André Bazin, Film Critic for Le Parisien libéré (1944–1958): An Enlightened Defender of French Cinema

Paragraph ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geneviève Sellier
Keyword(s):  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Daily Newspaper ◽  
Key Points ◽  
Andre Bazin ◽  
Post War ◽  
Day Plot ◽  
Film Critic

This article examines a neglected dimension of Bazin's work, namely his writings for the daily newspaper Le Parisien libéré. Four key points emerge from this corpus. First, Bazin goes beyond the film-reviewing norms of the day (plot summary and evaluation of actors' performances) to analyse the intentions and achievements of the film-makers. Second, Bazin foregrounds the capacity of cinema to address the concerns of contemporary society. Third, as a result, he ascribes a particular value to films that actively engage with the new social realities of post-war France. Four, Bazin remains blind to the misogynistic dimension of post-war French cinema, with its tendency to culpabilize women for the national disgrace of the Occupation. Ultimately, Bazin's newspaper reviewing represents a more socially aware vision of cinema than that promoted by more specialized cinema journals, yet his criticism remains caught within the gender ideology of his time.

Party and Democracy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Organizational Development ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
The State ◽  
Societal Change ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Post War ◽  
Totalitarian Regimes

The book integrates philosophical, historical, and empirical analyses in order to highlight the profound roots of the limited legitimation of parties in contemporary society. Political parties’ long attempts to gain legitimacy are analysed from a philosophical–historical perspective pinpointing crucial passages in their theoretical and empirical acceptance. The book illustrates the process through which parties first emerged and then achieved full legitimacy in the early twentieth century. It shows how, paradoxically, their role became absolute in the totalitarian regimes of the interwar period when the party became hyper-powerful. In the post-war period, parties shifted from a golden age of positive reception and organizational development towards a more difficult relationship with society as it moved into post-industrialism. Parties were unable to master societal change and favoured the state to recover resources they were no longer able to extract from their constituencies. Parties have become richer and more powerful, but they have ‘paid’ for their pervasive presence in society and the state with a declining legitimacy. The party today is caught in a dramatic contradiction. It has become a sort of Leviathan with clay feet: very powerful thanks to the resources it gets from the state and to its control of societal and state spheres due to an extension of clientelistic and patronage practices; but very weak in terms of legitimacy and confidence in the eyes of the mass public. However, it is argued that there is still no alternative to the party, and some hypotheses to enhance party democracy are advanced.

The Image of the Future in the Situation of the Decline of Culture: Contemporary Russia from the Perspective of O. Spengle

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 323-334
Author(s):  
Inga V. Zheltikova
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Conservative Values ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Images Of The Future

The concept of O. Spengler suggests that the history of any culture goes through certain stages of development, the last of which is civilization. During this period creative activity in culture is replaced by mechanical imitation and lost connection with the culture formed by the «pra-phenomenon». The author correlates Spengler’s postulates with the processes of actual social reality and comes to the conclusion that contemporary Russia is going through the stage of civilization. The article raises the question of how the future is seen in this situation. The author uses the term “image of the future”, introduced by F. Polak to understand the disinterest of modern post-war Europe in its future. Thus, the lack of interest in the future can be recognized as another characteristic of the state of civilization. The existence in contemporary Russia of distinct images of the future is an open question. Using the methods of content analysis, the author comes to the conclusion that in Russian contemporary society there exists a retrospective image of the future, focused on conservative values, hierarchy of society and its closed nature to the world. Thus, it is concluded that it is wrong to talk about complete absence of images of the future in contemporary Russia. But the nature and content of these images demonstrate the low level of interest in the future, which also indicates the transition of Russian culture to civilization.

Evil Women in the Post-war French Cinema

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noël Burch ◽  
Geneviève Sellier
Keyword(s):  
French Cinema ◽  
Post War

scholarly journals APIE NEREPREZENTACINIO KINO GALIMYBĘ. NUO ANDRÉ BAZINO IKI GILLES’IO DELEUZE’O

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 07-15
Author(s):  
Lukas Brašiškis
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
French Film ◽  
Andre Bazin ◽  
Film Critic

Remiantis prancūzų kino kritiko ir teoretiko André Bazino pateiktomis ontologinėmis kino teorijos tezėmis bei Gilles’io Deleuze’o knygos Kinas 1: Vaizdinys-judėjimas ketvirtajame skyriuje išplėtotais Henri Bergsono filosofijos argumentais, straipsnyje svarstomos žmogiškajai percepcijai būdingų redukcinių tendencijų nedubliuojančio kino galimybės. Klasikinio kino realizmo samprata yra palyginama su nereprezentacinio kino idėja, akcentuojant Bazino aprašomą iš dalies žmogišką, iš dalies technologinę kino prigimtį, kaip sąlygą galimybei priartėti prie Bergsono aprašytos acentriškos realybės. Vietoje straipsnio išvadų Bazino pasiūlytos kino neantropocentriškumo potencijos apmąstymas yra aktualizuojamas šiandieninėje filosofijoje pastebimo spekuliatyviojo posūkio fone.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: nereprezentacinis kinas, realizmas, pasakojimas, montažas, acentriška realybė, spekuliatyvusis posūkis.ON THE POSSIBILITY OF NON-REPRESENTIONAL CINEMA. FROM ANDRÉ BAZIN TO GILLES DELEUZELukas BrašiškisSummaryReferring to the ontological arguments shown in the theory of the French film critic and theorist André Bazin and the arguments elaborated by Gilles Deleuze in the fourth chapter of his book Cinema 1: Movement-Image, the possibility of the cinema that does not duplicate the reductive tendencies of the intentional human consciousness is discussed in this article. The classical understanding of the notion of cinematic realism is compared with the idea of non-representational cinema, accentuating the partially technological and partially subjective nature of film, which was described by Bazin, and its way to put the film viewer closer to the perception of the Bergsonian acentric reality. Instead of giving a clear conclusion, the Bazinian idea of the non-anthropocentric cinema is actualized in the light of the speculative turn in today’s philosophy.Keywords: nonrepresentational cinema, realism, narrative, montage, acentric reality, speculative turn.

French Cinema

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ginette Vincendeau
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
New Wave ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Ethnic And Cultural Identity ◽  
Andre Bazin ◽  
The 1960S

As befits the country of the cinema’s official “birth,” France boasts a long tradition of writing on film. In the 1920s, avant-garde filmmakers such as Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein started theorizing cinema’s specificity as a medium, while in the 1930s debates turned political. During that decade critics and historians, such as Georges Sadoul, began also to reflect on film history. Major works on French cinema, however, started to appear only after World War II. A first wave emerged from the postwar cultural effervescence and the rise of cinephilia, with new journals such as Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif. Film critic André Bazin and his disciples (among them future New Wave filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard) developed the politique des auteurs and wrote the first “serious” monographs about filmmakers—mostly American and French. In their wake auteurist works took off in the 1960s, as well as reflections on movements such as the New Wave and French cinema as a whole. A second wave followed the rise of academic film studies in the 1970s, initially with the accent on theory, and saw the internationalization of French cinema studies. In the 1980s and 1990s a “historical turn” generated influential studies—survey histories, anthologies, and accounts of specific periods and movements—in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France. Echoing the continuing spread of film studies courses and the buoyancy of French cinema, a third wave followed, with a discernible shift toward cultural and ideological approaches. In particular, issues of gender, ethnic, and cultural identity came to the fore, as well as film and philosophy, together with a marked interest in contemporary cinema. The enduring strength of auteurism means that some areas, notably popular genres, are still underexplored. Nevertheless, French cinema is now remarkably well mapped out.

André Bazin, or the Ambiguity of Reality

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Sorlin
Keyword(s):  
Chemical Reaction ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Variable Nature ◽  
The World ◽  
Andre Bazin ◽  
Film Critic

André Bazin, a teacher and a film critic, was intent on making his students and readers realize that the cinema offered them a unique tool to discover the world. After his premature death at the age of 50, his friends collected some of his articles, republishing them in a variety of formats. However, the variable nature of this series of montages sometimes provoked misinterpretations. For example, a sentence on the “irresistible realism” of film was considered a proof that, for him, cinematic images copied reality. However, this chapter will argue that Bazin’s conception of both film and reality was far more elaborate and sophisticated than that. Bazin argued that there are so many things around us that we cannot see them all, we thus only ever know a small portion of the surrounding reality. Human beings have long drawn portraits and landscapes in order to observe at leisure what interests them. Unlike drawings, biased by the artist’s feelings, photography is “objective” since it is merely the effect of a chemical reaction and, beside its target, for instance a person, it registers, unwillingly, aspects of the surroundings such as they are. Film is as unbiased as photography and in addition gives faithful motion reproduction. While watching a long sequence taken in distant shot we may become aware of people, actions, situations appearing in the background and that we wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Thanks to its realism a film can help us to gain a less narrow vision of reality.

Sociocultural Foundations of Communication in Contemporary Society

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
pp. 12-16
Author(s):  
Родин ◽  
A. Rodin
Keyword(s):  
Communication Networks ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
Life Strategy ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Key Points ◽  
Need For Approval ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Communication Practices

The problem of communication is considered as a phenomenon existing in the context of the interrelationship between the similarities and differences. The differences are connected with legitimation of interest in the subject of communication practices within the socio-cultural society (the similarities). It is revealed that the communication society culture exists as a unity of closely interrelated aspects — subjective and personal. The need for approval of the communicative model of personality as a multicultural entity creates prerequisites for radical changes in life strategy, the key points that make up the skills to be included in the growing complexity of communication networks, including the ability to create a new system of relationships (self-organization). All this does not only make the differences in culture explicit, but also stimulates the next stage of the socio-cultural development. It is concluded that the position of the subject, which has new communicative consciousness, may be changed. The basis for the mechanism of personal comprehension of the world is an innovative activity of the multicultural subject.

Media memorial discourses and memory struggles in Slovenia: Transforming memories of the Second World War and Yugoslavia

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-450
Author(s):  
Maruša Pušnik
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
The European Union ◽  
World War ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Daily Newspaper ◽  
The Common ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

The radical break between two national contexts in 1991, when Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia, and Slovenia’s integration into the European Union in 2004, has brought changes to the collective memory of the Slovenian nation. In this article, I investigate how Delo, a major Slovenian daily newspaper, has been involved in memory struggles to present new memorial discourses that are in accordance with the new national politics. A large part of the common Yugoslav past has been reinvented for the present political and ideological purposes of European integration, whereby the Second World War and the Partisan movement, which once signified a common Yugoslav life, have become a contested issue. The focus of the critical narrative analysis is put on those general narrative templates that underlie specific news narratives about the Second World War and socialist Yugoslavia. Over the last 25 years, dominant media have strengthened memory struggles in the Slovenian public realm and have created revisionist narratives of the Second World War and the post-war past.

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