Andre Bazin's New Media

André Bazin Greets the New Media of the 1950s

DUDLEY ANDREW

It took the expanded media environment of our twenty-first century to get me to look beyond André Bazin’s film theory to see what kind of media critic he might have been. How did he come to terms with all the threats and changes to cinema that arose just as he started the journal he is most associated with, Cahiers du Cinéma? I have been first among those who take him to be the patron saint of cinephilia, an organizer of film clubs, the man behind the auteur theory that came to dominate Cahiers and raised the prestige of cinema as art. But in fact, anyone who looks closely can tell he was a born cultural critic, intent on clarifying the most prominent or fascinating phenomena around him. After World War II, cinema was unquestionably the most prominent and fascinating of all, clearly the era’s most crucial and sophisticated cultural manifestation. As daily film critic for France’s largest circulation newspaper, Le Parisien Libéré, and as regular contributor to L’Ecran Français, the popular weekly for real film lovers that had been born in the Resistance, his job and his pleasure was to raise the level of discussion about what was playing in the more than three hundred movie theaters in Paris.

Thanks to his legendary curiosity and broad educational background, he took every opportunity to instruct himself and his readers on topics that any given film, or the cinema as a whole, might bring up, topics not just about the movies but about technology, science, art history, and so on. Those opportunities became far more frequent after 1950, when he was recruited to write regularly for two periodicals that were just being launched and that are exceedingly prominent to this day: Radio-Cinéma-Télévision, which is now Télérama, and L’Observateur politique, économique et littéraire (later called France-Observateur and then Le Nouvel Observateur). In the title of the first of these, cinema finds itself sandwiched between two rival media. As forL’Observateur, from the outset it has been a wide-ranging cultural news magazine with the visibility of Newsweek but the sophistication of The New Republic, only even more to the left. Today the Huffington Post may come closest to its stance and coverage. Readers expected extended film reviews from Bazin but also articles on trends in the entertainment industry.

Bazin’s first pieces for each journal appeared in September 1950, during a long forced respite from his daily cinema-going that was occasioned by a serious bout of tuberculosis. Writing from his new suburban home and addressing an educated general readership, he declared that he treasured this opportunity, first to assess cinema among the arts, and second to analyze its response to the political and technological crises of the time. The crises were American in origin, coming to France on the heels of the divisive Marshall Plan and, in the realm of cinema, the hard-to-swallow Blum-Byrnes accord, which dismantled most protections for French films against the Hollywood juggernaut. And Hollywood needed Europe more than ever following the 1948 Paramount divestiture decree, when, suddenly, the major studios lost their exhibition wing. Independent and foreign producers now could break into the formerly closed U.S. market. As the majors scrambled to keep control, long-term alliances broke down. A free-for-all ensued, exactly the moment for entrepreneurs to come up with attention-grabbing schemes. Evidence of this is all over the pages of American newspaper ads after 1950, promising spectacles never before seen on screen, while upstart distributors flirted with censorship as they promoted risqué movies from Germany, Sweden, or Italy.

The usually fiscally conservative studios also turned their engineers loose, looking to gamble on the format of cinema itself, understanding that, given their tremendous advantage in capital, they could still control exhibition after altering its format: why not make the movies gargantuan? Why not surround spectators with stereo sound and even put them into the midst of images projected in three dimensions? Already lagging behind Hollywood in color, all other producers would take years to catch up to these new technologies. Of course Hollywood also had the nightmare of television in view. A minor threat in 1948 (when there were still under 50,000 sets in operation, 80 percent of them on the East Coast), TV was growing exponentially as a formidable, unstoppable rival for the affection of the mass audience. Against television’s convenient, low-cost home viewing, Hollywood realized it had better offer increased spectacle. And so, after years of low metabolism in research and development departments, new inventions suddenly rolled out of the labs. With predictable fanfare, Hollywood promised to renew not just the movies, but the cinema experience.

Bazin, who traveled twice to South America, never tried to visit the U.S. This may have secured his often-praised critical distance, but it also meant that he surely missed elements and details that could have contributed to a larger account of things. He didn’t monitor drive-in theaters, for instance, which were unknown before 1950 but grew to nearly a quarter of all the screens in the country by the 1960s, and which competed head to head with TV for the newly mobile suburban audience. One can only imagine his anatomy of this social phenomenon and his analysis of the genres that thrived on screens set in front of enormous parking lots. But to my knowledge, he could not have found a single drive-in in France.

Drive-ins would be difficult commodities to export overseas; besides, they were developed by the seamier side of an already highly scattered exhibition wing of the industry. But films and technology are readily exportable, and these are in the hands of producers and distributors. In their fight with TV, the major studios needed to expand to Europe and beyond, not just to amortize the costs of their research and development units, but to pay for the greater expense of movies made in new formats, including ballooning publicity costs. Elaborate campaigns prepared the way for premieres of new formats at film festivals and in key theaters in many European metropolises. Bazin had a front row seat from which to watch Hollywood’s gaudy response to its TV crisis, but he was never in broadcast range of American TV, which would have allowed him to better measure the strength of its threat. His deep concern lay not with America, of course, but with the effect of its entertainment war on standard cinema the world over. And what about the future of TV in France, which was being born as he wrote his essay? For better or worse, it lagged behind the United States and operated under complete governmental supervision. What should it look like and how might it affect French cinema? Might there be a Parisian entertainment war too?

A large and extremely attentive readership followed his reports and essays, which mix historical information, technical explanation, aesthetic speculation, and cultural opinion. A critic by profession, he was expected to pronounce on the quality of what was available on screen, no matter the size or type of screen. But he was reluctant to pummel the first efforts of any new form, because, ever bearing the attitude of an evolutionary scientist, he was fascinated by all early expressions emerging from a new cultural configuration, including those that were likely to fail to develop.

Bazin never questioned evolution, accepting not just Darwin on biological species but Malraux on the arts. Having experienced his first talkie when he was twelve, he facetiously entertained the notion that the cinema was maturing at about the rate of a human being, though a bit slower. After the war, it was striving mightily to achieve adulthood, while being pulled this way and that by hormones and social pressures it scarcely understood. This was nothing like traditional arts such as painting and theater, which took millennia to arrive at a range of consistent genres. Traditional arts were born with human civilization and will expire only when it does. They may reach notable high points—classical periods—and they may undergo the vicissitudes of history that enervate them for a time, but we can count on their survival as long as there are people around who care about words, stories, drawing, shaping, or playing games of imitation.

By contrast, there’s nothing natural about the technological arts that began appearing in the nineteenth century. Aimed at mass culture, their paramount value must be measured far more by their social function than by their aesthetic achievement. Cinema, clearly the most potent art of the twentieth century, has an amazing capacity to capture, express, or process contemporary experience, even if, on the formal level, it could hardly be expected to reach the depth and significance of its noble predecessors. No one should denigrate cinema if in its first decades a very large part of celluloid and projection time was given over simply to providing things on screen that people cared to see conveniently (like boxing matches, variety acts, stage plays, and exotic places and peoples). Original concoctions on film, including adaptations from novels and oft-told stories, amount to a cinematic surplus, so to speak. Just half a century old when Bazin began his career as critic, genuinely innovative filmmaking could not be expected to often reach the level of sophistication that is more routine in the other arts; but by the 1950s Bazin believed that the most advanced cinema (the nouvelle avant-garde of the time) had taken on its shoulders the concerns and sensibility of the period, sharing these especially with the novel. No matter what your assessment of the traditional arts in the postwar era (when action painting, theater of the absurd, and the nouveau roman were causing their own stir), you had to credit the most ambitious postwar films as operating in the same cultural terrain as painting, theater, and the novel. The cinema had evolved to a point where it deserved the high-flown critical attention Bazin and others were paying it in journals like Esprit and Les Temps Modernes.

Yet as an industrial art, cinema is subject to technological and economic forces that mock any idealist notion of aesthetic evolution. Bazin writes fondly of Hollywood, realizing how terribly vulnerable it is, despite the way it so brashly puffs out its chest. He imagines some crisis or miracle in the world of economics and technology that may extinguish Hollywood and cinema in toto, or more likely, change it into some new medium, scarcely recognizable to his generation of critics. Never sentimental, Bazin will not retreat to a notion of pure cinema impervious to the marketplace. He may personally have looked forward to the more arty films, that 5 percent forming the aesthetic leading edge in each year’s march of 3,000 or so movies made worldwide, but cinema depended on being a world phenomenon and a mass art. To him this was non-negotiable. And, as much as he hated to admit it, cinema probably depended on economic and political concerns hostile to art.

This was patently true of French television, which he watched wriggle to survive in the harshest of incubators, a frigid climate drifting to France from the Hollywood entertainment wars and the Cold War. The trumped-up homegrown programming that he followed nightly on the single ORTF channel that served all of France continually provided him with ideas about media as a whole, about the inevitability yet unpredictability of its evolution. He wanted television to succeed and to do so on its own terms, but he knew the terms would never really be its own. He took a more cynical tone when addressing the other new media of the day, since these came to France as imposed by Hollywood’s determination to alter the cinema experience for its own gain. The public and the art form might gain as well, but that seemed a secondary issue to those making decisions. A lot was at stake for France with television and even more was at stake for cinema with CinemaScope, Cinerama, and 3D. Let’s begin with TV.

TV: THE HOMELY BABY IN THE IMAGE FAMILY

Years ago, in a dramatic personal moment that I’ve written about, I discovered a page of Bazin’s typed notes neatly folded inside his personal copy of Sartre’s L’Imaginaire.¹ I was instantly drawn to the way these notes suspend cinema as a medium between past and present, with photography as a frozen record of the past on one side and television as a live extension of sight on the other. Cinema’s distinct ontology, he intimated, derives from its being an image that, eerily, is both from the past and alive: life deferred indefinitely, re-animated at every projection. Today it is not cinema but his mention of television that fascinates me, and his premonition in these notes of what it might become. Ruminating in the 1940s, Bazin could only deal with TV as a thought problem, but by the 1950s it had become a genuine problem, with ramifications in every sphere he cared about: the artistic, the cultural, the political, the educational.

Bazin tucked this page inside the section of L’Imaginaire called The Family of Images, in which Sartre distinguishes paintings from memories, caricatures, hallucinations, and so forth. To this image family Bazin adds photos, films, and broadcast television—the newborn baby of the family. Whereas cinema inevitably projects images that lag days, weeks, or years behind the moment when they were recorded, television can be said to depend on the liveness of present perception. All viewers reached by a broadcast participate simultaneously in one and the same event. This essential difference may have become smudged over the decades, since the institution of television increasingly replays events recorded earlier, something Bazin already considered in his page of notes. And nearly right away, in the 1950s, entire movies would often show up on TV. But as the coronation of Elizabeth in 1952, as well as the routine of sports matches, nightly news, and (for us) the Olympics, the Oscars, and other live broadcasts attest, TV is essentially distinct from cinema. André Bazin’s philosophy of the image can be found within that distinction.

But we must be careful; Bazin was not prepared to pronounce on the essence of cinema, let alone TV, or to come too quickly to a definition of télégénie equivalent to the photogénie that critics in the 1920s rhapsodized. Indeed, TV was the new example that let him recognize that instability must also be the state of cinema, though to a lesser degree. He realized that the new technologies—and he used this term—needed time to steady themselves, since their forms could still be in flux and their social functions had hardly been tested. This was even truer of a completely new medium like television than of technologies like CinemaScope that he deemed supplements of the already established cinema system.

Since television was effectively starting from scratch, one should not hastily circumscribe its essence. Nor should one immediately impugn its chances eventually to contribute even to intellectual culture in the manner of the other arts. After all, the pundits of 1908 who had ridiculed the cinema for its baby talk had to eat their words twice, first in the 1920s, during the efflorescence of the silent screen, and then more recently when sound cinema, against all prognosis, had proved the film auteur to be the equal of the novelist.² Might the same be true a few decades hence with regard to TV? Bazin wasn’t sure; he claimed that the priority of utility over expressive creativity was evident in radio, a medium he was fond of, but which he took to be, in the main, a site where one could encounter creativity produced elsewhere, more like an orchestra hall than an orchestra. The same was surely truer for TV, even with the addition of the visual dimension, for at the time he wrote, French TV was limited to a single channel, and this hampered the experimentation and competition that gave radio at least a range of avenues. Bazin, who scoffed at the 1920s refrain Ça c’est du cinéma, rebuked anyone ready to say, Ça c’est de la télévision.³

Approaching television as he did all phenomena, through its evolution, Bazin predicted an optimistic tale of development, but no instant gratification. One couldn’t expect TV to achieve eloquence and maturity in a single decade if it took cinema half a century to do so. Indeed, for this to happen, TV would have to focus so completely on a single avenue of progress that it would sacrifice other possible aesthetic and social routes. Bazin didn’t mind seeing it drift. In fact, it wasn’t drifting enough to suit him. Operating on but a single channel was an immediate impediment. Another impediment, he went on to argue, came from technology itself, which actually works against the future it lays before us. Every technological invention seems futuristic when it first appears, but its bulky machinery then weighs down its flight. Just look at cinema. Its advances have been miniscule given the amazing changes that have occurred in civilization since its invention (Bazin mentions automobiles and airplanes, and he could have talked about social revolutions too). He was shocked to be watching two-hour feature films in 1952 just the way his parents had in 1918, the year of his birth. Where were the innovations that science had made in other spheres? His favorite whipping boy was Thomas Edison, whose quite arbitrary choice of 35mm as the standard gauge hampered the development of larger gauges that might have genuinely improved exhibition. Except for sound, films looked and acted very much the way they had for decades. Bazin also repeatedly mentions the retardation by a quarter century of Henri Chrétien’s 1926 anamorphic lens (the Hypergonar), the squelching of Abel Gance’s Polyvision, and the fact that a variable-shaped screen—such as the one Eisenstein proposed in The Dynamic Square and which Bazin supported—was infeasible.

But why infeasible? Not just because of capitalism, he wrote (since the Soviets showed no interest even in implementing what inventors had already come up with). Technological status quo must be the default of every mass industry, and it certainly was a drag on cinema for decades. Once the world’s 30,000 screens had been outfitted for sound, once thousands of exhibitors and projectionists had grown accustomed to their routine, even excellent supplements had a terrible time making a go of it, including the one process that had some economic punch behind it, Technicolor. Bazin was fatalistic and disappointed about the mediocre color and 3D processes that won out in the 1950s after having taken so long to be implemented at all. Just as Edison’s sacrosanct 35mm standard doomed a superior variant, the VistaVision system, so TV was almost certainly stuck with the mere 625 lines (525 in the United States) that were mandated for it in 1938. Even if some 2,000-line version had suddenly become available, it would not have been implemented, since this would render obsolete all of the current broadcasting and receiving equipment. From this perspective, it is reasonable to think that TV as we know it will last for a long time just the way it is. Bazin recognizes that color TV may in fact be on the near horizon, but he predicts—rightly, it turns out—that it will come about via a transition that will be smooth and that . . . will not overturn TV any more radically than it did cinema.⁴

In sum, Bazin felt that while we should not essentialize the medium, a provisional essence could be detected because, for the foreseeable future, television’s possibilities would be limited by the hardware in place as well as by strict institutional conditions (in France, a single channel under state supervision and censorship). He characterized this provisional essence in several general articles and in the many reviews of programs he watched, often from his sickbed, when he couldn’t get to Paris for the movies or to work in the office at Cahiers du Cinéma.

IMAGES EN DIRECT: TV IS NOW

Although for its first decades its content was controlled by impersonal institutions (the state in France, three powerful networks in the United States), television was sold as a friendly medium, a domestic one. Its size, its familiar position in the living room, and its utility in providing news and weather reports, often via the kindly voice of an attractive speakerine, immediately distinguished it from going to a movie theater and paying for something that promised to be extraordinary. Bazin wrote often of TV as the replacement for the hearth around which the family gathers to be warm and comfortable while watching—often inattentively—images that have been scrupulously sanitized. But far more critical to Bazin than this important though local social function was TV’s genuinely universal difference from cinema: its default tense is the present tense. Television addresses every viewer within its broadcast range in the now, no matter where they are. Bazin couldn’t get over the fact that a science program he watched let him see through a telescope the very moon whose light was streaming at that moment through the window beside the TV. He turned his chair from TV to window to verify that it was the same object, in its current phase. (Characteristically, he quipped that the moon and stars were not quite present, however, since they are available to us only via a more primary medium, light, which takes its own time. The stars we see on TV or out our window are no longer exactly there.)⁵

Bazin relished the drama and risks of live broadcasts. A daring live TV science program shows the exploration of a diseased lung, in real time, through an invasive bronchial procedure. What if something goes wrong, we ask as we watch? In cinema, what may have gone wrong on the shoot has been eliminated. Not so on live TV, where we suffer now with those who suffer now, and where we share some of the patient’s marvel at looking at his own lung at the very moment it is keeping him alive.

Let’s repeat. Bazin was no purist. As radio had demonstrated prodigiously, prerecorded material can often enhance a live broadcast, but Bazin cautioned that it ought to be recorded under live conditions, so that its more finished style wouldn’t clash with the roughness of the live portion, which, at least in those first years, served as TV’s baseline, and which it seems he had a taste for. Hence, he came down hard on that astronomy program when it intercalated images of a couple of planets that clearly had been taken earlier, all the while pretending that the on-camera astronomer had just swiveled his telescope. Television owes the public an attestation about the status—the tense—of what is sent out and received in the present.

These issues arose most frequently in teleplays, the medium’s most ambitious genre and one Bazin kept up with closely. If TV were going to become an art, everyone assumed it would be through the creative adaptation of good theater or through original dramas written for it. Bazin investigated this hope by triangulating TV with cinema and the stage in a large entertainment arena. Ontologically hybrid, a broadcast teleplay can deliver at least some of the selected perspectives and shot changes available to cinema, but it does so in the present tense of a play put on at a legitimate theater. Bazin writes about British experiments with four cameras that permit the switching of points of view within pure continuity; the TV switcher is completely distinct from the film editor who assembles an illusion of continuity from fragments. If prerecorded segments are called for by the script (or by a particularly audacious director), these can be carefully intercalated, but spatial contiguity should be maintained. He applauded this strategy in one play adapted for TV that took place in a sailors’ dive by a wharf. The set and dialogue implied there to be a barge presumably docked just outside. Scenes on the barge had been prerecorded on film, and unrolled seamlessly after being cued by the movement of the actors as they walked offstage and out of the bar, thus preserving continuity while giving the actors (and the TV cameramen) a few minutes’ break before action resumed back on the live set. This program existed only in a single unbroken ninety-minute block on TV. It was not a movie that could be shown again, and it was more than a play, since its action extended outside, beyond the wings of the stage. In Bazin’s rather conservative appraisal, there are limits to this, however. For instance, it would not have done to cut to some scene in the city. The filmed barge should really serve as a contiguous extension of the barroom stage setting.

With Sartre’s L’Imaginaire no doubt in mind, Bazin meditated on the mode of existence of the teleplay, wondering how its actors can hold up in a kind of ether. There is no audience as at the theater. There is the public, we want to say, but it exists as a statistical sum of individuals watching at the same moment but in ignorance of one another. In fact the actors perform before the cold eye of one or several lenses on television cameras. What if they slip up? At the theater they can be prompted by a complicit or generous audience member sitting somewhere in the first rows, but on TV they are naked and alone. This accounts for the double chagrin Bazin claimed he felt when, especially in the first years of TV dramas, slip-ups were common. He felt ashamed for the actor but also for his own impotence. At the cinema, by contrast, the editor restores everyone’s potency