André Bazin, or the Ambiguity of Reality

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.