BAZIN UNBURIED

14May09

Here’s a definite must-read: in its latest issue, Bright Lights Film Journal features André Bazin’s essay “Fifteen Years of French Cinema,” in its first-ever English translation (by Bert Cardullo). Originally delivered as a lecture in 1957, and later published in the 1983 book Le cinéma français de la liberation à la nouvelle vague, this is an all-encompassing, in-depth look at the major French filmmakers working between 1942 and 1957, the years during and after the occupation, and up through the “sea change” signaled by newcomers Godard, Truffaut, et al. Although the author himself modestly calls it a “rather incomplete survey,” it is in fact packed with insights about auteurs as varied (and in some cases unheralded) as Jacques Becker, André Cayatte, Julien Duvivier, and Max Ophuls, while saving special regard for the “two most original and therefore unclassifiable talents of postwar French cinema,” Jacques Tati and Robert Bresson.