Andre Bazin Quotes & Sayings

Every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image. — Andre Bazin

How has The Grand Illusion held up over the years? It is not enough to say that it has retained its power. Not only has the stature of the film remained undiminished by the passage of time (except in a few minor details), but the innovation, the audacity, and, for want of a better word, the modernity of the direction have acquired an even greater impact. — Andre Bazin

Photography can strip from the world that spiritual dust and grime with which our eyes have covered it. — Andre Bazin

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness. — Andre Bazin

Reality is not art, but a realist art is one that can create an integral aesthetic of reality. — Andre Bazin

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. — Andre Bazin

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 — Andre Bazin

The essential factor in the transition of the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process ... rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays not part. The solution is not to be found in the result achieved, but in the way of achieving it. — Andre Bazin

Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption. — Andre Bazin

All films are born free and equal. — Andre Bazin

it was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language. — Andre Bazin

[The photograph] is the object itself ... [It] shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model. — Andre Bazin

The 'Western' is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself. — Andre Bazin

A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith. — Andre Bazin

The photographer proceeds, via the intermediary of the lens, to a point where he literally takes a luminous imprint, a cast ... [But] the cinema realizes the paradox of moulding itself on the time of the object and of taking the imprint of its duration as well. — Andre Bazin

All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty. — Andre Bazin

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. — Andre Bazin

Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. 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 — Andre Bazin