The André Bazin Reader

The André Bazin Reader is the largest and most comprehensive edition of the work of André Bazin in English. It includes 40 articles from every full year of Bazin’s career, a major introductory essay by film theorist Jacques Aumont, and extensive annotations by translator Timothy Barnard. No other English-language edition has brought together all the major texts the way the caboose volume has. The texts included here are also offered in their original version, as they were written and published in Bazin’s day, before he or his posthumous editors revised and abridged them. Several have never before been translated. The volume includes brilliant essays on filmmakers of Bazin’s day (Renoir, Welles, Hitchcock, Chaplin, Bresson, Malraux, Pagnol, Wyler); essays on film and literature, painting and theatre; on Japanese cinema and Italian neo-realism; documentary and science film; film genres (comedy, the western, children’s films); film language and mise en scène; film history; television and new film technologies; exhibition and dubbing; and the ’politique des auteurs’ and the role of the critic. Readers will also discover the essay ＂Découpage,＂ which languished unread for nearly 60 years before the translator unearthed it. With the help of the translator’s extensive critical glossaries, this volume restores Bazin’s theory of découpage to his work and introduces it English-language film studies.

André Bazin (1918-1958) was France’s foremost film critic. He is the most influential and widely-read critic in film history and, in the mid-1950s, was the spiritual godfather to the French New Wave filmmakers. Jacques Aumont is the leading French film theorist today. Among his nearly two dozen authored, edited or co-edited books are, in English, Montage Eisenstein, The Image, Aesthetics of Film and, for caboose, Montage. In 2019 his career was recognized by the prestigious Balzan Prize.