Bazin Quotes

The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.

it was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language.

The most magical thing I have come across is a beautiful face with a beautiful heart and it's you❤ ❤

The preoccupation of Rossellini when dealing with the face of the child in Allemania Anno Zero is the exact opposite of that of Kuleshov with the close-up of Mozhukhin. Rossellini is concerned to preserve its mystery.

Not war but love is the reason for a million of miseries around the world I can see a sea full of broken hearts and my question is why?

for photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.

Reality is not art, but a realist art is one that can create an integral aesthetic of reality.

All films are born free and equal.

By the time she’d run to the edge of the crater, Bazine’s mentor and once-friend was climbing over the edge, bruised and scratched up but mostly unharmed.

Bazine Netal. You will retrieve a steel case last possessed by Imperial stormtrooper TK-1472. Human name: Jor Tribulus.

It was redeemed from sin by Niepce and Lumière. In achieving the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.

The dream of poor Bazin had always been to serve a man of the cloth.

The night was young, and Bazine Netal was hunting.

Undoubtedly the novel has means of its own—language not the image is its material, its intimate effect on the isolated reader is not the same as that of a film on the crowd in a darkened cinema—but precisely for these reasons the differences in aesthetic structure make the search for equivalents an even more delicate matter, and thus they require all the more power of invention and imagination from the film-maker who is truly attempting a resemblance. One

When the essence of a scene demands the simultaneous presence of two or more factors in the action, montage is ruled out.” It can reclaim its right to be used, however, whenever the import of the action no longer depends on physical contiguity even though this may be implied. For example, it was all right for Lamorisse to show, as he did, the head of the horse in close-up, turning obediently in the boy’s direction, but he should have shown the two of them in the same frame in the preceding shot.

O horário é um triturador de lembranças

Italian cinema is assuredly the only one to salvage, from within the very period it depicts a revolutionary humanism.

Feel this,” says Harold Bazin, and crouches and brings her hand to a curved wall which is completely studded with snails. Hundreds of them. Thousands. “So many,” she whispers. “I don’t know why. Maybe because they’re safe from gulls? Here, feel this, I’ll turn it over.” Hundreds of tiny, squirming hydraulic feet beneath a horny, ridged top: a sea star. “Blue mussels here. And here’s a dead stone crab, can you feel his claw?

In point of fact, now that sound has given proof that it came not to destroy but to fulfill the Old Testament of the cinema, we may most properly ask if the technical revolution created by the sound track was in any sense an aesthetic revolution.

„De treizeci şi cinci de ani presez hârtie veche şi cărţi, de treizeci şi cinci de ani mă murdăresc cu litere, astfel încât mă asemăn dicţionarelor enciclopedice, din care, în tot acest timp, am presat treizeci de chintale. Sunt ca un ulcior plin cu apă vie şi cu apă moartă, destul să mă apleci un pic şi încep să curgă din mine idei frumoase. Sunt educat împotriva voinţei mele, de aceea nici măcar nu ştiu care sunt ideile mele şi care cele citite. Aceşti treizeci şi cinci de ani i-am petrecut singur, doar eu cu mine însumi şi cu lumea din jurul meu. Atunci când citesc, nu citesc de fapt, iau doar frazele frumoase, le savurez ca pe bomboane, ca pe un pahar de lichior pe care-l beau încet, până când simt că ideea se răspândeşte în mine, ca alcoolul. Şi astfel, ideea se resoarbe în mine, se resoarbe în creierul şi în inima mea, făcând să-mi pulseze venele până la rădăcină. În felul acesta, într-o singură lună presez circa douăzeci de chintale de cărţi. Ca să găsesc destulă forţă pentru această umilă muncă, în aceşti treizeci şi cinci de ani am băut atâta bere cât să umplu un bazin de înot, lung de cincizeci de metri, loc de joacă pentru crapii de Crăciun

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

The role of cinema here is not that of a servant nor is it to betray the painting. Rather it is to provide it with a new form of existence. The film of a painting is an aesthetic symbiosis of screen and painting, as is the lichen of the algae and mushroom. To be annoyed by this is as ridiculous as to condemn the opera on behalf of theater and music.

The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, 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.

Nu te faci critic decât după ce te-ai convins tu însuți că nu poți fi poet. Înainte de a te resemna la tristul rol de a ține paltoanele și de a marca loviturile ca un băiat de biliard sau unul care servește mingea, multă vreme ai făcut curte muzei, ai încercat s-o deflorezi; dar nu ai avut destulă vigoare pentru asta, ți-ai pierdut răsuflarea și ai căzut, palid și istovit, la piciorul sfântului munte. Înțeleg ura ta. E dureros să vezi pe un altul așezându-se la masa banchetului la care tu nu ai fost poftit și culcându-se cu o femeie care te-a refuzat pe tine. Îl plâng din inimă pe bietul eunuc obligat să asiste la zbenguielile stăpânului său. El e admis în ascunzișurile cele mai secrete ale haremului; conduce cadânele la baie; vede lucind în apa argintie a marilor bazine frumoasele trupuri șiroind de perle, mai lucioase decât agatele; cele mai discrete frumuseți îi apar fără nici un văl. Prezența lui nu stingherește. E un eunuc. Sultanul își mângâie favorita și o sărută pe gura-i ca o rodie, în fața lui. E, într-adevăr, pus într-o situație cât se poate de falsă, și trebuie să se simtă desigur foarte încurcat, neștiind cum să se poarte. În aceeași situație se află și criticul care-l vede pe poet plimbându-se în grădina poeziei cu cele nouă frumoase cadâne, și lăfăindu-se într-o dulce lene la umbra laurilor verzi. Cu greu se stăpânește să nu ridice o piatră de pe drum și să i-o arunce în cap; cu ce sete l-ar nimeri, dincolo de zidul verde unde se află, dacă ar fi destul de îndemânatic. Criticul care nu a creat nimic e un laș; e întocmai ca acel abate care face curte soției unui laic: acesta din urmă nu se poate răzbuna în același fel și nici nu se poate bate cu el.

Le monde s'agite, [...] il réclame la justice et non la pitié,son dû et non vos aumônes; [...] il pense mal parce qu'il ne pense plus vôtre, et pourtant il pense, il vit, infiniment plus vaste que ce coin de terre isolé par des haies, il vit, et nous n'en savons rien, [...] il vit, et nous allons mourir.

Haal nog maar een lamsrug uit de koeling! En Rafael...' - Jenny 'Ik weet het, ik weet het al, bazin... nog een couvert erbij op tafel één!

- Mă iubești? îl întreb. Îl ia prin surprindere, îl lovește în cap ca o margine de bazin, își imagina probabil că marginea era mai încolo și că mai are, dar e aici și acum și s-a dat cu capul de ea și răspunsul corect nu e decât unul, iar el îl scoate pe gură direct din trunchiul cerebral, din creierul primitiv. - Da.

Antonioni, Alain Resnais, Marguerite Duras, writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet and theorists like André Bazin, Béla Balázs and Gilles Deleuze.

Po prvni svetove valce se zacaly stavet pomniky padlym vojakum, aby se na ne nezapomnelo. Historikove rikali, ze pomniky padlym vojakum existovaly uz pred prvni svetovou valkou, ale teprve ve dvacatych letech se v zapadni civilizaci staly univerzalne sdilenym symbolem pameti, a sochari a kamenici byli radi, ze maji hodne zakazek. Pomniky padlym se vetsinou stavely ve forme stely nebo obelisku. Nahore byl kohout nebo svaty Jiri nebo orlice, podle toho, jake byli padli vojaci narodnosti, uprostred vojak se zbrani a klidnym a odhodlanym vyrazem a dole zeny a deti, a antropologove a etnologove rikali, ze je to priznacne pro indoevropskou kulturu. Jmena padlych vojaku byla vetsinou serazena podle abecedy. Nejcastejsi slova na pomnicich byla VLAST, HRDINOVE, MUCEDNICI a PAMATUJ! Nekdy byl na pomniku take napis BUD PROKLETA VALKA! a v nekterych mestech byl postaven pomnik take vojakum, kteri byle za valky odsouzeni k trestu smrti nebo k nucenym pracim, protoze nechteli poslouchat rozkazy. A v roce 1916 byl u Juvincourtu popraven vojak, ktery nemel predpisove kalhoty a nechtel si vzit kalhoty mrtveho kamarada, protoze byly spinave a zakrvacene. A v roce 1920 vymysleli Francouzi pomnik neznamemu vojinovi s vecnym ohnem, ktery mel velky uspech v Anglii a Belgii a Italii a take novych zemich, ktere jeste nemely dejiny, v Ceskoslovensku, v Jugoslavii atd. Neznamym vojinem se mohl stat vojak, kteremu vybuch utrhl hlavu, nebo vojak, ktery zabredl do bazin. Jeden belgicky vojak zabredl u Courtai do bazin az po kolena a ctyri jeho kamaradi ho nemohli vytahnout a vsichni kone uz byli mrtvi. A kdyz po dvou dnech ustupovali po te same ceste, vojak byl porad nazivu, ale koukala mu ven uz jenom hlava a uz nekricel.

...photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.

the literary critic is guilty of imprudently prejudging the true nature of cinema, based on a very superficial definition of what is here meant by reality. Because its basic material is photography it does not follow that the seventh art is of its nature dedicated to the dialectic of appearances and the psychology of behavior. While

The screen uses violence in such a customary fashion that it seems somehow like a devalued currency, which is at one and the same time provoking and conventional.

Finally there is “montage by attraction,” the creation of S. M. Eisenstein, and not so easily described as the others, but which may be roughly defined as the reenforcing of the meaning of one image by association with another image not necessarily part of the same episode—for example the fireworks display in The General Line following the image of the bull.

... coloana vertebrală a lungului manuscris... Fiecare fragment e o vertebră din coloana vertebrală a fricii, având în vârf, sprijinită pe mecanismul obscen al axisului înfipt în atlas, cupola de os în care m-am născut și din care nu există ieșire. Urc de-a lungul ei, mă cațăr pe oasele ei poroase, ..., îmi lipesc urechea de lama arcului vertebral și ascult: măduva curge în interior cu vuiet, ca o cascadă. Sus e marele bazin neural, sunt un castel de apă ce alimentează cu frică îndepărtatul cartier al trupului meu.

Оценка вестерна в чем-то сродни дегустации вин. Только знаток вина может провести различие между крепостью и букетом, содержанием алкоголя и насыщенностью и оценить баланс этих компонентов, в то время как непосвященный может лишь высказать грубую догадку о том, бургундское это или бордо.

Je fais le point. Je ne suis plus modeste. C'est toujours cela que les Rezeau conserveront en moi. Je suis une force de la nature. Je suis le choix de la révolte. Je suis celui qui vit de tout ce qui les empêche de vivre. Je suis la négation de leurs oui plaintifs distribués à toutes les idées reçues, je suis leur contradiction, le saboteur de leur patience renommée, un chasseur de chouettes, un charmeur de serpents, un futur abonné de l'Humanité. "Les Enfants! C'est l'heure." Je suis votre scandale, la vengeance du siècle jetée dans votre intimité. "Les Enfants!" Tais-toi Folcoche. J'arriverai volontairement en retard et tu ne diras rien.

A Bolsa de Valores tem mais gênios que o Prêmio Nobel e mais profetas que o Velho Testamento.

Death is nothing more than the victory of time. To make fast bodily appearance is to snatch it from the course of time, to stow it in the hold of life.

It is not the absence of professional actors that is, historically, the hallmark of social realism nor of the Italian film. Rather, it is specifically the rejection of the star concept and the casual mixing of professionals and of those who just act occasionally. It is important to avoid casting the professional in the role for which he is known. The public should not be burdened with any preconceptions.

painting, the world over, has struck a varied balance between the symbolic and realism. However, in the fifteenth century Western painting began to turn from its age-old concern with spiritual realities expressed in the form proper to it, towards an effort to combine this spiritual expression with as complete an imitation as possible of the outside world. The decisive moment undoubtedly came with the discovery of the first scientific and already, in a sense, mechanical system of reproduction, namely, perspective: the camera obscura of Da Vinci foreshadowed the camera of Niepce. The artist was now in a position to create the illusion of three-dimensional space within which things appeared to exist as our eyes in reality see them. Thenceforth painting was torn between two ambitions: one, primarily aesthetic, namely the expression of spiritual reality wherein the symbol transcended its model; the other, purely psychological, namely the duplication of the world outside. The satisfaction of this appetite for illusion merely served to increase it till, bit by bit, it consumed the plastic arts. However, since perspective had only solved the problem of form and not of movement, realism was forced to continue the search for some way of giving dramatic expression to the moment, a kind of psychic fourth dimension that could suggest life in the tortured immobility of baroque art.a The

Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism. No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image.

But realism in art can only be achieved in one way—through artifice.

Orson Welles started a revolution by systematically employing a depth of focus that had so far not been used. Whereas the camera lens, classically, had focused successively on different parts of the scene, the camera of Orson Welles takes in with equal sharpness the whole field of vision contained simultaneously within the dramatic field. It is no longer the editing that selects what we see, thus giving it an a priori significance, it is the mind of the spectator which is forced to discern, as in a sort of parallelepiped of reality with the screen as its cross-section, the dramatic spectrum proper to the scene. It

and de Sica are less spectacular but they are no less determined to do away with montage and to transfer to the screen the continuum of reality.

O ponto de partida está em observar a relação entre Preço e Lucro da Ação, o famoso P/L. Quando esta relação está abaixo de 20, podemos começar a prestar atenção na empresa. Abaixo de 15: “Opa! Está ficando interessante!”. Abaixo de 10 pode ser uma oportunidade clara, mas abaixo de 5, preste atenção, pode ser um negócio arriscado. Obviamente, este fator não pode ser observado isoladamente. O P/L deve estar conciliado com uma boa Rentabilidade sobre o Patrimônio Líquido (RPL) ou Return On Equity (ROE). Acima de 10% seria ideal, mas para começar, 8% já seria um bom indicativo. De pouco adianta a empresa ter boa rentabilidade se ela não reparte parte dos lucros com seus acionistas, então o Dividend Yield também deve ser considerado na análise. Para Décio Bazin, autor do livro “Faça Fortuna com Ações”, um DY mínimo de 6% é o recomendável. Vale lembrar que estamos traduzindo Buffett e Munger para a realidade brasileira. Um quarto aspecto fundamental para iniciar uma análise de investimento é observar o grau de endividamento da companhia. Uma empresa que deve mais do que o valor do próprio patrimônio líquido, deve ser evitada. Neste

The structures of the mise-en-scène flow from it: decor, lighting, the angle and framing of the shots, will be more or less expressionistic in their relation to the behavior of the actor. They contribute for their part to confirm the meaning of the action.

Finally, the breaking up of the scenes into shots and their assemblage is the equivalent of an expressionism

time, a reconstruction of the event according to an artificial and abstract duration: dramatic duration. There is not a single one of these commonly accepted assumptions of the film spectacle that is not challenged by neorealism.

FOREWORD by François Truffaut

I am prepared to see the fundamental humanism of the current Italian films as their chief merit.b They

It is by way of its poetry that the realism of De Sica takes on its meaning, for in art, at the source of all realism, there is an aesthetic paradox that must be resolved. The faithful reproduction of reality is not art. We are repeatedly told that it consists in selection and interpretation. That is why up to now the “realist” trends in cinema, as in other arts, consisted simply in introducing a greater measure of reality into the work: but this additional measure of reality was still only an effective way of serving an abstract purpose, whether dramatic, moral, or ideological.

neorealism runs counter to the traditional categories of spectacle—above all, as regards acting

it calls upon the actor to be before expressing himself. This requirement does not necessarily imply doing away with the professional actor but it normally tends to substitute the man in the street, chosen uniquely for his general comportment, his ignorance of theatrical technique being less a positively required condition

neorealism is more an ontological position than an aesthetic one. That is why the employment of its technical attributes like a recipe do not necessarily produce it, as the rapid decline of American neorealism proves.

Italian neorealism contrasts with previous forms of film realism in its stripping away of all expressionism and in particular in the total absence of the effects of montage. As in the films of Welles and in spite of conflicts of style, neorealism tends to give back to the cinema a sense of the ambiguity of reality.

But does one not, when coming out of an Italian film, feel better, an urge to change the order of things, preferably by persuading people, at least those who can be persuaded, whom only blindness, prejudice, or ill-fortune had led to harm their fellow men?

Potemkin turned the cinema world upside down not just because of its political message, not even because it replaced the studio plaster sets with real settings and the star with an anoynmous crowd, but because Eistenstein was the greatest montage theoretician of his day, because he worked with Tissé, the finest camerman of his day, and because Russia was the focal point of cinematographic thought—in short, because the “realist” films Russia turned out secreted more aesthetic know-how than all the sets and performances and lighting and artistic interpretation of the artiest works of German expressionism. It is the same today with the Italian cinema. There is nothing aesthetically retrogressive about its neorealism, on the contrary, there is progress in expression, a triumphant evolution of the language of cinema, an extension of its stylistics. Let us first take a good look at the cinema to see where it stands today. Since the expressionist heresy came to an end, particularly after the arrival of sound, one may take it that the general trend of cinema has been toward realism.

Nothing happens in Ladri di Biciclette that might just as well not have happened. The worker could have chanced upon his bicycle in the middle of the film, the lights in the auditorium would have gone up and De Sica would have apologized for having disturbed us, but after all, we would be happy for the worker’s sake. The marvelous aesthetic paradox of this film is that it has the relentless quality of tragedy while nothing happens in it except by chance. But it is precisely from the dialectical synthesis of contrary values, namely artistic order and the amorphous disorder of reality, that it derives its originality. There is not one image that is not charged with meaning, that does not drive home into the mind the sharp end of an unforgettable moral truth, and not one that to this end is false to the ontological ambiguity of reality. Not one gesture, not one incident, not a single object in the film is given a prior significance derived from the ideology of the director.

It is clear to what an extent this neorealism differs from the formal concept which consists of decking out a formal story with touches of reality. As for the technique, properly so called, Ladri di Biciclette, like a lot of other films, was shot in the street with nonprofessional actors but its true merit lies elsewhere: in not betraying the essence of things, in allowing them first of all to exist for their own sakes, freely; it is in loving them in their singular individuality.

To explain De Sica, we must go back to the source of his art, namely to his tenderness, his love. The quality shared in common by Miracolo a Milano and Ladri di Biciclette, in spite of differences more apparent than real, is De Sica’s inexhaustible affection for his characters.

inherited from the theater, the actor expresses something: a feeling, a passion, a desire, an idea. From his attitude and his miming the spectator can read his face like an open book.

He loved the cinema, but still more he loved life, people, animals, the sciences, the arts;

Is not neorealism primarily a kind of humanism and only secondarily a style of film-making?

depth of focus brings the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality. Therefore it is correct to say that, independently of the contents of the image, its structure is more realistic; (2) That it implies, consequently, both a more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution on his part to the action in progress.

as in Welles’ pictures (or in Renoir’s) through depth of focus but by virtue of a diabolic speed of vision which seems for the first time to be wedded here to the pure rhythm of attention. Undoubtedly all good editing takes this into consideration. The traditional device of shot-reverse-shot divides up the dialogue according to an elementary syntax of interest.

In a world already once again obsessed by terror and hate, in which reality is scarely any longer favored for its own sake but rather is rejected or excluded as a political symbol, the Italian cinema is certainly the only one which preserves, in the midst of the period it depicts, a revolutionary humanism.

Când absența celuilalt te face să trăiești ca într-un delir, să nu-ți găsești locul și echilibrul, înseamnă dependență. Dependența crește în tine ca o boală, te stăpânește și te ucide. Dorul de celălalt ajunge să te deformeze în așa hal încât să nu mai știi cine ești. Am trăit în afara firii mele. Am intrat în firea lui ca într-un bazin. Cine-ți oferă respectul lui dacă vede în tine numai lipsa ta de respect? Celălalt se comportă cu tine cum îi permiți să se comporte. Celălalt este ceea ce ceri de la el, prin ceea ce ești. Demnitatea este punctul de unde începe cursa. Înseamnă în primul rând să nu aluneci spre ieșirea din tine, spre abandon. Orice formă de nepăsare de sine este o trădare de sine. Cum să fii onest cu celălalt dacă nu ești cu tine? Slăbiciunile oricărora dintre noi sunt un spectacol. A nu lăsa emoțiile să ne invadeze înseamnă doar a ne apăra teritoriul, a ne ține sănătoasă respirația și a nu-l lăsa pe celălalt să ne sufoce. E un act de iubire, nu de egoism. Să te păstrezi nealterat, să nu te contaminezi cu sinele celuilalt e un act de maturitate, nu de trufie. Sunt multe feluri de a trăi în cuplu. Libertatea este singura formă care definește iubirea profundă. Maturitatea nu-ți știrbește din naivitate, din inocență. Dimpotrivă. Te determină să-ți asumi față de celălalt fiecare gest. Suma gesturilor pe care simți că vrei să le faci pentru celălalt îți definește iubirea matură, profundă.

The sound of a windshield-wiper against a page of Diderot is all it took to turn it into Racinian dialogue

Although we all knew him for a good and honest man, his goodness was nevertheless an endless surprise, so abundantly was it manifest. To talk with him was what bathing in the Ganges must be for a Hindu. Such was his generosity of spirit that I sometimes found myself deliberately running down a common acquaintance just for the pleasure of hearing André defend him.

His chronic physical ill health was paralleled by his constantly surprising moral strength. He would borrow money aloud but lend it with a whisper. In his presence everything became simple, clear, and aboveboard.

Whether the world be good or evil I cannot say, but I am certain that it is men like Bazin who make it a better place. For, in believing life to be good and behaving accordingly, André had a beneficial effect on all who came in contact with him, and one could count on the fingers of one hand those who behaved badly toward him.

Undoubtedly there are other examples in the history of techniques and inventions of the convergence of research, but one must distinguish between those which come as a result precisely of scientific evolution and industrial or military requirements and those which quite clearly precede them. *Thus, the myth of Icarus had to wait on the internal combustion engine before descending from the platonic heavens.* But it had dwelt in the soul of everyman since he first thought about birds. To some extent, one could say the same thing about the myth of cinema, but its forerunners prior to the nineteenth century have only a remote connection with the myth which we share today and which has prompted the appearance of the mechanical arts that characterize today's world.