Bazin, Television Critic

A “writer of cinema” is what François Truffaut called André Bazin (1918-1958),1 the man who once took him under his wing. Bazin’s influence and legacy can hardly be overstated. Entire generations of film critics and filmmakers, especially those associated with the Nouvelle Vague, are indebted to his writings on film. With his more than two thousand texts, he provided a completely new direction to cinema as an art form. For Jean-Luc Godard, Bazin was a “filmmaker who did not make films, but who made cinema by talking about it, like a peddler.”2

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. A few years earlier, he helped found the famed Festival du Film Maudit in Biarritz, where he would meet some of his future allies at Cahiers and later Nouvelle Vague filmmakers. 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. Television offered a different viewing experience and related differently to the reality it described. At the time, the French television landscape was still a very small biotope. It had one channel, a short daily airtime, and a limited range of programs, which gave Bazin time to closely follow and map these early years. Bazin admittedly had clear favorites, both in terms of programming and among the select group of television personalities. He could also be immensely annoyed by factual inaccuracies in scientific programs, especially those about animals.3

Realism was Bazin’s fundamental point of orientation, his guideline in watching films, a term he always used with some restraint: “The word ‘realism’ as it is commonly used does not really have an absolute and clear meaning but rather refers to a movement, a certain tendency toward the faithful rendering of reality.”4 Realism is thus, according to Bazin, not a coherent philosophy but rather a gesture filmmakers make toward the world they find before them, coupled with a way of seeing. In what is perhaps his best known and most commented on text, written in 1945 and titled “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin describes the essence of the photographic image and its ability, to form, so to speak, a point of contact with reality, a “window on the world.” The photographic image, and the film image by extension, can reveal reality: “It is not for me to separate off, in the complex fabric of the objective world, here a reflection on a damp sidewalk, there the gesture of a child. Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love.”5 The form of filmmaking makes the filmmaker want to get closer to reality, something Bazin refers to in “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” one of his other important texts, as acting according to a “belief in reality.” The spectator, in turn, experiences that reality as a “poet.” Cinema creates an intimate interface between the two. Bazin loved Renoir’s cinema because it does not exclude the life that manifests itself before the camera lens but preserves it and at the same time wants to hold something of it.

Bazin’s thinking about television had a different angle. He was stimulated by the many possibilities but was also aware of the many pitfalls that television contained as a new medium. It made him more cautious in his descriptions. He shunned overly theoretical considerations and approached the new phenomenon sometimes sternly, almost with a suspicious eye, at other times with a certain playfulness. Unlike cinema, reality in television “enters” the living room through a much smaller area. The rays of light from that square screen have a different intimacy and presence. Bazin once compared the light from the film projector in the cinema to moonlight that shines indirectly on us and “only carries in itself shadows and fleeting illusions.”6 The enveloping darkness of cinema, through which this “dancing cone,”7 as Roland Barthes once called it, makes its way, is missing here. The transmission of television is more direct. In “The Aesthetic Future of Television,”8 one of the texts included in this dossier, Bazin aptly demonstrates the difference in the perceived distance from the image. He gives the almost banal example of an encounter on the street with someone he vaguely thinks he recognizes. Hand already outstretched, he realizes it is someone he “met” the previous evening in his living room, a speaker from the other side. In another essay, Bazin describes the helplessness of an actor when performing a play on television. The actor falters for a moment and forgets what he is supposed to say. In the theatre, the actor can rely on the sympathy of the audience present while his position in front of the live camera is much more vulnerable. The actor is completely alone, with countless invisible gazes pointed at him. Every hesitation echoes in endlessly many rooms.

In television, the live image pre-eminently creates a different kind of interface with reality. In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin uses, among other things, the metaphor of a death mask to show that the film image retains something of the reality being shown. The relationship between the two is indexical, like smoke refers to fire or like a footprint. What cinema holds onto belongs irrevocably to the past; the image “embalms time,”9 like an insect in amber. The great power of live television, according to Bazin, lies in the simultaneity of the watching and the happening. “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. 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!”10 The actor’s misstep can never happen again. Live television introduces a risk factor; chance may play a role. Bazin gives the example of the moon brought into focus during a live broadcast. By itself, there is little difference between this particular image and a photographic reproduction, but the fact that it is the same moon visible through the window at that moment dramatically changes the quality of the image. “Nothing but the moon, but if I may say so: alive!”11 The example makes it clear that television is to a large extent an extension of human desires. The wish to be everywhere and witness everything, still preferably comfortably at home. It would be only ten years after Bazin’s expression before television would set foot on the moon along with the first human being.

Television is also supposed to “bring us closer to human beings,” to use a common slogan. “The cinema will never film a biography of my concierge or my grocer, but on my TV set they can be admirable and astounding.”12 For Bazin, television has a “quotidian intimacy with life,”13 allowing the world to invade our living rooms daily to integrate itself into and enrich our own intimate lifeworld. Centring the human and considering human interest, which are still the defining concept for much contemporary television making, has been important from the beginning. "Each time a human being who deserves to be known enters into the field of this iconoscope, the image becomes richer and something of this man is rendered to us.”14 This accomplishment has nothing to do with beauty or intelligence, according to Bazin, who proposes the term télégénie, but with a certain human authenticity and dignity that speak from the image. This revelation of the human also contains a moral aspect: it is “the most moral of all mechanical arts,” Bazin writes about a program by Jean Thévenot. “[Thévenot] shows that kings and shepherds, geniuses and simpletons are all equal before television, in the same manner as we are all equal before death.”15 In this guise, television would make possible a new form of speech and give a voice to the voiceless. It is a promise closely related to the humanism that inspired the belief in television, the belief that television could also be socio-culturally formative and have didactic potential, an idea from which, for example, the historical television films of Roberto Rossellini all proceed.16

Its omnipresence, the democratic ideal of available information, the dissemination of culture and the moral aspect of television: everything that testified to its potential as a medium proved utopian in retrospect. After the searching and “experimental” phase of development, many soon lost their already fragile faith in the new medium. Fascination turned to disgust among many critics for the manipulative nature that lay behind the increasing flow of images. Theodor Adorno,17 who places television within his larger critique of the so-called culture industry, early on calls television “the dreamless dream, [...] a means for approaching the goal of possessing the entire sensible world once again in a copy satisfying every sensory organ.” The world that television makes visible to us is an empty duplicate, and the visibility it provides is, according to Adorno, “ideological.” A good thirty years later, from a sociological perspective, Pierre Bourdieu, in his profound analysis Sur la television (1998), also comes to a similar conclusion: “One thing leads to another, and, ultimately television, which claims to record reality, creates it instead. We are getting closer and closer to the point where the social world is primarily described – and in a sense prescribed – by television.”18 From the perspective of film criticism, Serge Daney, himself active for a time as a channel surfer,19 took stock of these utopian core ideas in “Montage Obligatory: The War, the Gulf, and the Small Screen,”20 an essay on the live coverage of the Gulf War, took stock of these utopian core ideas. The ubiquity of imagery, Daney argues, hides an obscene void. “Television is watched because it is indeed very realist,” Daney writes, “It tells the truth and informs absolutely.” Only, that truth is one-sided; television reports from the standpoint of power. In the endless stream of images, the horror of the Gulf War turns into an event that remains mere imagery, a showcased reality in which any counter-image is missing – a “useless obscenity.” The images of war only serve to drape American victory. Daney would in this respect make the distinction between the image (image) and imagery (visuel). Unlike imagery, the image is “always more and less than itself,” there is always something missing. That lack contains the possibility for something else: a counter-image. It exerts a certain resistance.

For Bazin, the spectacle of the live broadcast still has a certain charm. In one of his commentaries, for example, he tells that he “felt invited” to a live-broadcast Paris soiree, where Chaplin happened to be present. As Daney puts it, the “discreet murmur of live sound” takes on grim undertones and the television viewer becomes complicit in a spectacle that has completely lost its innocence. In the visual spectacle of the Gulf War, television demonstrates both an incorrect consciousness of form and its machine-like character. In Bazin’s time, that machine sputtered a little more often, and moments regularly surfaced when the television event lost itself for a moment and went out of sync. In the background of the spectacle, often in the margins of the picture, something honest and true still sometimes appeared. The appearance of a woman handing out the prizes, for example, standing up in a corner, waiting for the right moment to hand over the flowers. The television camera would never consciously bring her into the image, Bazin wrote, but her presence on the television set was revealed in flashes, much to his delight. The margin of the picture frame is also important for Daney, which is in his view one of the only remaining spaces for political expression. Here, however, it is the indignant looks of passersby on the streets of Baghdad that are visible in the background. They are the only thing that seems to narrowly preserve the political stakes of the “democratic” ideal of information, the only thing that still resists the position of power, without which “there would be only signs ‘to read’ and no more people ‘to see.’”21

Television has evolved into a medium that lacks completion, that suffers from the lack of ordered imagination. In 1976, way before the mediatization of the first Gulf War (1990-1991), Dirk Lauwaert wrote that television is “always ‘happening,’” always taking place in the present tense. The viewer is always the “finisher,” who with his gaze becomes a participant “in the making, part of the creation, complicit in the final product.”22 For those who dare, what remains is the “exhausting gymnastics” of watching, “never being where television expects us to be” and “imagining what one no longer sees.”23

The critical distance Daney refers to seems even more imaginary today. “Previously, images were in the world. Today, it is the world that is swimming in an ocean of images,” reads the beginning of Nicole Brenez’s 2021 State of Cinema for Sabzian. Bazin described the moment when television first brought images into his world and the potential it held. At the same time, he caught a glimpse of that other world that already then seemed to be coming. Dirk Lauwaert once wrote, “Criticism is lucidity hopelessly immersed in naiveté.”24 Conscious of his explorer’s gaze, Bazin always remained lucid in his texts, never naive. If his texts on television take us anywhere, it may be to another form of living with images. They bring “the impossible” back within reach for a moment.

• 1Truffaut wrote this in the introduction to Bazin’s book about Jean Renoir.
• 2Jean-Luc Godard, “L’art à partir de la vie. Entretien avec Jean-Luc Godard par Alain Bergala,” in Godard par Godard, vol. 1, 1950-1984, ed. Alain Bergala (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1998), 10.
• 3Bazin was an avid animal lover and amateur geologist. The former once led him to keep an alligator in the bathtub of his home for months to the understandable annoyance of his wife.
• 4André Bazin, Jean Renoir, trans. W. W. Halsey II and William S. Simon, ed. François Truffaut (London: W. H. Allen, New York, 1974), 85, translation modified.
• 5André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema, vol. 1, trans. Dudley Andrew (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 14.
• 6André Bazin, “Créer un public,” in L’Information universitaire 1185, March 18, 1944.
• 7Roland Barthes, “En sortant du cinema,” Communications 23 (1975): 104. In the same text, Barthes suggests that through the television “we are condemned to the family, of which it has become the household instrument, as was once the hearth and its communal cooking pot.”
• 8André Bazin, “The Aesthetic Future of Television,” in André Bazin’s New Media, trans. and ed. Dudley Andrew (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
• 9Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 8.
• 10André Bazin, “Reporting on Eternity: TV Visits the Musée Rodin,” in André Bazin’s New Media, 101.
• 11André Bazin, “Television as a Medium of Culture,” trans. Sis Matthé, Sabzian, December 11, 2019.
• 12André Bazin, “In Quest of Télégenie,” in André Bazin’s New Media, 46.
• 13André Bazin, “The Aesthetic Future of Television,” in André Bazin’s New Media, 43.
• 14Ibid.
• 15Ibid.
• 16Luís Mendonça, “Rossellini en de strijd tegen onwetendheid op televisie,” Sabzian, June 13, 2018.
• 17Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 49. It was originally published in two parts as Eingriffe: Neun kritische Modelle (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963) and Stichworte: Kritische Modelle 2 (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969).
• 18Pierre Bourdieu, On Television, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (New York: The New Press, 1996), 22.
• 19Daney wrote about television in the French newspaper Libération between September and December 1987. These texts were first brought together in the volume Le salaire du zappeur (Ramsay Poche Cinéma, 1988). The back cover reads, “For a hundred days, a film critic and journalist for Libération watched six French television channels and bathed in their stream of images and sound.” Why exactly? A “certain perplexity” about the state of cinema – and of film criticism – and a genuine curiosity about the state of television. These are the writings of a “frontier dweller” who travels incessantly back and forth between “his homeland (cinema) and that strangely uncharted and little-commented continent of television.”
• 20An English version of this text was published as Serge Daney, “Montage Obligatory: The War, the Gulf and the Small Screen,” trans. Laurent Kretzschmar and Rouge, Rouge 8 (2006), http://www.rouge.com.au/8/montage.html.
• 21In a 1996 text, Jean Baudrillard strikes a similar (disappointed) tone: “The real catastrophe of television has been how deeply it has failed to live up to its promise of providing information – its supposed modern function. We dreamed first of giving power – political power – to the imagination, but we dream less and less of this, if indeed at all.” Jean Baudrillard, “TV Fantasies,” in Screened Out, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002), 189.
• 22Dirk Lauwaert, “Certainties of the Massive,” Sabzian, May 22, 2019. Originally published as “De zekerheden van het massieve,” in Film & Televisie 228-229 (May 1976): 48. This article was republished in De Witte Raaf 191 (January-February 2018), https://www.dewitteraaf.be/artikel/de-zekerheden-van-het-massieve/.[/fn] The “massive” is the name Lauwaert gives to that useless obscenity. The massive “is like a cancer of conviction, of point of view, of solidarity. The massive no longer allows itself to be situated (‘I’m that for that reason’), but becomes the core from which everything is situated.” Escaping the complicity that television imposes on us is difficult. “Opposed to the collaborator is the unadapted, the marginal, the deviant.” It presupposes a critical approach to images, which for Daney already was a “flirting with the impossible.” It requires an “oblique” gaze that must always look for the images that are missing, that searches for what television is withholding and tries to fill in for the lack of imagination. Lauwaert’s text ends pessimistically for now: “It can’t be different, not better, not ‘richer,’ because one has to go against so much human, technical, bureaucratic material." Television has become a part of our lives and represents inertia and immobility, it “disarms” us.

  The figure of the television critic struggles with something that is constantly in flux and that can be grasped less and less. Writing about television takes on something paradoxical: “To understand television, you need a certain distance, a distance that I don’t have, that no one has,” Daney said in one of his last interviews.The transcription of the filmed interview, done by Régis Debray in 1992 for the program Océaniques from the French broadcaster FR3, was later published under the title “Itinéraire d’un ciné-fils.”

• 23Daney, “Montage Obligatory.”
• 24Cited in Rudi Laermans, “Dirk Lauwaert als criticus. Fragmenten voor een intellectuele biografie,” in De Witte Raaf 192 (March-April 2018).