What Cinema Is!: Bazins Quest and its Charge

What Cinema Is! offers an engaging answer to Andre Bazin’s famous question through a sweeping look back over the phenomenal ascendancy of a certain “idea of cinema.” Written by one of the foremost film scholars of our time, this provocative volume proclaims cinema’s distinct value not just for the last century but for our current audio–visual culture. Whatever cinema may yet become, this unique “idea” should orient and guide it.   Examining cinema’s institutions and its social force – but always through the qualities of key films – What Cinema Is!  testifies to the power of something that didn’t even exist before 1895. From the art films cherished by cinephiles after World War II through the banner years of the New Wave to a technologically “expanded” cinema, Andrew traces the long nerve of this idea that has made cinema supremely alive to (and in) our times.

Acknowledgments. Prologue: The Target of Film Theory. 1 The Camera Searching in the World. Is a Camera Essential? The Cahiers Axiom. Tracing Bazin′s Trace. Images Contested Today. 2 The Editor′s Discovery of Form. Bazin’s Forerunners. Documentaries in the Cauldron of History. The Cahiers Line. Pursuing Cinema in the Twenty–First Century. 3 The Projector as Spectator′s Searchlight. The Power of Projection. Opening the Screen′s Dimensions. Frame as Threshold. Writing out of the Frame. 4 The Evolution of the Subjects of Cinema. Modern Film: Between Classic and Avant–Garde. The Ontogeny of Cinema. Credits and Auteurs: An Ecology of Adaptation. Fidelity: The Economy of Adaptation. Index.

Dudley Andrew is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale University. The author of many books, including Mists of Regret (1995) and Popular Front Paris (2005), he is an Officier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.