Religion

Bazin argues that miracles are inexplicable events that test science. Wary of the supernatural and transcendence, he does not approve of Pius XII’s standards of sainthood. All religions are fair game for social anthropology, even if they address mankind’s spiritual dimension. Irrational belief in God is necessary to maintain hope in eternal justice, since human laws are imperfect. Cinema’s illusionism turns irrational belief into a spiritual sensibility even for those who do not believe in any religion. Opposed to the dogmatic tendencies of any religion, Bazin argues that, in comparison to Jean Delannoy’s literary adaptations, Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951) stands out as an avant-garde film that is a masterpiece. This film explores Blaise Pascal’s notion of the Hidden God, by remapping the senses in such a way as to mark a new stage in the evolution of cinematic language. It is an example of pure cinema, comparable to Vittorio De Sica’s very different Bicycle Thieves (1948).

Introduction

Bazin’s work explores a key question: What is a human, in contrast to an animal, a plant, an object or a machine? A human is simultaneously a rational animal and an irrational being. Human irrationality can lead to cruelty and madness unless it becomes creativity through art, or it turns into spirituality through irrational belief. Well aware that a human being can reduce the Other to an animal or an object, Bazin’s anti-anthropocentric ethos upholds empathy and coexistence. At the same time, Bazin approves of the anthropomorphic nature of human perception. For him, anthropomorphism is an automatic response that taps into the unavoidable contiguity of humans, animals, and things. Notorious for his dislike of Soviet montage, Bazin’s essays on children’s fairy tales, animal documentaries, and Robert Montgomery’s Lady in The Lake (1947) prove that, in his film theory, editing is as important as camera movement in filmmaking.

Epilogue

Bazin’s model of spectatorship is grafted onto the system of the arts, with the sensuality of painting at the bottom. By contrast, the abstractions of literature belong to the top of cinema’s trajectory toward an anti-anthropocentric stance. It is as if cinema could recapitulate the history of technology and Darwinian evolution inside our consciousness so that we may better understand how we overlap with, as well as differ from, animals, plants, objects, and machines. Dialogical with Edgar Morin’s sense that man is not above nature, but only a fact in the cosmos, Bazin is most likely to disagree with Teilhard de Chardin’s anthropocentric noogenesis. Interestingly, Bazin devotes his very last essay to how humble farming weaves itself around the religious ruins of Saintonge, thus emphasizing mankind’s resilience as well as finitude.

Science

Biology is the most important science in Bazin’s theory. By rejecting Herbert Spencer’s survival of the fittest, the film theorist valorizes the holism of Darwinian evolution and the randomness of quantum physics. Due to the physical materiality of photographic tracing, Bazin rejects the Platonic equations of algebra and the static structures of classical geometry. Representative of the anti-Euclidean modern mathematics of change, contingency, and motion, the metaphor of the “integral” from calculus highlights the quasi-documentary, improvisational approach of a few Italian neorealist films. The difference between Italian neorealism and other cinematic realisms, based on a quantitative approach and naturalistic details, is that everything happens as if it were unfolding for the very first time. Neither a style nor a genre nor a repeatable formula, Italian neorealism deals with changing subjective perceptions within unpredictable social relations.

Art

Bazin’s mainstream cinema dialogues with various art forms, such as painting in the post–World War II art documentary. The pictorial canvas is a static object within a centripetal frame that focuses on artistic virtuosity and separates itself from the rest of the world. By contrast, cinema’s centrifugal screen specializes in events unfolding in time and photographically grounded in the world. Two art documentaries, especially, challenge painting’s centripetal stillness: Alain Resnais’s Van Gogh (1948) explores objects’ power to appeal to cinema’s objectifying lens. Alternatively, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (1956) is the first “Bergsonian” art documentary ever made. Its central topic is the creative evolution of autonomous surfaces, rather than the hand of the artist controlling the production of a static object.