Through metaphors and allusions to art, science, and religion, André
Bazin's writings on the cinema explore a simple yet profound question:
what is a human? For the famous French film critic, a human is
simultaneously a rational animal and an irrational being. Bazin's idea
of the cinema is a mind-machine where the ethical implications have
priority over aesthetic issues. And in its ability to function as an art
form for the masses, cinema is the only medium that can address an
audience at the individual and community levels simultaneously-- the
audience sees the same film, but each individual relates to the
narrative in a different way. In principle, cinema can unsettle our
routines in productive ways and expand our sense of belonging to a much
larger picture.
By arguing that this dissident Catholic's worldview is
anti-anthropocentric, Angela Dalle Vacche concludes that André Bazin's
idea of the cinema recapitulates the histories of biological evolution
and modern technology inside our consciousness. Through the projection
of recorded traces of the world onto a brain-like screen, the cinema can
open viewers up to self-interrogation and empathy towards Otherness.
Bazin was neither a spiritualist nor an animist or a pantheist, yet his
film theory leads also to ideas of a more cosmological persuasion:
through editing and camera movement, cinema explores our belonging to a
vast universe that extends from the microbes of the microscope to the
stars of the telescope. Such ideas of connectedness, coupled with
Bazin's well-known emphasis of realism, form the foundation for his film
theory's embrace of Italian neorealism. Choosing to avoid a quantitative
naturalism based on accumulation of details, Bazin's theory instead
promotes the kind of cinema
that celebrates perceptual displacement, the objectification of human
behavior, and one's own critical self-awareness.
