What is Cinema? Volume I Quotes

“it was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1

“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.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1

“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”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 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

“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.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1

“for photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1

“All films are born free and equal.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume I

“Death is nothing more than the victory of time. To make fast bodily appearance is to snatch it from the course of time, to stow it in the hold of life.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume I

“Is not neorealism primarily a kind of humanism and only secondarily a style of film-making?”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1

“The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, 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.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1

“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.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume I

“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”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume I

“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.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1

“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.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1

“The sound of a windshield-wiper against a page of Diderot is all it took to turn it into Racinian dialogue”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume I

“Undoubtedly there are other examples in the history of
techniques and inventions of the convergence of research, but one
must distinguish between those which come as a result precisely of
scientific evolution and industrial or military requirements and
those which quite clearly precede them. *Thus, the myth of Icarus
had to wait on the internal combustion engine before descending
from the platonic heavens.* But it had dwelt in the soul of everyman
since he first thought about birds. To some extent, one could say the
same thing about the myth of cinema, but its forerunners prior to
the nineteenth century have only a remote connection with the
myth which we share today and which has prompted the appearance
of the mechanical arts that characterize today's world.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume I

“as in Welles’ pictures (or in Renoir’s) through depth of focus but by virtue of a diabolic speed of vision which seems for the first time to be wedded here to the pure rhythm of attention. Undoubtedly all good editing takes this into consideration. The traditional device of shot-reverse-shot divides up the dialogue according to an elementary syntax of interest.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1

“depth of focus brings the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality. Therefore it is correct to say that, independently of the contents of the image, its structure is more realistic; (2) That it implies, consequently, both a more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution on his part to the action in progress.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1

“and de Sica are less spectacular but they are no less determined to do away with montage and to transfer to the screen the continuum of reality.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1

“Italian neorealism contrasts with previous forms of film realism in its stripping away of all expressionism and in particular in the total absence of the effects of montage. As in the films of Welles and in spite of conflicts of style, neorealism tends to give back to the cinema a sense of the ambiguity of reality.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1

“Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism. No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1

“painting, the world over, has struck a varied balance between the symbolic and realism. However, in the fifteenth century Western painting began to turn from its age-old concern with spiritual realities expressed in the form proper to it, towards an effort to combine this spiritual expression with as complete an imitation as possible of the outside world. The decisive moment undoubtedly came with the discovery of the first scientific and already, in a sense, mechanical system of reproduction, namely, perspective: the camera obscura of Da Vinci foreshadowed the camera of Niepce. The artist was now in a position to create the illusion of three-dimensional space within which things appeared to exist as our eyes in reality see them. Thenceforth painting was torn between two ambitions: one, primarily aesthetic, namely the expression of spiritual reality wherein the symbol transcended its model; the other, purely psychological, namely the duplication of the world outside. The satisfaction of this appetite for illusion merely served to increase it till, bit by bit, it consumed the plastic arts. However, since perspective had only solved the problem of form and not of movement, realism was forced to continue the search for some way of giving dramatic expression to the moment, a kind of psychic fourth dimension that could suggest life in the tortured immobility of baroque art.a The”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1

“The screen uses violence in such a customary fashion that it seems somehow like a devalued currency, which is at one and the same time provoking and conventional.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1

“the literary critic is guilty of imprudently prejudging the true nature of cinema, based on a very superficial definition of what is here meant by reality. Because its basic material is photography it does not follow that the seventh art is of its nature dedicated to the dialectic of appearances and the psychology of behavior. While”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1

“Finally there is “montage by attraction,” the creation of S. M. Eisenstein, and not so easily described as the others, but which may be roughly defined as the reenforcing of the meaning of one image by association with another image not necessarily part of the same episode—for example the fireworks display in The General Line following the image of the bull.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 1