André Bazin: The Founder of Cahiers du cinéma

At the time of the Liberation of Paris, André Bazin was 27 years old. He had abandoned the idea of becoming a professor but agreed with the optimism of the time that considered culture as a tool of intellectual and political emancipation, "returning culture to the people and the people to culture."

A Christian communist, he wrote for several magazines including L'Écran français and Esprit, which he was already a loyal reader of, and became involved in popular educational associations. He organized numerous movie clubs, particularly in factories with workers' unions, and helped organize the Festival du Film Maudit in Biarritz in 1949, which supported the emergence of a new avant-garde, most notably observed in American cinema.

André Bazin's most famous articles question the specific role of cinema as a newcomer to the arts (Théâtre et cinéma [Theater and Cinema,] Peinture et cinéma [Painting and Cinema,] etc.) and the conditions of a purely cinematic realism (Montage interdit [Forbidden Montage]).

In The Ontology of the Photographic Image, André Bazin fundamentally explores the question of realism in (and of) cinema via an analysis of its analog process as a molding of reality using light, as illustrated by the movie Journey to Italy by Roberto Rossellini.

Bazinian realism also involves lasting art, capable of allowing the seamless cloak of reality to be taken off without artifice. It's with this idea of realism that André Bazin supported the post-war Italian neorealist movement, helping to highlight the complexity of Rossellini's work and to defend La Strada (The Road) by Federico Fellini against Italian critics, who were convinced that the movie betrayed the Marxist and realistic nature of the movement.

Bazin would become a leading figure (who was revered as much as he was reviled) of the Young Turks, a group of movie critics and soon to be directors comprising Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and others.

In poor health, André Bazin died in 1958 at the age of 40, without witnessing the height of the New Wave moviemakers. A year later, François Truffaut dedicated his first feature film to him, The 400 Blows (1959).