Film and Video Editing Theory

6 Realism and André Bazin

André Bazin, French film critic, co-founder of Cahiers du cinéma in 1951, and “the sound film’s master-thinker and the first to register the effervescence of the cinematic modernism that began to come to prominence during his professional life,” wrote roughly 2,600 articles in the 15 years (1943–1958) he wrote exclusively about cinema. That only 52 of these articles – 26 in English translation – form the basis of what most people know of his ideas has not diminished his stature in the field of film theory, even as scholars have recently tried to expand our understanding of what forms the basis of his theorizing.¹

With only a small portion of his writing widely available, Bazin is nevertheless considered one of the most ...