Bert Cardullo

André Bazin

A new collection of posthumous writings by André Baz

André Bazin and Italian Neorealism

The essays in this insightful film-analysis text show cover twenty-one of the best European films made between the coming of World War II and the end of the twentieth century, showing what makes each of them outstanding. These essays are clear and readable—that is, sophisticated and meaty yet not overly technical or jargon-heavy. They will make perfect introductions to their respective films as well as important contributions to the field of film studies in general. Written with university students in mind, these essays cover some of the central films treated—and central issues raised—in today’s cinema courses and provide students with practical models to help them improve their own writing and analytical skills. A list of questions for discussion is included, to trigger further thinking among film buffs and to help educators prepare for class. The book is aimed at students, teachers, and cinephiles with an interest in European cinema in particular and cinema studies in general, as well as at those educated readers with an interest in the practice of film analysis and criticism. The only competition comes from Stanley Kauffmann’s relatively brief Ten Great Films (136 pp., 2012). The current work offers twenty-one illustrated essays (Kauffmann’s book contains no images) and focuses on Europe. (The countries represented are France, Italy, England, Hungary, Belgium, Sweden, Scotland, Denmark, Russia, Spain, Germany, Scotland, and Finland.) Twenty-One Landmark European Films, 1939-1999 overlaps with Kauffmann’s book only in the case of L’avventura, though the two approach this film from vastly different angles. Moreover, the book provides a complete critical apparatus—notes, bibliographies, credits, and filmographies, whereas Kauffmann’s has none. This book could be one of the primary texts for courses in film analysis, to accompany a work like Timothy Corrigan’s A Short Guide to Writing about Film (8th edition, 2011). It would also be a suitable supplementary or secondary text in such courses as 'Introduction to Film' or 'Film Appreciation'; 'Western European Cinema'; 'History of Film' or 'Global Cinema'; and 'Film Directors' or 'Film Style and Imagination.'

Twenty-One Landmark European Films 1939-1999

In European Directors and Their Films: Essays on Cinema, Bert Cardullo offers readable analyses of some of the most important film artists and individual films of the last several decades. Beyond simple biographical capsules and plot summaries, these readings demonstrate with elegance and clarity what cinema means as well as shows, explaining how international moviemakers use the resources of the medium to pursue complex, significant human goals.

Essays on Cinema

European Directors and Their Films

In 'Soundings on Cimena', film critic Bert Cardullo engages nine major international film directors - Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson, De Sica, Felini, Kaurismaki, Leigh, Renoir and Syberberg - in a series of dialogues about how they work and the meanings of their films.

Speaking to Film and Film Artists

Soundings on Cinema

Five French Filmmakers: Renoir, Bresson, Tati, Truffaut, Rohmer; Essays and Interviews is, as its title indicates, a collection of essays about, followed by interviews with, five of France's major movie directors from the silent period (the early part of Jean Renoir's career) through the New Wave and beyond (even to the present, in the films of Eric Rohmer). Most critics would agree that these five men are among the most important, if not the most important, in the history of French cinema-which means, of course, that they play a significant role in the history of world cinema as well. Moreover, there are echoes of Renoir's work in Francois Truffaut's, even as there are of Robert Bresson in Rohmer. The great Jacques Tati himself is evidence of Bresson's dictum that the soundtrack invented silence, for he made all of his comedies-otherwise filled with silence-during the sound period. Five French Filmmakers, then, is the macrocosmic French cinema in microcosm. And all the more so because this book is introduced by the seminal French theorist and critic Andre Bazin (1918-1958), who in 1957 wrote an essay (translated here by me, for the very first time) titled Fifteen Years of French Cinema, which serendipitously spans the period from Renoir's sound pictures all the way up to the start of the New Wave. Bazin naturally talks about all the important directors, in addition to Renoir, Bresson, Tati, Truffaut, and Rohmer, working or starting their careers from 1942 to 1957, which is precisely why I have included his piece in-indeed, placed it at the start of-Five French Filmmakers.

Renoir, Bresson, Tati, Truffaut, Rohmer : Essays and Interviews

Five French Filmmakers

A number of writers have attempted to capture Robert Bresson's style as well as his substance with such terms as minimalist, austere, ascetic, elliptical, autonomous, pure, even gentle. Most famously, Paul Schrader once called Bresson's films transcendental, while Susan Sontag described them as spiritual. Both these critics thus extended in anglicized form a tendency that had early been dominant in Bresson criticism in France: the attempt, made by such Catholic writers as Andre Bazin, Henri Agel, Roger Leenhardt, and Amedee Ayfre, to understand Bresson's work in religious terms, seeing his camera as a kind of god and the material world as (paradoxically) a thing of the spirit. That attempt, in Sontag's essay, led to the introduction of Bresson to the New York-based avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, whose films-such as Richard Serra's Hand Catching Lead (1968), for one-show the influence of the French director's severe, reductivist style. Jean-Luc Godard, of course, needed no such critical introduction to Robert Bresson, for, in his iconoclasm and integrity, in his rejection of the Gallic Cinema du Papa as well as in his embrace of film as an independent art, Bresson was one of the heroes of the young directors who constituted the French New Wave in the early 1960s. So much so that Godard was moved to say in Cahiers du cinema in 1957 that Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music. The result is that Bresson has undeniably influenced a slew of contemporary European filmmakers, including Chantal Akerman, Olivier Assayas, Laurent Cantet, Alain Cavalier, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Claire Denis, Jacques Doillon, Bruno Dumont, Michael Haneke, Benoit Jacquot, and Maurice Pialat--not to speak of his influence on Asian and American cinema. Bresson and Others: Spiritual Syle in the Cinema is an attempt to document this influence through essays on fifteen international directors who followed in Bresson's wake, who in fact may have influenced him (Carl Dreyer), or who contemporaneously worked veins similar to those found in Bresson's films (Ingmar Bergman, Yasujiro Ozu). These essays are preceded by an introduction to the cinema of Robert Bresson and followed by film credits, a bibliography of criticism, and an index. The subject of Bresson and Others, then, may specifically be Bressonian cinema, but, in a general sense, it could also be said to be spirit and matter--or film and faith.

Spiritual Style in the Cinema

Bresson and Others

Out of Asia: The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Abbas Kiarostami, and Zhang Yimou is a collection of interviews with, and essays about, the four filmmakers who introduced the cinema of their respective countries to the West: Kurosawa (Japan) and Ray (India), in the 1950s; Kiarostami (Iran) and Zhang (China), in the 1980s. Kurosawa and Ray were post-World War II phenomena, as the new breed of American cinephiles demanded more contact with Asian cultures of which they had known little until the 1940s. Kiarostami and Zhang, for their part, are both post-revolutionary filmmakers whose films have helpfully introduced Americans to two Eastern cultures with which the American government has long had-and continues to have-a problematic relationship. As a whole, then, Out of Asia documents an alternative to Western brands of cinema even as these four foreign directors, with the possible exception of Kiarostami, integrate Western forms, styles, and genres into their own native traditions. As such, these artists could be said to represent a global filmmaking perspective that now, more than ever, this world-and the American nation-can use. Each of the interviews in this volume is accompanied by an overview of the director's career or an essay on representative films by him. In addition, Out of Asia is preceded by a contextualizing introduction; it is followed by filmographies, a bibliography, and an index; and the book is interspersed with photographs of the four directors in question or stills from their films. There are books devoted to individual filmmakers like Kurosawa, Ray, Kiarostami, and Zhang, but, until Out of Asia, there has not been one that treats representatives of four national cinemas from their own point of view, as well as from an international perspective.

The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Abbas Kiraostami [sic], and Zhang Yimou : Essays and Interviews

Out of Asia

In this collection of essays by avant-garde theatre's most creative practitioners—directors, playwrights, performers, and designers—these writings provide direct access to the thinking behind much of the most stimulating playwriting and performance of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A Casebook from Kleist to Camus

Theories of the Avant-garde Theatre

The two volumes of "Practical Film Criticism" are an attempt to grapple with the nature of film art through the evaluation of vital and representative instances of that art, created throughout the world, from 1993 to 1998. The essays contained herein are acts of analysis and interpretation, they are neither windy theoretical musings nor impenetrable scholarly tracts. In addition, there are two translations of visionary articles by prominent international directors; an extended interview with an esteemed American movie critic, a speculative piece on the relationships among theatre, fiction and film; an overview of the careers of the Vittorio De Sica and Woody Allen; and a long, polemical introduction.

An Enlightened Approach to Moviegoing

Practical Film Criticism

In World Directors and Their Films, Bert Cardullo offers readable analyses of some of the most important films and the artists who produced them. Beyond simple biographical capsules and plot summaries, these readings demonstrate with clarity and elegance how international moviemakers use the resources of the medium to pursue complex, significant human goals. Including essays on filmmakers from China, Japan, India, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Iran, Senegal, and Chad, this book is an engaging collection of enlightening and helpful essays that will appeal as much to the general reader as it will to scholars of international cinema.

Essays on African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern Cinema

World Directors and Their Films

‘The Films of Robert Bresson: A Casebook’ spans Bresson’s entire career, with interviews and essays addressing the great auteur’s oeuvre from every artistic angle. The interviews presented here—by such noted cineastes as Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Schrader, and David Thomson—elicited authorial comment from an auteur not known for his garrulousness, and they are either as aesthetically inclusive or as journalistically pointed as possible. For their part, the essays in this volume are by such luminous figures as André Bazin, Susan Sontag, and François Truffaut. Each interview is followed either by an essay on the film discussed in the interview, an essay on Bresson’s work by the interviewer himself, or an essayistic overview of Bresson’s career when the preceding interview itself is survey-like. In this way the book ‘bounces’ the essays and interviews off one another so as to stimulate a kind of semi-continuous critical conversation about the films, their maker, and the interviewers themselves. The result is something that may be as good as criticism itself: enlightened authorial comment.

A Casebook

The Films of Robert Bresson

In this collection of essays by avant-garde theatre’s most creative practitioners—directors, playwrights, performers, and designers—these writings provide direct access to the thinking behind much of the most stimulating playwriting and performance of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Theories of the Avant-Garde Theatre

Unlike other countries such as Italy and France, Germany has not produced a single great writer of comedy alone. Furthermore, little familial resemblance can be detected among the best German comedies - they are individual to an extreme, even radical. The German comic dramatists are bound by no preconception of what a comedy ought to be and have bequeathed us, as a result, no body of comedies that we can term "classical." We might say of German comedy what Valery said of a contemporary's work: "The exceptions are admirable, but the whole is of little consequence." The failure of a national comedy to take root in Germany (as opposed to Austria) can be attributed largely to the absence of "social culture" in that country - to the absence of a society like England's, whose homogeneity has produced a well-defined code of manners, or of a capital city comparable (as a locus of dramatic energy and comic extraction) to Paris or Venice. During the seventeenth century, when a tradition of comedy might have been established in Germany, its cultural centers were small seats of court, university towns, or commercial hubs whose theaters were shallowly rooted in a nondescript public and whose inhabitants offered few models to the comic dramatist; moreover, the country was suffering under the political confusion and social disintegration caused by the Thirty Years' War (1618-48). In Minna von Barnhelm (1767), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing created what has often been called Germany's first national comedy, but it is "national" to the extent that it reconciles the division within Germany between Prussians and Saxons through the union of the Prussian Major von Tellheim and the Saxon Minna, not to the extent that it ridicules or treats as broadly funny in themselves aspects of German character. Minna represented a digression for the man who won widespread fame for his domestic tragedies, and in this he is typical of the authors of great German comedy, which is an affair of brilliant, isolated efforts on the part of otherwise "serious" playwrights whose seriousness underpins their comic writing. Heinrich von Kleist, for example, wrote The Broken Pitcher (1807), a folk comedy whose examination of deceit in human behavior is not far removed from the spirit of Kleist's tragedies. In stark contrast to the Viennese folk comedy of Ferdinand Raimund and Johann Nestroy stands Franz Grillparzer's only comedy, Woe to the Liar! (1837), which, in its examination of the nature of truth, is closely related to the theme of Grillparzer's tragedies. Similarly, Gerhart Hauptmann's The Beaver Coat (1893) is a comic version of this writer's naturalistic tragedies, which make up a good portion of his extensive and variegated oeuvre. It is significant that Hauptmann's sequel to The Beaver Coat was a tragicomedy, The Red Cock (1901), in which the heroine of the earlier play comes to ruin. In time Hauptmann began to see The Beaver Coat more and more in terms of his prevailing conviction - one shared by other significant dramatists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries - that true comedy is invariably tragicomedy, and he followed it not only with The Red Cock but also with two more tragicomedies.

A Critical Anthology

German-language Comedy

"This is a collection of ten long essays arranged around the primordial subject of realism and non-realism, or anti-realism, in the drama, as this subject manifests itself in modern Europe and contemporary America from Ibsen to Shaw to the symbolists, expressionists, surrealists, dadaists, futurists, and absurdists. This book treats not only the issue of realism versus anti-realism in theater from a practical as well as a theoretical point of view. It also treats at least two subjects related to this issue: the superfical or bourgeois realism that has long crippled the theater versus the critical and sometimes poetic realism that liberates it; and the avant-garde, the rearguard, and the middle-to-advanced artistic ground in between claimed by Bertolt Brecht and Harold Pinter. Special attention is paid, moreover, to the first thoroughgoing American avant-garde dramatist, Gertrude Stein. In sum, this book treats the subject of realism and non-realism from the point of view of the theater's ability to create not only the illusion of reality onstage, but also the reality of illusion"--Publisher's description, back cover.

Six Modern Playwrights in One Movement : Essays in Revisionism

An Idea of the Drama

In Search of Cinema chronicles the vitality of international film art in the last two decades. At a time when the movie review has degenerated into mere publicity for Hollywood pictures and film scholarship has become entangled in its own pseudo-scientific discourse, Bert Cardullo reclaims the territory of a certain type of film critic, somewhere between a reviewer-journalist and a scholar-theorist. With elegance, clarity, and rigour, he offers close readings of individual films to show how moviemakers use the resources of the medium to pursue complex, significant human goals. The essays collected here reflect the spectacular rise of Iranian cinema in recent years as well as the strong contributions of contemporary filmmakers from countries such as Belgium, Canada, China, Israel, Lebanon, Scotland, and Spain. But In Search of Cinema does not neglect the best recent films from major film-producing nations like the United States, France, and Italy and includes retrospective pieces on the careers of Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen as well as several essays on the interrelationship between film form, or film genres, and drama and the novel, the two forms from which the cinema continues to draw a wealth of its material.

Writings on International Film Art

In Search of Cinema

This is an attempt, through essays and interviews, to chronicle what happened to neorealism after the disappearance of the forces that produced it - World War II, the resistance, and liberation, followed by the postwar reconstruction of a morally, politically, and economically devastated society.

Italian Filmmakers and Their Films : Essays and Interviews

After Neorealism

This book features interviews with 13 major international directors: Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Luchino Visconti, Abbas Kiarostami, Ermanno Olmi, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Zhang Yimou, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Jacques Tati, Eric Rohmer, and Fran_ois Truffaut.

Conversations on Cinema

World Directors in Dialogue

Classic and new essays examining the historical, cultural, and aesthetic relationships between theater and film.

Adaptation Theory from 1916 to 2000

Stage and Screen

This book examines the historical, cultural, and aesthetic relationships between theater and film. As we enter the 21st century, almost all artists, students, and critics working in theater will have had earlier and greater exposure to film than to theater. In fact, film has become central to the way in which we perceive and formulate stories, images, ideas, and sounds. At the same time, film and video occupy an increasingly significant place in theater study, both for the adaptation of plays and for the documentation and preservation of theatrical performances. Yet far too often theater and film artists, as well as educators, make the jump from one medium to the other without being fully aware of the ways in which the qualities of each medium affect content and artistic expression. This book is intended to fill such a gap by providing a theoretical and practical foundation for understanding the effect that film and drama have had, and continue to have, on each other's development. Moreover, this study provides a history of the relationship between drama and cinema, starting with the pre-cinematic, late 19th-century impulse towards capturing spectacular action on the stage and examining the artistic and commercial interaction between movies and plays, both in popular and experimental work, throughout the 20th century. Important subjects treated in this book include stage versus screen acting, the adaptation process itself, the theatrical as well as the cinematic avant-garde, and the �portability� or adaptability of dramatic character.

Bert Cardullo

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