Andre Bazin Reading

After reading The Innovators 1950-1960: Divining the Real, my ideas of cinema and photography were contested. It is amazing how a single, frail man can start a whole new movement of cinema critics and ideology of capturing reality versus making art. I thought it was interesting he believed photography and the video camera were created to capture God’s beautiful work exactly as it appears in reality. But when a human uses the device to create a cinema, that pure reality is lost due to the artist’s decisions on what to capture. Therefore he believed cinema could never show reality without losing its artistic qualities. It is a shame this amazing mind was lost at such a young age, and I am curious to how movies and shows of today would be different if Bazin was still around developing and sharing his critiques and theories.