![]() What then are we to make of Bazin’s discussion of the positives of neorealism in the face of the final paragraph of “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” wherein he writes, “oday we can say that at last the director writes in film” ( CV 324)? But this idealized view of the neorealist impulses in Rossellini’s films is clouded somewhat when Bazin argues that there is “nothing in films that belongs to literature or to poetry” (100). What remains after ridding cinema of this purposeful method of idea association (montage) are merely gestures, changes, physical movements, or as Bazin puts it in his letter, “the essence of human reality” (100). Sergei Eisenstein, also apparently in deep contemplation (better hair though). ![]() Unlike Bazin, Eisenstein supports cinema’s potential to prompt mental and emotional responses, and this can be achieved through choice juxtapositions of structures and conventions, or as he puts it, “tendentious selection of, and comparison between, events” ( Writings 41). He also states, tellingly, in “The Dramaturgy of Film Form,” that he takes cinema – in its mechanistic purposes – to be closer to writing than theater or painting ( CV 275). In his conception of montage, something neurological should occur to the audience. To be assaulted with an “intended effect” is to watch a film by Sergei Eisenstein: his stated goal with film montage is to exercise “emotional influence over the masses” through “a series of blows to the consciousness and emotions of the audience” ( Writings 39). Evidently, a filmmaker like Roberto Rossellini fits snugly within this definition because his films are structured such that the viewer sees “nothing but the event itself,” and is never assaulted with “intended effect” (101, 100). In the letter, Bazin explains how neorealism differs from the realism that comes before it in that “its realism is not so much concerned with the choice of subject as with a particular way of regarding things” (97). In addition to offering a masterclass in tact, Andre Bazin’s “In Defense of Rossellini” letter to Guido Aristarco provides readers with a characteristically indeterminate sketch of his own cinematic predilections. ![]() They occupy places on opposite ends of the critical spectrum when it comes to the cinema, but the implicit conversation of their criticisms – when manipulated into explicit dialogue surrounding one work of filmic art – might reveal some interesting truths about how we judge film specifically, but also art in general. To approach an answer to this question we’d do well to consult two of the most notable thinkers on the purpose and power of film: Andre Bazin and Sergei Eisenstein. Film and Medium Specificity: A Voyage to Italy Through France and Russiaĭoes film, as an art, have a unique and proper area of competence? Is there anything in film we could call “unique in nature”? A difficult argument to make considering how much it owes to the more established arts of painting, photography, poetry, and theater – a more incisive question, perhaps, is whether there can be innovation or significance in an art form constituted almost entirely of other art forms.
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