André Bazin on Documentary: Cinema's Urge to Explore - Paperback

Documentary is at the core of André Bazin's powerful views of cinema. This collection, curated by renowned film scholar Dudley Andrew, brings to English-language readers sixty-two articles in which Bazin interrogated films about geography, history, animals, painting, and, especially, distant lands and peoples. Both an advocate and critic of popular science and exotic travelogues, Bazin applauded the creativity of impure forms like docu-fiction and the genre he baptized the "essay film." Engaging minor short subjects, as well as classic works by Robert Flaherty, Jean Rouch, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker, Bazin's incisive prose is at once intricately beautiful and playfully entertaining-and his brilliant reflections on both the morality and the aesthetics of documentary remain compelling and urgent today, when spectacles sold as reality flood our screens.

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"No one in the Anglophone world has illuminated the range and nuance of Andr? Bazin's theoretical insights like Dudley Andrew. In this elegantly curated volume of Bazin's writings on nonfiction film, many of them previously unknown and untranslated, Andrew shows Bazin to be the unacknowledged godfather of contemporary documentary studies."--Michael Renov, Haskell Wexler Endowed Chair in Documentary and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California