André Bazin: a bio-bibliography

André Bazin (1918-1958) is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit, as well as with being the spiritual father of the French New Wave. In 1951 Bazin co-founded and became editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma, the single most influential critical periodical in the history of the cinema. He can also be considered the principal instigator of the equally influential auteur theory: the idea that, since film is an art form, the director of a movie must be perceived as the chief creator of its unique cinematic style. Unlike nearly all the other authors of major film theories, Bazin was a working or practical critic who wrote regularly about individual films. He based his criticism on the film actually made rather than on any preconceived aesthetic or sociological principles; and for the first time with him, film theory therefore became not a matter of pronouncement or prescription, but of description, analysis, and deduction. Indeed, Bazin can be regarded as the aesthetic link between film critics and film theorists. During his relatively short writing career, his primary concern was not to answer questions but to raise them, not to establish cinema as an art but to ask, ``What is art?'' and ``What is cinema?'' Regrettably, André Bazin died tragically young of leukemia in 1958, an illness against which he fought bravely for years. Yet he left much material behind, in his four-volume collection Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? (1958-1962) as well as in such magazines as Esprit, L' 'Ecran fran c{cais, and France-Observateur. All of that material is now duly noted, for the first time, in this book's comprehensive bibliography of writings by Bazin and about Bazin, in all languages (but primarily in French and English). Also featuring a contextual introduction to Bazin's life and work, André Bazin: A Bio-Bibliography represents a major contribution to the still growing academic discipline of cinema studies, as well as a testament to the continuing influence of one of the world's pre-eminent critical thinkers.