17 Quotes by André Bazin

The photographer proceeds, via the intermediary of the lens, to a point where he literally takes a luminous imprint, a cast... [But] the cinema realizes the paradox of moulding itself on the time of the object and of taking the imprint of its duration as well.

Every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image.

A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith.

All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.

Photography can strip from the world that spiritual dust and grime with which our eyes have covered it.

Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. The image--its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism--has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last the equal of the novelist

Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.

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