James Tweedie reviews André Bazin’s New Media

André Bazin. André Bazin’s New Media. Trans. and Ed. Dudley Andrew. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. 352 pp.

Review by James Tweedie

10 February 2016

In André Bazin’s New Media, Bazin observes that the history of cinema has often deviated from the grand plans of its founding figures and meandered through a series of accidents, errors, and misunderstandings. The earliest inventors and moguls may have imposed certain standards on the world, like the 35mm format foisted on posterity by Edison and decried by Bazin, but cinema as we know it was also the result of a “cluster of serendipitous technological, economic, and sociological convergences” (p. 315). A slight shift in this constellation of deliberate designs and chance happenings could have produced a very different art and industry. The same could be said about the trajectory of Bazin’s career in the Anglophone world. What if readers had encountered his work as a daily film and television critic for major French newspapers and journals, following the development of his ideas in a representative sample of the 2,600 pieces he published during his career? What if the touchstone for the work of Bazin had been the writing on television and widescreen cinema presented in André Bazin’s New Media rather than the reviews and essays contained in What Is Cinema? for decades a canonical text in film studies? Some aspects of his thought would remain recognizable, as the relationship between cinema and reality features prominently in his writing. But readers of this other Bazin would probably envision their author as a pioneering television critic, perhaps even an evangelist for new media technology that, he suggests, could either revitalize or supplant the “mortal” medium of cinema. This alternative Bazin would also be viewed as a keen analyst of the economics of the film industry, especially the exhibition sector. Aesthetics and philosophy remain important elements in the Bazinian mode of new media criticism, but they always exist in a complementary relationship with more sociological and contextual concerns. In his remarks on the simulation of widescreen cinema in narrow Parisian theaters better suited to the projection of square images, Bazin condemns the practice of masking the top and bottom of the frame to create the illusion of a panoramic perspective and, as a side effect, chopping off heads and feet that would have appeared in a full frame. Those viewing conditions did not allow the audience to look at an expansive world through a window; they forced the spectators to view reality through a diminished aperture, through the “slit of a mailbox” (p. 303). Because of the relative inaccessibility of the vast majority of Bazin’s writing, generations of film scholars have encountered Bazin by looking through the thin sliver of a mail slot. Edited and translated by Dudley Andrew, the scholar most responsible for a recent revival of interest in Bazin, André Bazin’s New Media opens onto a more panoramic and rewarding view of the most insightful and influential critic of cinema. And, as this book finally allows us to see, the newly revealed Bazin is both a familiar theorist of cinematic realism and a perceptive observer of France’s fledgling experiment with television and the other emerging media technologies of his time.

The book is most enjoyable and remarkable as a chronicle of those changes viewed through the eyes of Bazin. Relative to the US, France was a latecomer to the era of mass-market television, and the mid-1950s remained a period of innocence and experimentation in French TV, with just under forty-five hours of programming per week carefully partitioned among different genres that were still seeking a formula for aesthetic and economic success. Bazin’s sometimes diaristic accounts of television viewing reveal the contradictions and wonder that characterized the everyday experience of the medium during its early years in France. Some of his comments offer basic practical advice to novice television viewers: “you need to monitor the contrast during the course of broadcasts, and to rectify this each time there is a need. Just setting the contrast once and for all at the beginning of the film is insufficient” (p. 161). He also bears witness to the impact of television on domestic life in France, as when he highlights the addictive potential of serials, attests to their popularity in his own household, and tries to muster the forbearance necessary to “forgive TV for complicating my family life by magnetizing my son’s powers of attention at set hours” (p. 135). While one of his main concerns was the evaluation of program quality in his role as critic, Bazin’s reviews also reveal the range and particularity of television content at the time. He describes, for example, a promising but underachieving program focused on the life of Professor Cincinnatus Malladoli, an eighty-seven-year-old man who owns a palatial estate but lives in a trailer because his castle is inhabited by wild and exotic animals. He also reviews a simultaneously quotidian and avant-garde metaprogram that features one camera following another camera around a set to chronicle the making of a television show, a “live broadcast of a live broadcast” and “game of mirrors” (p. 140). And he introduces a range of key figures on the French television scene, including some directors primarily known for their work on the small screen and the growing cohort of film industry regulars who migrated back and forth between cinema and TV, blurring the boundaries between television and other artistic and social movements. (Their biographies are glossed in a series of useful footnotes and an appendix.) The reviews in André Bazin’s New Media establish a historical trajectory over the course of the 1950s, with television beginning as a less prestigious and uncertain medium but eventually overlapping and converging with the previously distinct realm of cinema. While he feels obliged to provide rudimentary knowledge to readers and TV professionals learning to watch and make television on the fly, he also addresses an increasingly sophisticated readership and analyzes programs that eventually rival cinema and theater in their formal complexity and social significance.

As a theoretical undertaking, Bazin’s writing on television, 3D, and widescreen film rethinks his key concepts, including realism, in the related but distinct context of new media. While he often underscores the difference between television and cinema, using that comparison as a starting point, he also understands the fundamental challenges posed by the unique production and viewing conditions of TV to concepts inherited from film. He observes that “intimacy is the privileged style of television” and advocates a TV aesthetic where the mise-en-scène “relies more on the actor than on the décor; and this could take us to the limit case of a mise-en-scène composed entirely of close-ups” (p. 41). At its best television is a “conversation” that can bring the “personal testimony” of fellow human beings into our homes and establish a relationship of endearment between otherwise distant people and societies (p. 128). Bazin views this intimacy as a powerful democratizing force. Face to face with other citizens, we learn that we are “equal before television, in the same manner as we are all equal before death. This demonstrates that the TV camera is the extraordinary revealer of the human” (p. 42). Associating television with live broadcasts unfolding without the benefit of planning or rehearsals, he argues that the “aesthetic morality of television” is based on a fundamental honesty, on its capacity for “frankness” and its openness to “risk” (p. 41). Bazin also maintains that live broadcasts provoke a unique form of sympathy for the people who appear on screen, especially when the performer falters in front of the camera and “we can do nothing for him and he, many kilometers away from us, finds himself alone, if not disabled, in front of soulless recording machines” (p. 83). This emphasis on the compassionate and egalitarian potential of television occasionally verges on naïve faith in the medium, especially when viewed with the benefit of hindsight from the twenty-first century. In the 1950s France was rebuilding a civil society shattered by the war and using mass media as the cornerstone of that reimagined public sphere, but television has only intermittently lived up to the ideal envisioned by Bazin in that moment of cautious optimism. At the same time, however, that very innocence also helps establish Bazin as a necessary addition to the canon of early television theory. Rarely has the utopian case for the potential of television been argued so forcefully and with such awareness of the stakes involved in the failure of our experiments in communitarian media.

In these apologies for a democratic television, Bazin begins to echo his earlier aspirations for cinema in the age of neorealism. As with the masterpieces of neorealism, imperfection becomes a sign of television’s authenticity and “sincerity” (p. 122). He writes that the “bumpy tracking shots of the Orticon camera, the groping attempts to frame, the simple, brutal illumination of the spotlights, the slight hesitations of the montage, all this made us participants in the show’s creation” (pp. 100–101). Unlike the artificial constructions of studio cinema that result in a manufactured or processed experience to be consumed after the fact, live television leaves us with the “feeling of living with the image, of discovering it at its birth” (p. 101). Rather than pit older and newer media against each other, Bazin views television as a site where the best of cinema can survive the perpetual turbulence and possible mortality of the film industry. He describes television as an “unwitting cinematheque” (p. 148) whose own economic uncertainty and low budgets compel programmers, in a role reminiscent of Benjamin’s ragpickers, “to rummage through stocks of old movies that have hardly any commercial value. While these films are often quite bad, you can find among them a few masterpieces as well as some quite interesting movies that have become practically invisible in the commercial circuit” (pp. 147–48). He sees in American TV a revival of the “freedom of inspiration that characterized Hollywood’s earlier heroic era” (p. 149), and his writing becomes a plea for French television to participate in this spirit of rediscovery and rejuvenation. “Our best directors could use television” (p. 149), he writes. Bazin sounds a similar theme in his essays on Cinerama, CinemaScope, and 3D, which he again views not as rivals but as a continuation of an aesthetic of reality by other means. That realist dimension of the expanded screen could explain the historical fact that Cinerama never realized its potential as a vehicle for fantastic spectacles but was successful as a more immersive experience of documentary footage recorded at natural locations and travel destinations. Writing for a variety of publications at a rapid pace, Bazin sometimes recycled the same ideas and themes in various venues. The sections on widescreen film bear traces of that publication history, as similar comments about, for example, stubborn exhibitors and the superiority of Scope over Cinerama appear in several essays. But even these repetitive passages offer a valuable revision of the standard narrative about Bazin, as he embraces widescreen technology as a mechanism for the enhancement of cinematic realism and the emergence of something new and vital within the mature medium of film.

Because of its concern with the mortality of film and the challenge of technological innovation, André Bazin’s New Media could be catalogued along with the growing list of recent studies focused on “the end of cinema” and its aftermath. Although the book is classified as an edited volume and focuses on a particular aspect of Bazin’s career and thought, it is also motivated by more contemporary concerns about the fate of cinema in the era of digital media. A cannily selected final chapter seems almost like a direct address to critics working today. But it would be a mistake to view this volume as a presentist intervention in media studies or a mere addendum to the widely read film theory contained in Hugh Gray’s more comprehensive English translations of What Is Cinema? which first appeared in 1967 and 1971. Seen in retrospect, the first English versions of Bazin’s work were also a curated project that addressed what seemed like the imperatives of their time. They abridged the original four volumes down to two, concentrated on reviews of post-war art cinema, and foregrounded his most obviously theoretical writing. Those books contributed to the urgent effort to establish cinema as a legitimate object of intellectual and academic interest, but they also provided a significantly different answer to the question on their cover than the one revealed over the entirety of Bazin’s life and work. If Bazin’s answers were complex and varied, bouncing between the aesthetic and social dimensions of film, the two English volumes of What Is Cinema? foreground its status as art (though for students of my generation, the hot pink and rave green covers seemed to come straight out of Vegas and sent a contradictory message). Linked with a mystified and seemingly elitist conception of art, Bazin’s work underwent a period of denigration and denunciation in the 1970s and 1980s before experiencing its current revival as an account not only of realism, which remains his primary philosophical concern and resurfaces in theories of digital documentation but also as the technological and social phenomenon highlighted in André Bazin’s New Media. Before he was a theorist or an advocate for a particular school of cinema, Bazin was a daily viewer of film and television whose regular work attempted to capture the centrality of those media in French life during a crucial period of cultural and technological transformation. This book is significant not only as a history and theory of television and “dimensional” cinema but also as an argument for the relevance of classical and modern theory in a contemporary media environment advertised everywhere as a revolution.

This fundamental question about the relationship between canonical theory and our digital age is also raised by the title of the book. Does the phrase “new media” apply to a historical collection focused on television, 3D, and widescreen cinema, with no direct references to the digital revolution that usually comes to mind when we invoke that phrase? Bazin’s “new media” seem old in an age when television is rapidly migrating online, when the promise of virtual reality energizes the technological vanguard, and when video games attract more bodies and dollars than even the most spectacular theatrical cinema. Bazin could not have anticipated and gestured toward all of the paths that moving images would pursue in the intervening decades. But underlying that question is an assumption that media undergo an implicit transition from new to old at some point in their particular histories, that cinema and television have confronted their mortality after decades as the paragons of artistic or popular innovation, and that they belong within a historical conversation rather than our most pressing contemporary debates. When we speak of “newness,” in other words, perhaps we should focus on something other than film or even TV. But cinema was marked from the beginning by its association with innovation and revolution, by its capacity to reinvent itself in response to a seemingly unending series of industrial, social, and aesthetic crises. To examine the history and theory of moving images is to contemplate the problem of newness itself. Cinema, Bazin insists, can never be characterized as either an art or an industry; instead he describes it as an “Industrial Art” (p. 315), with those two words constantly redefining each other in a relationship of conflict and synergy. To imagine what cinema is and what it will become, we have to understand its radical recombination of aesthetics and cultural commerce, innovation and tradition, marketable fantasy and inescapable reality. André Bazin’s New Media reminds us that the history of cinema and television are an essential prologue to the all-pervasive media environment of today because generations of spectators, artists, and critics understood the newness of media through their everyday encounters with images captured by cameras and viewed on those screens. Without that knowledge we risk viewing our own cultural history through the contemporary equivalents of mail slots, like spectators experiencing a live event on their smartphone screens when the action is also unfolding alongside and behind them. Thanks to this volume, that long, panoramic history of new media now includes Bazin in a role more consistent with his unique outlook and enormous contributions.