André Bazin's film theory : art, science, religion / Angela Dalle Vacche.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dalle Vacche, Angela, 1954- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Bazin, André, 1918-1958--Criticism and interpretation.

Bazin, André.

Bazin, André, 1918-1958.

Motion pictures--Philosophy.

Motion pictures.

Criticism and interpretation.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xv, 218 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2020]

Summary:

Through metaphors and allusions to art, science, and religion, Andre Bazin's writings on the cinema explore a simple yet profound question: what is a human? For the famous French film critic, a human is simultaneously a rational animal and an irrational being. Bazin's idea of the cinema is a mind-machine where the ethical implications have priority over aesthetic issues. And in its ability to function as an art form for the masses, cinema is the only medium that can address an audience at the individual and community levels simultaneously- the audience sees the same film, but each individual relates to the narrative in a different way. In principle, cinema can unsettle our routines in productive ways and expand our sense of belonging to a much larger picture.0By arguing that this dissident Catholic's worldview is anti-anthropocentric, Angela Dalle Vacche concludes that Andre Bazin's idea of the cinema recapitulates the histories of biological evolution and modern technology inside our consciousness. Through the projection of recorded traces of the world onto a brain-like screen, the cinema can open viewers up to self-interrogation and empathy towards Otherness. Bazin was neither a spiritualist nor an animist or a pantheist, yet his film theory0leads also to ideas of a more cosmological persuasion: through editing and camera movement, cinema explores our belonging to a vast universe that extends from the microbes of the microscope to the stars of the telescope. Such ideas of connectedness, coupled with Bazin's well-known emphasis of realism, form the foundation for his film theory's embrace of Italian neorealism. Choosing to avoid a quantitative naturalism based on accumulation of details, Bazin's theory instead promotes the kind of cinema that celebrates perceptual displacement, the objectification of human behavior, and one's own critical self-awareness.

Contents:

1 Introduction: The Soul of Cinema p. 1

Conceptual Key Words p. 7

Cinema's Special Eye p. 9

Lady in the Lake p. 12

Cinema as Mind-Machine p. 13

A Christological Ontology p. 16

Impure Cinema p. 22

Pure Cinema p. 25

The Postwar Art Documentary p. 29

Painting as Object, Cinema as Event p. 30

Frame and Screen p. 34

The Objects of Still Life and the Camera Lens as Object p. 39

From Painting to Biology p. 49

Darwin and Bergson p. 55

Evocative Affinities p. 61

Bergson, Einstein, Heisenberg p. 64

Geometry and the Snowflake p. 67

Mathematics and the Policier p. 69

Miraculous Mathematics p. 77

Neorealism and Calculus p. 81

Michael Faraday p. 93

4 Religion p. 98

Immanence and the Supernatural p. 101

Catholics and Communists p. 104

Taking Risks p. 109

Looking at Oneself from the Outside p. 113

Chariot and Cabiria p. 117

Saint Sulpice and Max Ophuls p. 127

Robert Delannoy's Religious Adaptations p. 129

Bazin's Ontology, Bresson's Stylistics p. 133

5 Epilogue: Wind and Dust p. 142

Anti-Anthropocentric Anthropocosmomorphism p. 143

The Wild Grass of Saintonge p. 147.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN:

9780190067304

0190067306

9780190067298

0190067292

OCLC:

1097462441

Publisher Number:

99984998397