Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 94

90 Popular Culture Review description, analysis, and deduction-cum-induction. Indeed, Bazin can be regarded as the aesthetic link between film critics and film theorists. During his relatively short writing career, his primary concern was not to answer questions but to raise them, not to establish cinema as an art but to ask, “What is art?” and “What is cinema?” Most contemporary newspaper reviews answer the insistent question, “Is this movie worth the money?” Bazin’s criticism, by contrast, poses the additional question, “If a film is worth seeing, why is it worth seeing as a filmT^ In theoretical response to the latter question, Bazin paradoxically claims that, of all art forms, films penetrate reality to the fullest, yet become most filmic or artful in the process of doing so. To him, a special effect is most effectively fantastic when it is also the most realistic, and movies are most sacred when working against the medium’s affinity for religious iconography. A film like Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953) reveals the most about the souls of its characters as it focuses exclusively on their appearances, while an intensely realistic movie like Scarface seems bom from an artful novel or short story that chose instead to become a film. In practical response to the question, “If a film is worth seeing, why is it worth seeing as a film T Bazin displayed his ability to depict different directors’ styles, and to position each style against the greater evolving realism of his time. For example, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible is “a beautiful work” because of its clarity of style, despite “renouncing fifteen years of realistic cinema.” Bazin’s appreciation of this picture’s uniqueness thus paradoxically transcends the fact that it is the antithesis of his cherished, realistic film essence, for, as he himself put the matter, “we must make a distinction between the value of the style as such and the quality of its individual execution.” The following pieces allow the reader to gauge Bazin’s movement between the role of theoretician, espousing a transcendent reality for film, and the role of practicing reviewer. As the latter, he seeks to give a foreign, underestimated, or overly familiar movie a fresh public perception, while arguing for the application of a different set of values to the popular cinema—as in his consideration of Marilyn Monroe’s screen image and metaphorical dimension in the review below of Niagara. His entwined roles as an analyst, defender, challenger, and expander of common notions of film remain compelling critical tasks or missions. We miss Bazin’s capacity to discuss individual films, filmmakers, techniques, and methods. We have lost his interest in comparing film with other arts, sciences, and philosophies (from algebra to magnetic fields, geology to theology). We lack his sensitivity and openness to different kinds of movies. Most of all, we might revive his ability to stimulate critical thinking about every aspect of cinema, whether in agreement with or refutation of his own arguments. More than once, Andre Bazin has been called the Aristotle of cinema for being the first to try to formulate principles in all areas of this (at the time) unexplored