Coming soon. Read two 12-page samples from the two volumes below.
These volumes follow in the time-honoured tradition of Erasmus, gathering together succinct epigrammatic statements that encapsulate the astute perceptions of a writer who arguably founded the field of film studies. Organised chronologically by year, André Bazin’s insights into the nature of cinema remain the cornerstones on which much of film philosophy builds today – as fresh as when they were written, these passages, which vary in length, are both prescient and magisterial. Scholars, students and cinephiles will treasure this collection as a source of inspiration, intellectual stimulation – and bed-time reading. An essential addition to every film lover’s library.
— Hilary Radner, Professor Emeritus of Film and Media Studies, University of Otago
The André Bazin Reader is shipping now, with a steep discount for individuals.
Currently in preparation
André Bazin, Rhetorician: Epigrams 1942-1958, in two volumes
Translated by Timothy Barnard
André Bazin wrote and published some three million words of film criticism in his brief lifetime and sixteen-year writing career – equivalent to some thirty 250-page books. The vast majority of this material is untranslated, and most of it will likely remain so. These two volumes present over 2,000 pithy epigrams which reveal that deep within this massive body of work, sometimes in the seemingly unlikeliest of places, lies a hitherto unknown Bazin, capable in the midst of his staggering output to come up with pithy zingers of astonishing clarity and insight across the vast breadth and depth of his thought and the range of his interests.
In a career which produced the aforementioned three million words of criticism, most of it written in ill health on a hectic daily or weekly schedule of reviews of sometimes humdrum movies about which, by Bazin’s own admission, it could be hard to find anything interesting to say, there is inevitably a certain amount of dross in Bazin’s oeuvre. Timothy Barnard has done the work of reading all of Bazin in the original French for the English-speaking reader and has forged out of this vast treasure trove an astounding new Bazin that will keep readers glued to the page. In his reading, Barnard has spotted the golden nuggets in Bazin’s long flowing stream of words, picked them up, rubbed off any mud clinging to them and polished them over and over until they gleam.
Readers will discover in addition Bazin’s by turns playful and acerbic wit, social engagement and unusual unerring aesthetic taste and instinct in commentary now more than sixty years old which has lost none of its bite or ability to jolt us into rethinking our critical commonplaces.
About one-fifth of the over 2,000 epigrams in these two volumes are drawn from caboose’s mammoth new volume The André Bazin Reader. The other four-fifths are new translations done especially for these volumes of epigrams.
André Bazin, Rhetorician: Epigrams 1942–1958 will immediately earn a favoured place on readers’ bookshelves and bedside table. The volumes are accompanied by introductions by two of the world's leading film scholars, Gertrud Koch and Jacques Aumont.
Please note that for copyright reasons this book cannot be sold in the U.S.A., U.K., Europe or Australia.
is professor emerita in cinema studies at Freie Universität Berlin and a visiting professor at Brown University. She has been a research fellow and visiting professor at numerous universities. She was director of the research centre “Aesthetic Experience in the Sign of the Entanglement of the Arts” in Berlin from 2006 to 2014. Her publications include Herbert Marcuse zur Einführung; “Was ich erbeute, sind Bilder”; Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung; Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction; Breaking Out, Breaking Bad, Breaking Even; Die Wiederkehr der Illusion, forthcoming in English; and Zwischen Raubtier und Chamäleon. She sits on the editorial board of numerous scholarly journals and is currently preparing a book on techno-aesthetics and animation.
taught film and aesthetics for forty years in Parisian universities. His work has focused on theoretical problems around representation; the aesthetics of visual art, in particular the relationship between cinema and painting; and film analysis, its methodology and related concepts. He is the author, for caboose, of Montage; the author or co-author in English of Montage Eisenstein, The Image and Aesthetics of Film; and the author in French of more than twenty volumes on film theory and aesthetics. In 2019 he was awarded the Balzan Prize, the first time it was awarded in the field of film studies.
