André Bazin on Adaptation: Cinema’s Literary Imagination (Preview)
by André Bazin. Edited and with an introduction by Dudley Andrew. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. 407 pp. Hardcover: $85.00, Paperback: $34.95 and E-book: $34.95.

Reviewed by Phillip Lopate

“In 1967, thousands of us Anglophone film enthusiasts were knocked sideways when the University of California Press brought out a slim pink volume, André Bazin’s What Is Cinema?,” writes Dudley Andrew in his introduction to André Bazin on Adaptation: Cinema’s Literary Imagination. I was one of those enthusiasts knocked sideways. In fact, a half-century later, I am startled to realize that Bazin has had more of an impact in shaping my way of looking at films than any other critic, including the great Americans such as Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Andrew Sarris, Manny Farber, and Pauline Kael. His emphasis on the integrity of the shot, on deep focus and staging or mise en scène, on the ethical implications of film framing and camera movement, on the values of realism and humanism, all made sense to me, as did his embrace of a “mixed cinema” that could draw unashamedly on literary sources such as the theater and novels.

After this initial collection, Éric Rohmer said, “Let us hope that new volumes will be added to the series, because almost all of André Bazin’s articles deserve to be republished.” What Is Cinema: Volume II indeed followed in 1971, as did several other collections in English, such as French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance (1981) and The Cinema of Cruelty (1982), both edited by François Truffaut, Bazin’s more or less adopted son. It turns out that, in addition to his full-length essays, Bazin wrote hundreds and hundreds of weekly reviews for newspapers and magazines—not only a priceless record of movies released in France from the early 1940s to his untimely death at age forty in 1958 but also a trove of wisdom and insight from one of cinema’s greatest critical intelligences. In France, all these reviews have been hunted down by Hervé Joubert-Laurencin and edited in a massive Écrits complets (Macula Press, 2018). All well and good for those who can read French, but what about the rest of us, hungry for more Bazin?

I’ve been especially eager to read his reviews because, having edited American Movie Critics (2006) for The Library of America, I concluded that the snobbish distinction between film criticism and film reviewing was nonsense: a good daily newspaper columnist like Vincent Canby could cobble together an elegant thousand-word piece that was every bit as smartly essayistic as some lengthy rumination for a quarterly. 

Dudley Andrew is our foremost authority on Bazin, having written his biography and a dozen books on film theory and practice, including the magnificent Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film (1995). Let’s just say there are few film scholars as distinguished and reputable in America today as Mr. Andrew. He has chosen to deal with this mountain of previously inaccessible Bazin material by carving it up into themes, first in André Bazin’s New Media (2014), which covered the critic’s writings on cinemascope, 3-D, and television, and now in a collection related to film adaptation, ably translated by Deborah Glassman and Nataša Ďurovičová. It is an immensely ambitious project, which could run to ten volumes: other titles in the works or contemplated include Bazin on Documentaries, Bazin on Genre, Bazin on Theater, and a compendium of Bazin’s “most beautifully written and entrancing essays.” But each will always constitute soundings or gleanings, not the complete picture. As Andrew warns in his preface, “Do not imagine that this volume constitutes anything like his total output on the subject. With a degree in literature from the École normale supérieure, Bazin inevitably kept in mind cinema’s relation to that art. More important…he believed that, at mid-century, cinema’s immediate future was intricately tied up with literature. In France, at least, the two forms needed each other and ought to be thought of together.”…

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