Opening Bazin Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife

"This amazing collection, whose contributors are some of the most distinguished contemporary film scholars, rescues Bazin from the ossified stereotypes that have come to define him in film pedagogy--realism vs. formalism, depth of field vs. editing, humanism vs. Marxism. It sheds light on the complexities and intricacies of the Bazin oeuvre in all its diversity and delineates the ways in which his work illuminates the definitive impact of film as an art in the 20th century."--Mary Ann Doane, Brown University"Elegantly moving across disciplines, history, theory and geography, the essays in Opening Bazin construct an invaluable and vivid picture of Bazin as film theorist, film critic and engaged intellectual. It seems throughout to amount to more than the study of one man. However its richness and diversity is derived from those qualities in Bazin himself, so just as the book transcends its subject, he himself returns not only as its generative figure but also as an emblem of the peculiar and elusive nature of the cinema itself."--Laura Mulvey, Birbeck, University of London