Andre Bazin famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.
-- Andre Bazin

#Photography #Art #Doe
The 'Western' is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself.
-- Andre Bazin

#Cinema #Genre #Western
All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.
-- Andre Bazin

#Photography #Art #Flower
Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. The image--its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism--has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last the equal of the novelist
-- Andre Bazin

#Writing #Mean #Reality
How has The Grand Illusion held up over the years? It is not enough to say that it has retained its power. Not only has the stature of the film remained undiminished by the passage of time (except in a few minor details), but the innovation, the audacity, and, for want of a better word, the modernity of the direction have acquired an even greater impact.
-- Andre Bazin

#Impact #Years #Innovation
All films are born free and equal.
-- Andre Bazin

#Film #Born #Born Free
Every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image.
-- Andre Bazin

#Objects
Photography can strip from the world that spiritual dust and grime with which our eyes have covered it.
-- Andre Bazin

#Spiritual #Photography #Eye
A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith.
-- Andre Bazin

#Drawing #Faithful #May
The photographer proceeds, via the intermediary of the lens, to a point where he literally takes a luminous imprint, a cast... [But] the cinema realizes the paradox of moulding itself on the time of the object and of taking the imprint of its duration as well.
-- Andre Bazin

#Duration #Lenses #Cinema
[The photograph] is the object itself... [It] shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.
-- Andre Bazin

#Becoming #Virtue #Photograph
Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.
-- Andre Bazin

#Photography #Art #Obsession
The essential factor in the transition of the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process... rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays not part. The solution is not to be found in the result achieved, but in the way of achieving it.
-- Andre Bazin

#Photography #Lying #Men

You may also like:

Andrew Sarris
Film critic
Chris Marker
Writer
Claude Chabrol
Film director
Eric Rohmer
Film director
Francois Truffaut
Film director
Gilles Deleuze
Philosopher
Ingmar Bergman
Writer
Jacques Rivette
Film director
Jean Renoir
Film director
Jean-Luc Godard
Film director
Jeanne Moreau
Actress
Orson Welles
Actor
Robert Bresson
Film director
Roberto Rossellini
Film director
Rudolf Arnheim
Author
Serge Daney
Film critic
Sergei Eisenstein
Film director
Siegfried Kracauer
Writer
Stanley Cavell
Philosopher
Christian Metz
Film theorist