Not sure about the rarity of this piece. It was written in 1983 for Dudley Andrew's biography, André Bazin, and Truffaut had already written a different foreword for the 1978 English edition, which he titled "Yes, We All Miss André Bazin." That foreword is much shorter, and has four or five sentences in common with the 1983 foreword. My guess would be that he rewrote the foreword for the French translation five years later, except for that Truffaut uses some anglicisms and English loans uncommon for his style. He also did this when writing the preface to Rosenbaum's translation of Bazin's Orson Welles, which was intended for translation. Nevertheless, English reeditions from the early 2000s include the 1978 foreword, and I've only been able to find the 1983 version in French, in the collection Le plaisir des yeux (compositing Truffaut's prose from after the period covered in Films in My Life). The 1983 version is more revealing, more relevant to our time, and one of Truffaut's best writings.
About 15 years ago, a sketch in the New Yorker showed a team of Hollywood executives around an oval table. Pens in the air, scratching their foreheads, they're looking at a blackboard which reads, "The extraordinary life of...?"
If we admit that the Americans have the greater talent for biography, then we should not expect from Dudley Andrew an "extraordinary life," but simply a scrupulous portrait of a man who was remarkable in his kindness, intelligence, and humour.
André Bazin no doubt would never have imagined his life and work the subject of a book, nor this book to be written by a young American - a professor in cinema - who would cross thousands of miles to question his friends. Nevertheless, I see in this spiritual biography an extension of Bazin's project, which he defined in 1943: "We already have a professor of the 7th art at the Sorbonne, and one day we'll have an 800 page thesis on the Comic of American cinema between 1905 and 1917, or something approximating that. And who would dare to claim that it isn't serious?"
If, instead of Bazin the critic, I prefer to speak of Bazin the "film writer," it's because he never treated his work like a job. Even if he lived off of a pension or from some step-aunt's inheritance, he would have written about the cinema. It was his pleasure, and a necessity one with his pedagogical vocation. His best articles are generally the longest, and sometimes he would carry twenty to thirty sheets of manuscript paper to Esprit or the Cahiers du Cinéma, and he would say "I haven't had the time to shorten them."
While evident that Bazin wasn't the only one to analyse the nature and values of the moving image, he was alone in his interrogation of the role of the critic. When Janine Bazin and I compiled his first texts (1943-45) in The Cinema of the Occupation and the Resistance, we were surprised to find five or six addressing solely the purpose of criticism. Later, when Pierre-Aimé Touchard's prediction that "In ten years Bazin will be the greatest film critic" would be achieved, these types of articles still regularly appear, culminating in the famous "On the festival considered as an Order."
Since he started writing in 1943, in The Student Echo, Bazin was shocked to see that, in the mainstream press, films were only ever summarised: "We looked in vain through the majority of our film journals for an opinion on the décor or the photography, judgements on the use of sound, on the precision of the editing. In a word, on those things which make the cinema the cinema... It seems this singular art has no past, no dimension, like the imponderable shadows on the screen. It's high time one invented a cinematographic criticism in relief."
Bazin himself would provide this "criticism in relief." Anyone owning all twenty editions of The Cinema Revue have noticed that the serious discussions start around no. 9, with Bazin's first contribution, The Myth of Monsieur Verdoux. When a film moves or impassions him, he returns to it two, three times, not hesitating to question his own judgements.
Some films are lovable from the first viewing because they happily embrace the elements which we know, and adjust them with a new harmony in such a way that we are moved before we are surprised. Renoir's beautiful film, A Day in the Country, corresponds to this definition. Other films (neither better nor worse) embrace new or known adjusted elements, and so we're surprised before we're touched. Another Renoir corresponds to this definition: The Diary of a Chambermaid, which gives Bazin the occasion to mix his criticism and auto-criticism.
Who other than Bazin has had the courage - not once, but ten times - to revisit his first judgements and reconsider them not because of changes of humour, but in pursuit of a deeper analysis? On the 15 June 1948, taken aback by The Diary of a Chambermaid (Renoir being his favourite director), Bazin writes in L'Ecran francais: "Renoir has made both enormous and derisory efforts to recreate about his heroes the uniquely French world in which they live and die. But we can feel the artificial "sunlights" on Burgess Meredith's rosebushes, and the entire film is soaked in this aquarium lighting characteristic of Hollywood studios, under which everything, the actors included, turns into a Japanese floral arrangement." Some years later, Bazin reviews The Diary and is astounded. He writes a new text and loyally cites his first article: "I've pursued the unhealthy curiosity to reread what I wrote in L'Ecran Francais..." He continues and comments on the new viewing: "Then The Diary of a Chambermaid started, and in the first few minutes I had the unhappy impression of recognising my error and how absurd it was to persist in wanting to see a realism which was not in this most oneiric film, the most deliberately imaginary if Renoir's oeuvre... As for this aquarium lighting which troubled me so, I've found it again, only as the light of an interior inferno, a sort of telluric phosphorescence, like that imagined by Jules Verne which lights his voyagers in the center of the earth. It's perhaps the first time that we see Renoir step away from the workings of the theatre into pure theatricality."
The intentional confrontation between these two articles, rather than implicating us in a self-effacing revision, intensifies our understanding. Here then is not only Bazin's integrity, but also the quality of his perception, since, leaving aside the problems with his initial judgement, the description of Renoir's film in the critical account is unequivocally better than any which an unconditional fan - like my friends and I at the Cahiers - could have written. From here, it's not too far before we're suggesting a politique des auteurs-critiques, by which a negative article by a Bazin is a better description of a film than any paean by one of us.
This "aquarium lighting" is an important idea, isolating one of the most arresting contrasts of post-war cinema: that of Hollywood and neo-realism. Indeed, it was to escape this lighting that Ingrid Bergman, moved by Rome, Open City, left Hitchcock for Rossellini.
To recognise the virtues of a certain theatricality gilding and amplifying a film's imagery, as an echo chamber aggravates the human voice - a greater stylisation than any surface realism maintained throughout an entire production - was the beginning of much of Bazin's best work, on Welles (Macbeth), Cocteau (Les Parents Terribles), and Pagnol (Letters from my Windmill). No doubt today's producers and directors would profit from reading these 30 year old texts. Take, for example, Bazin's words on an adaptation of The Doctor Despite Himself, botched by its efforts to "do cinema":
"Moliere's play only makes sense against a forest of painted canvas, and the actors' game follows the same condition. The footlights aren't from an autumn sun. One is limited to playing the fagot scene before a curtain, since at the foot of a tree, it no longer exists... The director wanted to imbue it with reality, to offer a perspective for us within the scene. Unfortunately, these clumsy ruses had the opposite effect, only declaring the irreality of the characters."
Bazin finds a timeless example of adaptation from the theatre in Les Parents Terribles, which, on film, excludes all exteriors, even when the characters move from one building to another: "As a filmmaker Cocteau has understood the necessity to add nothing to his decor, and that the cinema is not here to multiply, but to intensify... The essential here being the dramatic fact of claustrophobic cohabitation. The thinnest ray of sunlight, indeed any light that isn't electric, would have destroyed this fragile and fatal symbiosis... The theatre by essence can never be conflated with nature, or else it will dissolve and cease to be."
Even if the industry is indifferent to critical analyses beyond the points of "See it!" or "Don't bother!" it's clear that these remarks on theatricality, read well and observed well, would have allowed Gaumont to shoot Mozart's Don Giovanni on two billion centimes instead of three, and even take back one instead of losing two, since this was a flagrant example of a film failing by its ruinous and naive abandonment of the required "scenic" convention, rather than by its theatricality.
Two years earlier, far from aiming to "do cinema," Ingmar Bergman filmed The Magic Flute in an old theatre, not offering the artificial mise en scene of an opera so much as the representation of an opera. Modestly commissioned for Swedish television, the film became an international success, and I don't hesitate to call Bergman's work method Bazinian.
The expression "left intellectual" is laughed at today, and not only by those lamenting French Algeria - so how should we react to the notion of a "left catholic"? Bazin was a left catholic intellectual, and none who knew him would deny the perfect intimacy between his thoughts and his actions.
When he was leaving for a trip with Janine, he phoned some of his worse-off friends to offer them his house, or when he was staying at Vincennes and picked up three people waiting for the bus in the rain and took them to Paris, was it the catholic Bazin or the leftist Bazin? I couldn't say. It was Bazin, and I sometimes tell myself that two good reasons to believe in the equality of man are better than one.
Dudley Andrew's book revealed to me that Bazin, near the end of his adolescence, was distressed and anguished to the point of consulting a psychiatrist. I never knew this and couldn't have suspected it, probably because my relationship with him was pretty egotistical on my part, even as I loved him deeply, and also because when I knew him, he was stable, happy in his private life thanks to Janine, and reassured in his professional life, being already internationally known and respected. Bazin took to his work like a duck to water. You will never find an overly harsh article. At his most severe, you might find, "The premise was interesting, unfortunately mishandled because of..."
When Bazin died, he had been writing for fifteen years. Never jaded, never skeptical, and always social. He wrote in 1943, "The aesthetic of the cinema will be social or the cinema will go without aesthetic." But one would never have found in him a trace of "social vanity," since he had neither the desire to be someone else, nor to do anything else. His great talent eventually introduced him to the most famous filmmakers, on equal terms which came about automatically, though he always denied his relationships with Renoir, Rossellini, Cocteau, Fellini, and Orson Welles.
My first work with Bazin, circa 1947, was accompaning him in factories where, in the half hour following lunch and preceding the return to the workshops, he showed the workers two short Chaplin films, and found himself face to face with his audience. Knowing these films frame by frame and having nothing more to discover from them, he studied the audience's reactions and found there conformation of what he had written four years earlier: "Any elite aesthetic is radically incompatible with the functioning laws of the cinema. The cinema needs an elite, but this elite will have influence only insofar as it understands, with realism, the sociological demands of the seventh art." One of his first articles, dedicated to a commercial failure - fashionable with the Saint-Germain-des-Prés crowd, called Adieu Léonard and directed by Pierre Prévert, whose brother Jacques wrote the scenario - well illustrates his anti-snobism: "That one could have raved about this scenario proves to what point one has forgotten the possibilities of the cinema, since if it had any idea it could only be qualified by the style of its execution. This fantastical satire, a little ridiculous, could only come to life in a universe where rhythm and poetry imposed on us a superior verisimilitude of artifice; however, we never end up freed of logical contingencies, and can never accept freely the world which is imposed on us." At the end of the article Bazin shows his lack of personal animosity against Prévert: "To forget the film, we went to rewatch for the fourth time Le Jour se leve: hello, Prévert!"
It wouldn't be pointless to recall here than in Bazin's time, critics saw films on the first day with the public. They didn't write their articles prompted by a press release, so had to reconstruct scenarios themselves, interpret the intentions, and evaluate what distance was between the intentions and the results. Mixing in with the paying public didn't prevent Bazin from feeling solidary with the film when it was unjustly received or misunderstood, as in the case of Les Dames du bois de Boulogne.
Do I always agree with Bazin? Surely not. Indeed, I'm hostile to documentary cinema, of which Renoir says somewhere that it is "the falsest genre of the cinema." I adhere less to his idea, most evident in his early career, of the hierarchy of genres: "Goupi Mains Rouges is a half perfect work, while Les Visiteurs du Soir has its faults, but the genre of Becker's film is aesthetically inferior to Carné's." To follow Bazin down this path would lead one to consider King Vidor superior to Lubitsch. Now, one could find in earlier writings some remarks contradicting this hierarchy, such as in 1948: "Despite how it seems, comedy was the most serious genre in Hollywood, insofar as it reflected through comedy the moral and social beliefs of American life."
What's happened since Bazin's left? First of all, television has pulverised the myths, destroyed the stars, and broken the spell. The generalisation of colour has made the average quality of images regress, and rendered the reading of films at once more simple and less bewitching. Indeed, the percentage of nourishing and ambitious films has dropped.
Unfortunately, today's criticism - in any case its regular exercise - has nearly entirely lost its influence, principally because of television. When cinema had the monopoly over moving images, the function of criticism was to evoke these images with words, and if a film irresistibly drew in the public, no unanimously negative critical opinion would have dissuaded them from going to judge for themselves, simply because any film constituted a visual mystery. Today, three poorly chosen extracts are shown on television in one of these programs which the Minister of Communication assures us "promote" the cinema, and these are enough to dissipate the visual mystery and fix the destiny of a film. Under these conditions, and without giving the impression of having noticed, the critic has come to hold, in the cinematographic game, the same role as the ecological movement in the political game: theoretical, inefficacious, and morally indispensable.
In Bazin's time, the average film lacked ambition. The role of the critic was to stimulate directors by drawing their attention to the possibilities which existed in themselves, and of which they were not conscious. Today, it's the opposite, and one regularly sees ambitious films mutilated and failing to take flight because of the weakness of their execution. This is not an exclusively French phenomenon, and Bazin, if he were still living - he'd only be 65, after all - would be the most capable of establishing a greater harmony between our projects, attitudes, goals, and style.
For the sake of this preface I'm forced to write about Bazin with distance, as if he was a man like any other for me, when really André was the man I loved above all others. He and Janine adopted me when I was in great distress, and brought to an end the worst period in my life. I don't want to bring this up in too much detail, perhaps because I've written it out already, elsewhere, but through Andrew's book the reader will see what a marvelous man Bazin was, his extraordinary good faith, and his love for every living thing. Bazin had no enemies and could not have any, since his nature lead him to reformulate, with deeper understanding, the point of view of his adversary, before putting forward his own argument. Everyone became better in coming into contact with Bazin. If we disagreed, we observed it with tenderness.
André has been dead for 25 years. One would think that the passage of time would soften the feeling of his absence, but that's not the case.
We all miss Bazin.
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