Surviving Politics: Andre Bazin and Aesthetic Bad Faith

Film theory;aesthetic politics;André Bazin;Post-World War II French cultural politics;Film studies;Screen Arts and Cultures;Humanities;Screen Arts and Cultures

Hassan, Syed FerozSolomon, Matthew P ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Film theory;    aesthetic politics;    André Bazin;    Post-World War II French cultural politics;    Film studies;    Screen Arts and Cultures;    Humanities;    Screen Arts and Cultures;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/137158/ferozh_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation offers a revisionary account of the seminal French film critic and theorist André Bazin (1918-1958) to argue that his work, long considered to be largely apolitical, instead offers a model of aesthetic politics that calls for a critique grounded in an affective-hermeneutic practice. Against the standard account of Bazin as a realist film theorist, it argues that not realism but the idea of ;;mythology” is the cornerstone of Bazin’s work. His understanding of cinema as a producer of mythologies conceives of it as a site for both escape from ongoing historical experience and for an orientation within it. Putting him in dialogue with his contemporaries, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes, I argue that Bazin’s model of aesthetic politics confronts the troubling character of all political experience by refusing the satisfactions of either expert demystification or heroic commitment. The first part of the dissertation reconstructs Bazin’s readings of key genres and films, such as the Western and the films of Chaplin, and the debates within which he made these readings, to bring out his argument that an essential task of aesthetic critique is to identify the ideological contradictions in mythologies in spite of which we become affectively committed to them. This is a recognition of the ;;bad faith” character of the aesthetic, a term that designates, in an extra-moral sense, a necessary margin of unconscious self-deception involved in how mythologies orient us in history. The second part undertakes an excavation of hitherto unnoticed but prominent anxieties that Bazin had about the ontological realism of film. It is the context of totalitarianism, heavily marking some of his key texts, that gives a special charge to these anxieties. The realism that Bazin championed was an aesthetic realism that responds to the model of mythologies developed in the first part.