I just grabbed a copy of Bazin at Work from my library and thought I’d discuss it with you. André Bazin is the most important film critic of all time. As his biographer, Dudley Andrew, argued: “André Bazin’s impact on film art, as theorist and critic, is widely considered to be greater than that of any single director, actor, or producer in the history of cinema. He is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit.” This might overstate things a bit, but nevertheless, he’s a legend.
Here’s how this will work: I’ll quote from one of his essays in the book, give the page number, and spew my thoughts about it all over the ‘page.’ I hope you will join me!
Page 4: “We [can see] that… the highest level of cinematic art coincides with the lowest level of mise en scene.”
Bazin was an outspoken advocate of Renoir/Welles-esque mise en scene over Griffith/Eisenstein-esque montage. Mise en scene aspires to capture events as realistically as possible by recording them in an uninterrupted shot (the opening shot of Touch of Evil). Montage seeks to heighten the power of a sequence by rapidly cutting between linked (by action or psychology) images (the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin or the Psycho shower scene).
Here Bazin means that the best filmic art is captured by an unmoving, always-rolling camera. A static, uncut shot still frames the important action for the audience, but allows the eye to wander and discover within the frame as it does in real life, rather than being told which piece of a busy scene is the most necessary.
Bazin goes on to say that he also prefers deep focus because it further enables the eye to choose what to investigate within the frame. Of course, in real life, everything but what we are looking directly toward is out of focus. But if elements of a film frame are out of focus, we cannot make them come into focus by looking directly at them. If the entire frame is in focus, everything but what we are looking at will be out of focus to our eye anyway, and if we look somewhere else within the frame, it will move into focus as it would in real life.
Both these points bring us to the basic argument over how much the filmmaker should guide the audience’s experience of his work, and how much he should allow the audience to experience the film in their own way.
Static mise en scene and deep focus influence our experience of a movie on a ‘low’ - but very significant - level. In other words, we’re not talking about the difference between conclusive propaganda and an open-ended character study. This has more to do with our moment-by-moment experience of watching of a film. Are our focus and emotions manipulated constantly to give every person exactly the same experience, or are we left to our own methods of seeing and interpreting each scene?
Though it may occasionally be necessary to ‘turn the audience’s head,’ and certain scenes undeniably play better through montage (the tractor scene in Earth), I generally prefer the latter approach. So, like Bazin, I’m an advocate of mise en scene and deep focus (I still love Requiem for a Dream, though). I’d love to see the Odessa Steps sequence shot in deep focus mise en scene and compare the two.
As for ’static’ mise en scene, Bazin actually said (in the next sentence), “Nothing could better heighten the dramatic power of [a particular scene in The Best Years of Our Lives] than the immobility of the camera.” Bazin’s love for Welles indicates he acknowledges that dynamic, or moving-camera mise en scene can often be the best choice for a particular scene.
Despite his affection for mise en scene, Bazin is a realist:
Page 7: “To want one’s film to… show reality… may be an honorable intention. As it stands, however, this does not go beyond the level of ethics. In the cinema, such an intention can result only in a representation of reality. The aesthetic problem begins with the means of that representation. A dead child in close-up is not the same as a dead child in a medium shot is not the same as a dead child in color. Indeed, our eyes, and consequently our minds, have a way of seeing a dead child in real life that is not the way of the camera…”
Indeed, ‘reality’ in film may not be achievable until we can directly link our brains to a virtual reality as convincing as that of The Matrix. But this is a mute point, because all art forms are equally incapable of truly representing reality. The words “A dead child lay on the ground,” no matter how much you embellish the scene, is not the same as a dead child on the ground. The same is true of paintings, sculpture, sketch… anything but an actual dead child.
Thus, ‘reality’ in art must only be as true a representation of reality as is possible for the medium. The development of sound, color, and even the failed Smell-O-Vision expanded film’s ability to represent reality.
Naturally, reality is only desired in films that aspire to be experienced as a possible reality. Nevertheless, this qualification includes most films, excepting surrealistic, expressionistic, and avant-garde films.
Anyway, this is a discussion, so, please… discuss!
Note: I’ve stopped obsessive IMDB linking because of the ‘dialup effect’ and IMDB’s new, bloated page URLs.