We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
apartment, this is no mere “ventilation” of the script. Cocteau exploits camera movements through the cramped rooms in order to retain the sense of suffocation that pervades the play.
Bazin’s challenge, then, involves not only widening the canon and proposing new, long-range causes of stylistic change. He also rejects the aesthetic preferences of the Standard Version, elevating an “ontological” realism over the aesthetic stylization prized by the silent-era aficionados. Still, he does not challenge other aspects of the Standard account. Many of his protagonists—Murnau, Flaherty, Stroheim, Dreyer—were already heroes of the Basic Story. The revival of silent classics in ciné clubs and in Langlois’s Cinémathéque Frangaise made the canon familiar. And, thanks to the publicity surrounding Kane, it did not take the panegyrics of la nouvelle critique to convince intellectuals that Toland and Welles were in the forefront of American cinema.
There are also intriguing congruences between Bazin’s account and that offered by Bardéche and Brasillach. The latter posited an international “classicism” at the end of the 1930s and traced the stylistic stability of American sound cinema to the emergence of genres and cycles. Both premises became indispensable points of departure for Bazin’s arguments about depth of field. In addition, the 1943 edition of Bardéche and Brasillach’s Histoire highlighted Ford and Wyler as the outstanding American directors, particularly emphasizing Stagecoach (1939), Dead End (1937), The Letter (1940), and The Little Foxes. Even though Bardéche and Brasillach did not discuss the films’ stylistic qualities, Bazin’s generation was primed to see these works as salient.
Bazin’s basic assumption that stylization contrasts with realism can be found in earlier literature too. Most proximately, in the epilogue to their Histoire Bardéche and Brasillach posit two opposing tendencies traversing the
>
history of the medium: “to escape as far as possible from reality” and “to accentuate the most realistic properties of the photographic image.”72 This formulation became a cliché, embalmed in the textbook split between Méliés and Lumiére, formalism and realism. Bazin subtly revises this schema, but it was put conspicuously on the horizon by the most notable French history of cinema.
More broadly, Bazin’s position converges with some of the Standard Version’s aesthetic principles. Like Arnheim and others, he assumes that film technology is evolving toward greater reproductive fidelity. For him as for his predecessors, cinema has an essence, and a properly artistic use of the medium should exhibit it. And all agree that some filmmakers understand cinema’s essence and assist the medium in developing toward its proper aesthetic goal.
These shared assumptions open Bazin up to the same sorts of criticisms that Standard Version teleologies face. Filmmakers working on very different pro
ANDRE BAZIN AND THE DIALECTICAL PROGRAM
73