Dudley Andrew, the biographer and chief advocate of André Bazin, has recently organized, translated, and introduced the famous film theorist’s copious startling articles on the new media of the 1950s: television, CinemaScope, and 3-D. Far more a cultural critic than anyone knew, and in the mode of his contemporary Roland Barthes, Bazin wrote cunningly about the technological, economic, sociological, and aesthetic concerns of these challenges to the regime of standard cinema. Along the way, in these 57 pieces, his views on realism and on film style, as well as on theater and painting, are reinforced. Bazin was nothing if not consistent; better than that, he was agile and not in the least sentimental when it came to historical changes in cinema, the artform he nevertheless believed the most important of the century.
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