17 Quotes by André Bazin

Italian cinema is assuredly the only one to salvage, from within the very period it depicts a revolutionary humanism.

Reality is not art, but a realist art is one that can create an integral aesthetic of reality.

The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.

The essential factor in the transition of the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process... rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays not part. The solution is not to be found in the result achieved, but in the way of achieving it.

The 'Western' is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself.

How has The Grand Illusion held up over the years? It is not enough to say that it has retained its power. Not only has the stature of the film remained undiminished by the passage of time (except in a few minor details), but the innovation, the audacity, and, for want of a better word, the modernity of the direction have acquired an even greater impact.

All films are born free and equal.

[The photograph] is the object itself... [It] shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.