What is Cinema? Author: André Bazin Publisher: Huazhong University of Science and Technology Press

Based on the authoritative version, this book selects 28 famous articles including "Charlie Chaplin", "The Myth of Monsieur Verdoux", "The Spring and Autumn of the Stage, or, The Death of Moliere", and "A Morphological Study of the Poster Girl". Through this book, we can clearly see that Bazin always insisted on studying the ontology of film. His articles covered many topics such as film ontology, film sociology, film psychology and film aesthetics, which won him the lofty honor of "Aristotle of Film". He advocated the aesthetics of film realism and proposed the theory of "film is the asymptote of reality" and scene arrangement. Driven by Bazin and Cahiers du Cinema, the New Wave movement of French film emerged after World War II.

Andre Bazin

1918-1958

One of the founders of Cahiers du Cinema, a famous French film theorist and critic, he is known as the "Father of the New Wave". His high-quality film reviews published in the 1940s and 1950s were compiled into a four-volume book, What is Cinema?, which has become a classic work and important textbook in the history of film theory and a cornerstone of the development of realistic film theory after World War II. Bazin advocated realistic aesthetics, discovered and expounded the important value of Italian neo-realist directors, expounded the dialectical relationship between montage and depth of field in film language, enriched and summarized the auteur theory. It can be said that "today's French film was born from Bazin's thoughts and explorations" (François Truffaut).