André Bazin, Television Critic

Criticism was both a public and daily activity for Bazin. In the postwar years, he was involved in just about every magazine that had anything to do with early film culture. This was a process that would culminate in his founding, along with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, of Cahiers du Cinéma in 1951. It was also around this time that his fragile health first became critical. It is for this reason, among others, that Bazin, stuck in his bed, turned to television. He came to see the tube as an important part of the visual world, and he wanted to describe it.

On the little TV screen the person who looks at us is supposed to talk to us face to face, person to person; he or she is among us. This is where that feeling of intimacy that presides over Impromptu du dimanche comes from. But let this interlocutor stumble and lose the thread of his discourse, and the falseness of this illusory situation is brutally revealed, because we can do nothing for him and he, many kilometers away from us, finds himself alone, if not disabled, in front of soulless recording machines.

Television gives rise to a new notion of presence, void of all visible human content – nothing, in short, but the presence of the spectacle to itself [la présence du spectacle à lui-même]. A tracking shot, in television, never passes through the same place twice. No two framings are alike, any more than there are identical leaves on trees. Let us savor the image that we will never see twice.

Whether improvised, semi-improvised, or carefully rehearsed, TV commentary should respond to certain requirements. Commentaries that accompany films of a documentary nature ought to be inspired by the restraint that has been adopted by cinema. They should also be competent and effective, for example, providing the names of the animals instead of going on ecstatically about their fur or their speed, which everyone can see.

André Bazin is sometimes called “the inventor of film criticism”. Entire generations of film critics and filmmakers, especially those associated with the Nouvelle Vague, are indebted to his writings on film. Film opens a “window on the world”, according to Bazin. His writings would also be important for the development of the auteur theory. Bazin: “It has always seemed to me that one of the main arguments against the denigrators of the mechanical arts that have invaded modern life lay in the fact that they are both a tremendous means of cultural dissemination and a form of entertainment.”

Television maintains, first of all, a quotidian intimacy with life and the world, such that it penetrates every day into our living rooms, not to violate our privacy, but rather to become part of it and enrich it. Even more precisely, TV, in the infinite variety of its revelations, favors man. Each time a human being who deserves to be known enters into the field of this iconoscope, the image is made richer and something of this man is rendered to us.

If television were cinema, the ideal speakerine would be someone more or less like the music hall presenter: a pretty girl in a bathing suit, agreeable and spirited. Of course you can imagine options that are more intimately persuasive, in the genre of the “White Tooth Smile,” for example, but the speakerine quickly installs herself in the mind of the television viewer as a figure from his private life: a person whose daily visits must be suitable for the whole family, especially for the wife.

Television is still rather frowned on – particularly by the intellectuals. How did you come to it?

Renoir: Through being immensely bored by a great number of contemporary films, and being less bored by certain television programs. I ought to say that the television shows I’ve found most exciting have been certain interviews on American TV. I feel that the interview gives the television close-up a meaning that is rarely achieved in the cinema. [...]

Rossellini: Let me make an observation on that note. In modern society, men have an enormous need to know each other. Modern society and modern art have been destructive of man: man no longer exists – but television is an aid to his rediscovery. Television, an art without traditions, dares to go out to look for man.

The fact that one can reasonably ask oneself such a question today, and that it requires some thinking through to come to an optimistic answer, should be enough to justify astonishment and musing.