Opening Bazin

Andre Bazin remains one of the most read, most studied, and most engaging figures ever to have written about film. He is indisputably the cinema's most influential philosopher-critic. Always an important presence within cinema theory, Bazin, who died just over fifty years ago, has seen a massive resurgence of interest among critics, scholars, and students of every persuasion. The journal that he founded in 1951, Cahiers du Cinéma, marked the anniversary year ofhis death by republishing a dozen of his uncollected essays while Film Comment and Film Quarterly in the US published memorial issues; conferences were held worldwide. Last year also saw the opening of an electronic Bazin archive which consists of his entire output of 2600 pieces on a fascinating arrayof topics. These events represent an ideal springboard for a major collection about Bazin. The proposed volume will include essays from the best scholars of French cinema in the US and abroad. The contributors represent a pantheon of several generations of the very best film scholars: Gunning, Frodon, Margulies, Conley, MacCabe, Narboni, Vernet, Finally, Fifty years after his death, André Bazin's full range of articles has been catalogued. Armed with this, 33 scholars from four continents haveopened Bazin up in this new century, tracing his lineage, debating his aesthetics, locating him in the rich cultural moment of postwar France, and tracking the effect of his thought around the world. This volume reinforces his preeminence as the most gifted and influential of all writers on film.

This amazing collection, whose contributors are some of the most distinguished contemporary film scholars, rescues Bazin from the ossified stereotypes that have come to define him in film pedagog?, Elegantly moving across disciplines, history, theory and geography, the essays in Opening Bazin construct an invaluable and vivid picture of Bazin as film theorist, film critic and engaged intellectual. It seems throughout to amount to more than the study of one man. However its richness and diversity is derived from those qualities in Bazin himself, so just as the book transcends its subject, he himself returns not only as its generative figure but also as an emblem of the peculiar and elusive nature of the cinema itself.

Dudley Andrew: an Officier de l'ordre des arts et des lettres (French Ministry of Culture and Communication) and inductee into the America Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published The Major Film Theories, Concepts of Film Theory, and Andre Bazin, all with OUP as well as books on major filmmakers and 30s French culture (with Princeton, Harvard, and the BFI). Hervé Joubert-Laurencin: a leading authority in France on Bazinas well as a specialist on the work of Pasolini. Publications include Pasolini: Portrait du poete en cineaste (1995 Diffusion Seuil), and La lettre volante: Quatre essais sur le cinema d'animation (1997 Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle)