, and fluid camera movement—technical avenues quite different from the “creative use of sound” advocated in the early 1930s. Moreover, particular films revealed a formal interaction among découpage, montage, and the new stylistic tendencies, with the contrasts themselves becoming a source of fruitful aesthetic effects (as in Kane or The Little Foxes). And although stylistic progress had all but ceased, cinema would develop by tackling new subjects and setting itself new formal problems, such as adapting works in other media to the screen.
Bazin’s research program replaces the idea of stylistic progress as accumulated resources with a more dialectical dynamic of inner tensions and partial syntheses. This move is made possible by extending the transnational generalizations already outlined in Bardéche and Brasillach’s period scheme. Bazin’s predecessors had often emphasized national cultures as wellsprings of film art, but he traces cinematic innovation to supranational forces at work across the history of representation. He offers, in fact, two developmental schemes—one largely technological, the other involving the history of visual representation. Both locate cinema outside orthodox histories of modern art.
Bazin’s technological history treats movies as manifesting an age-old “myth of total cinema.” In the nineteenth century, he claims, tinkerers and artisans dreamed of a representation that would be a complete simulacrum of reality, “a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color, and relief.” The history
AGAINST THE SEVENTH ART