Andre Bazin Quotes

#1. The 'Western' is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself.

Andre Bazin

#2. Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.

Andre Bazin

#3. All films are born free and equal.

Andre Bazin

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

Andre Bazin

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

Andre Bazin

#6. 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

#7. Every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image.

Andre Bazin

#8. Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.

Andre Bazin

#9. 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

#10. [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

#11. 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.

Andre Bazin

#12. 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

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

Andre Bazin