Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife

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 of his 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 array of 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 have opened 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.