English practice 21

André Bazin's Nouvelle Vague

André Bazin died on November 11, 1958 after over 15 years of pioneering work in film criticism. His magazine, Cahiers du Cinéma (Cinema Notebooks), had been issued regularly since its founding in 1951, and it had become the premier journal in French for the serious discussion of films. Bazin, working and living in Paris, had become one of the cities¹ premier intellectuals. Despite all of the achievements of Bazin's lifetime, the true fruit of his labor did not begin to become truly apparent until the year following Bazin's death. It was in 1959 in Paris² that the nouvelle vague (new wave) in French cinema exploded³ onto the international film scene.

Bazin published his first piece of film criticism in 1943 and pioneered a new way of writing about film, he⁴ championed the idea that cinema was the "seventh art," every bit as deserving as the more respected arts of: architecture,⁵ poetry, dance, music, painting, and sculpture. Many before Bazin's time thought of the cinema as a simple extension of another art form: theatre. In fact, in many early writings about film, it is not uncommon to hear the authors speak of film. Bazin, though, sought to show that the cinema had every bit as much creative vitality and craftsmanship as any of the other six arts. From this fundamental belief came what was possibly Bazin's greatest contribution to film criticism: auteur theory.

Auteur is the French word for author, and the suggestion contained in both the word and Bazin's theory is that every film is "authored" by a single mind just as a novel or poem is the work of a single author. For Bazin, and the increasingly influential group of critics working with him at the Cahiers du Cinéma, the author of any film is its director, and to discern a director's true style, perspective, or his sense of voice,⁸ the critic has merely to watch a group of the director's films with an eye to similarities between them. Accordingly, Bazin and the Cahiers group were truly the first to discuss films and the practice of cinema in general as the masterwork of directors, rather than screenwriters or actors. With auteur theory, nonetheless,⁹ Bazin created a new way of looking at films, and his early works on¹⁰ such influential directors as Orson Welles, Vittorio de Sica, and Jean Renoir—remain, to this day, pioneering works of film criticism that are studied and emulated by film critics today.

Bazin's greatest achievement was the strong impression he left on a young generation of French filmmakers and critics who came on to the international scene all over the world¹² just a year after Bazin's death. In 1959, two films changed the landscape of international filmmaking:¹³ Fran?ois Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. In each film, the director has taken Bazin's emphasis on auteur filmmaking to heart, and in every frame, the viewer is reminded of the director's presence by the overwhelming stylistic personality of shots and scenes. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, independent and avant-garde filmmakers in places as disparate as France, the United States, Italy, and Japan were beginning to exercise the new cinematic freedom that Bazin had charted for them. At that time,¹⁴ whenever a national film industry completely reinvents itself, it is carried along by a group of auteur directors who refer to their films as part of a new wave. Now there are legions of filmmakers, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami in Iran or Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro in Mexico, for example, whose inspiration can in some way be traced back to Bazin and his humble work as editor of the Cahiers du Cinéma in France way back in the 1950s.