Often when he did bring an auteur center-stage, however, as he did with Camé on theoccasion of his forgettable 1951 film Juli-ette ou la clé des songes, it was not as a tran-scendent artist whose themes and sensibilitydeserved deep refieaion; instead Bazin usedCarné's career to ponder how styles andgenres move into and out of phase with his-tory and with the public sensibility.

Bazin loved to probe the system thatbrought films into being and sustainedthem in the cultural imaginary, for as adaily critic he took in every sort of filmimaginable, mainly mediocre features.Rather than try to filter from these a fewcrystals, he aimed to understand tbe entireprocess by which they got made and thenanained their shape and value, whateverthat might be. This meant genre study inthe broad sense. What psychological knotdoes each genre pick at? How have latervariants grown out of earlier examples inthe genre or drawn on adjacent types?What pre-cinematic avatars connect thesefilms to longstanding cultural concerns? Tohim cinema was a vast ecological system,endlessly interesting in its interdependen-cies and fluctuations. He was always readyto celebrate the creativity' of tbe director;but "tbe genius of the system" he foundeven more fascinating. Only an interdisci-plinary approach could start to understandwhy even modest directors made such sat-isfying films during the classical period, aperiod he could sense was on its way out.His protégés might exercise an elitist poli-tique des auteurs, but he shamed them withtheir obligation to keep in mind technology,economics, sociology, and, yes, actual poli-tics, alongside the usual approaches bor-rowed from literary studies and art history.

Bazin knew quite a lot about each oftbese subjects and methods, but his partic-ular genius lay in identif>'ing some reveal-ing textual attributes of whatever film wasbefore him, then using these to leverage aweighty understanding of rbe film as awhole, or the filmmaker, or the genre, orthe general conditions of filmmaking andreception. In effect he followed out thequestions to which films appear to stand asanswers, letting stylistic details in the filmsthemselves call up his extraordinary rangeof knowledge. No one before him, and

CONTINUED ON PACE 4Z

EVERY EILM IS ASOCIAL DOCUMENTARYM-,'U\DRÉ BAZINTranslated by Paul Fileri

(Originally puhli.slied as "Tout film est un documentaire social,"LPS Lettres fr ancaisps. \o . i66. ", Julv 1947)

THE REALIST DESTINY OF CINEMA—

innate in photographic objectivity—isfundamentally equivocal, because it allowsthe "realization" of the marvelous. Preciselylike a dream. The oneiric charaaer of cin-ema, linked to tbe illusory nature of its imageas much as to its lightly hypnotic mode ofoperation, is no less cmcial than its realism.

In a certain sense, cinema cannot lie,and every film can be considered as a socialdocumentary. To the extent that it hascome to satisfy the dream desires of themasses, it becomes its own dream. The soleobjective criterion is success. Every pro-ducer who bas made a film that pleasesknows how to fill the type of imaginaryvoid within which his film took shape. Incommercial terms, good producers detectwithin the public any "dream holes" stillunfilled and hasten to fill them in.

It's true that advertising and the erosioneffected by carefully managed productionscan dig those holes in advance. But, being adream, cinema hides its ultimate realitybehind appearances that are nothing butsymbols. As in a dream, nothing in cinemais completely accidenta!, and at the same

time nothing is completely fake either. Itisn't ttue that French or American f>eopleenjoy lives free of work, living in sumptu-ous apartments, decked out witb threefiights of marble staircases, where tele-phones, which you and I have trouble find-ing, are made of white bakélite at tbe veryleast. But it's true that some secret demonkeeps the shameful hope for such a socialparadise alive in each of our hearts.

American secretaries don't marry thesons of tbeir billionaire bosses, but the Cin-derella mytb occupies a dominant positionin American culture and millions of secre-taries find themselves dreaming about theone and only modern, urban Prince Charm-ing who will sweep them off their feet.

IT IS A SOCIOLOGICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS ;

rather than a critical analysis that can |best reveal cinema's secret reality. This real- rity is all the more secret since it lets the era- Jziest dreams take on the quasi make-believe sof real life. And so the social, political, Imoral, and lastly aesthetic value of a film ;depends on its implicit affirmations. \

It follows that if we define film culture <

40 I FILM COMMENT I November-December2008

not only as knowledge of some of thegivens of the technical, the historical, andthe artistic but also as the recognition ofour collective dreams, illusions, and, I daresay, worst thoughts, then every film, goodor bad, realist or fabricated, is an irreplace-able social documentary.

To defend the public against this form ofabuse of consciousness, to wake the audi-ence from its dream, to pull back all theveils, tight down to the seventh veil thatmasks the viewer's own unconscious desire,to help tbe audience in tbis way to prioritizeits pleasure according to what it contains,to teach it at the same time to reject whatconsciousness could not admit were it tofully understand; to render the public sensi-ble to the needs or illusions that were cre-ated in it as a market, for the sole purposeof providing the opium sellers with an out-let for their drug; to bring out in the outlineof its images, as in a riddle where you'reasked above all not to look for the big badwolf, these self-interested concoctions,which an entire production consortium, aState, even a civilization or a culture wantsto make the masses mistake for their owndesires—these are, among other things, theaims of a film culture expanded to thedimensions of the public itself, a film cul-ture for which the growth of the ciné-clubshas at last left us filled with hope. G

44 IE WE DEEINE EILMCULTURf: NOL ONLYAS KNO^^LEDGE OESOME GI\T:NS OE THETECHNICAL, THE HIS-TORICAL, M D THEARTISTIC BUT ALSOAS THE RECOGNITIONOE OUR COLLECTEVEDREAMS, ILLUSIONS,A^D,IDARESAYWORST THOUGHTS,THEN EW.RY EILM,GOOD OR BAD, REAL-IST OR EABRICATED,IS AN IRREPIACE-ABLE SOCLAL DOCU-MENTARY??

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November-December2008 i f i L M COMMENT I 41