What is Cinema? Quotes

“Whether the world be good or evil I cannot say, but I am certain that it is men like Bazin who make it a better place. For, in believing life to be good and behaving accordingly, André had a beneficial effect on all who came in contact with him, and one could count on the fingers of one hand those who behaved badly toward him.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“His chronic physical ill health was paralleled by his constantly surprising moral strength. He would borrow money aloud but lend it with a whisper. In his presence everything became simple, clear, and aboveboard.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“Although we all knew him for a good and honest man, his goodness was nevertheless an endless surprise, so abundantly was it manifest. To talk with him was what bathing in the Ganges must be for a Hindu. Such was his generosity of spirit that I sometimes found myself deliberately running down a common acquaintance just for the pleasure of hearing André defend him.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“FOREWORD by François Truffaut”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“He loved the cinema, but still more he loved life, people, animals, the sciences, the arts;”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“neorealism is more an ontological position than an aesthetic one. That is why the employment of its technical attributes like a recipe do not necessarily produce it, as the rapid decline of American neorealism proves.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“it calls upon the actor to be before expressing himself. This requirement does not necessarily imply doing away with the professional actor but it normally tends to substitute the man in the street, chosen uniquely for his general comportment, his ignorance of theatrical technique being less a positively required condition”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“time, a reconstruction of the event according to an artificial and abstract duration: dramatic duration. There is not a single one of these commonly accepted assumptions of the film spectacle that is not challenged by neorealism.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“Finally, the breaking up of the scenes into shots and their assemblage is the equivalent of an expressionism”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“The structures of the mise-en-scène flow from it: decor, lighting, the angle and framing of the shots, will be more or less expressionistic in their relation to the behavior of the actor. They contribute for their part to confirm the meaning of the action.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“inherited from the theater, the actor expresses something: a feeling, a passion, a desire, an idea. From his attitude and his miming the spectator can read his face like an open book.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“neorealism runs counter to the traditional categories of spectacle—above all, as regards acting”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“It is by way of its poetry that the realism of De Sica takes on its meaning, for in art, at the source of all realism, there is an aesthetic paradox that must be resolved. The faithful reproduction of reality is not art. We are repeatedly told that it consists in selection and interpretation. That is why up to now the “realist” trends in cinema, as in other arts, consisted simply in introducing a greater measure of reality into the work: but this additional measure of reality was still only an effective way of serving an abstract purpose, whether dramatic, moral, or ideological.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“To explain De Sica, we must go back to the source of his art, namely to his tenderness, his love. The quality shared in common by Miracolo a Milano and Ladri di Biciclette, in spite of differences more apparent than real, is De Sica’s inexhaustible affection for his characters.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“It is clear to what an extent this neorealism differs from the formal concept which consists of decking out a formal story with touches of reality. As for the technique, properly so called, Ladri di Biciclette, like a lot of other films, was shot in the street with nonprofessional actors but its true merit lies elsewhere: in not betraying the essence of things, in allowing them first of all to exist for their own sakes, freely; it is in loving them in their singular individuality.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“Nothing happens in Ladri di Biciclette that might just as well not have happened. The worker could have chanced upon his bicycle in the middle of the film, the lights in the auditorium would have gone up and De Sica would have apologized for having disturbed us, but after all, we would be happy for the worker’s sake. The marvelous aesthetic paradox of this film is that it has the relentless quality of tragedy while nothing happens in it except by chance. But it is precisely from the dialectical synthesis of contrary values, namely artistic order and the amorphous disorder of reality, that it derives its originality. There is not one image that is not charged with meaning, that does not drive home into the mind the sharp end of an unforgettable moral truth, and not one that to this end is false to the ontological ambiguity of reality. Not one gesture, not one incident, not a single object in the film is given a prior significance derived from the ideology of the director.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“Potemkin turned the cinema world upside down not just because of its political message, not even because it replaced the studio plaster sets with real settings and the star with an anoynmous crowd, but because Eistenstein was the greatest montage theoretician of his day, because he worked with Tissé, the finest camerman of his day, and because Russia was the focal point of cinematographic thought—in short, because the “realist” films Russia turned out secreted more aesthetic know-how than all the sets and performances and lighting and artistic interpretation of the artiest works of German expressionism. It is the same today with the Italian cinema. There is nothing aesthetically retrogressive about its neorealism, on the contrary, there is progress in expression, a triumphant evolution of the language of cinema, an extension of its stylistics. Let us first take a good look at the cinema to see where it stands today. Since the expressionist heresy came to an end, particularly after the arrival of sound, one may take it that the general trend of cinema has been toward realism.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“I am prepared to see the fundamental humanism of the current Italian films as their chief merit.b They”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“But does one not, when coming out of an Italian film, feel better, an urge to change the order of things, preferably by persuading people, at least those who can be persuaded, whom only blindness, prejudice, or ill-fortune had led to harm their fellow men?”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“In a world already once again obsessed by terror and hate, in which reality is scarely any longer favored for its own sake but rather is rejected or excluded as a political symbol, the Italian cinema is certainly the only one which preserves, in the midst of the period it depicts, a revolutionary humanism.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“Orson Welles started a revolution by systematically employing a depth of focus that had so far not been used. Whereas the camera lens, classically, had focused successively on different parts of the scene, the camera of Orson Welles takes in with equal sharpness the whole field of vision contained simultaneously within the dramatic field. It is no longer the editing that selects what we see, thus giving it an a priori significance, it is the mind of the spectator which is forced to discern, as in a sort of parallelepiped of reality with the screen as its cross-section, the dramatic spectrum proper to the scene. It”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“But realism in art can only be achieved in one way—through artifice.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2

“It is not the absence of professional actors that is, historically, the hallmark of social realism nor of the Italian film. Rather, it is specifically the rejection of the star concept and the casual mixing of professionals and of those who just act occasionally. It is important to avoid casting the professional in the role for which he is known. The public should not be burdened with any preconceptions.”
― André Bazin, What is Cinema?: Volume 2