Home > Author > André Bazin
1 " Reality is not art, but a realist art is one that can create an integral aesthetic of reality. "
― André Bazin , What is Cinema?: Volume I
2 " The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires. "
― André Bazin
3 " it was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language. "
4 " The preoccupation of Rossellini when dealing with the face of the child in Allemania Anno Zero is the exact opposite of that of Kuleshov with the close-up of Mozhukhin. Rossellini is concerned to preserve its mystery. "
5 " Undoubtedly the novel has means of its own—language not the image is its material, its intimate effect on the isolated reader is not the same as that of a film on the crowd in a darkened cinema—but precisely for these reasons the differences in aesthetic structure make the search for equivalents an even more delicate matter, and thus they require all the more power of invention and imagination from the film-maker who is truly attempting a resemblance. One "
6 " When the essence of a scene demands the simultaneous presence of two or more factors in the action, montage is ruled out.” It can reclaim its right to be used, however, whenever the import of the action no longer depends on physical contiguity even though this may be implied. For example, it was all right for Lamorisse to show, as he did, the head of the horse in close-up, turning obediently in the boy’s direction, but he should have shown the two of them in the same frame in the preceding shot. "
7 " for photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption. "
8 " All films are born free and equal. "
9 " Italian cinema is assuredly the only one to salvage, from within the very period it depicts a revolutionary humanism. "
― André Bazin , André Bazin and Italian Neorealism
10 " It was redeemed from sin by Niepce and Lumière. In achieving the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness. "
11 " The image - its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism - has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last, the equal of the novelist "
12 " In point of fact, now that sound has given proof that it came not to destroy but to fulfill the Old Testament of the cinema, we may most properly ask if the technical revolution created by the sound track was in any sense an aesthetic revolution. "
13 " The role of cinema here is not that of a servant nor is it to betray the painting. Rather it is to provide it with a new form of existence. The film of a painting is an aesthetic symbiosis of screen and painting, as is the lichen of the algae and mushroom. To be annoyed by this is as ridiculous as to condemn the opera on behalf of theater and music. "
14 " It is by way of its poetry that the realism of De Sica takes on its meaning, for in art, at the source of all realism, there is an aesthetic paradox that must be resolved. The faithful reproduction of reality is not art. We are repeatedly told that it consists in selection and interpretation. That is why up to now the “realist” trends in cinema, as in other arts, consisted simply in introducing a greater measure of reality into the work: but this additional measure of reality was still only an effective way of serving an abstract purpose, whether dramatic, moral, or ideological. "
― André Bazin , What is Cinema?: Volume 2
15 " neorealism runs counter to the traditional categories of spectacle—above all, as regards acting "
16 " inherited from the theater, the actor expresses something: a feeling, a passion, a desire, an idea. From his attitude and his miming the spectator can read his face like an open book. "
17 " The structures of the mise-en-scène flow from it: decor, lighting, the angle and framing of the shots, will be more or less expressionistic in their relation to the behavior of the actor. They contribute for their part to confirm the meaning of the action. "
18 " Finally, the breaking up of the scenes into shots and their assemblage is the equivalent of an expressionism "
19 " time, a reconstruction of the event according to an artificial and abstract duration: dramatic duration. There is not a single one of these commonly accepted assumptions of the film spectacle that is not challenged by neorealism. "
20 " it calls upon the actor to be before expressing himself. This requirement does not necessarily imply doing away with the professional actor but it normally tends to substitute the man in the street, chosen uniquely for his general comportment, his ignorance of theatrical technique being less a positively required condition "
