Social Aesthetics of Film: Restaging Bazin’s Ciné Clubs
In this film lecture, screening and ciné club re-enactment, we will be introduced to the format of André Bazin's 'ciné clubs' by Dr. Blandine Joret from the University of Amsterdam.
Please reserve a free ticket at the link above.
Doors open 16:45, sharp start at 17:00. Including food and drinks!
The postwar film criticism and theory of André Bazin has earned a canonical yet debated spot in film and media theory: in France as well as abroad, we know him as the advocate for “ontological realism”, author of over 2,000 articles and an influential figure in shaping auteur theory and the French New Wave. Amidst all this writing and theory about the image, however, Bazin had an equally strong interest in his audience: the ciné clubs he organized in many different milieus (from Parisian avant-garde theatres to remote villages) comprise what he called the “social aesthetics” of film. The meaning of films, so Bazin realized, depends as much on the image on screen as it does on the public’s imagination.
For this session, Blandine will first lecture on the historical and pedagogical foundations of such ciné club discussions and highlight their function in consciousness-raising education. Bazin’s practical guidelines on this topic and his reflections on his own ciné club experiences will lead to a blueprint for understanding audience perception in the cinema as part and parcel of the film’s signification: “film aesthetics will be social,” he claimed, “or film will do away with aesthetics” (Bazin, 1943).
After the lecture, we will put Bazin’s method for ciné club discussions into practice by watching and discussing Jean-Luc Godard’s Le petit soldat (1963). It is his second film, explicitly political and representative of Godard’s auteur aesthetic, and therefore provides good grounds for discussions on historical as well as contemporary social aesthetics of film.
Le petit soldat [The Little Soldier] (1963), 88 mins
Before his convention-shattering debut, Breathless, had even premiered, Jean-Luc Godard leapt into the making of his second feature, a thriller that would tackle the most controversial subject in France: the use of torture in the Algerian War. Despite his lack of political convictions, photojournalist Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor) is roped into a paramilitary group waging a shadow war in Geneva against the Algerian independence movement. Anna Karina (in her first collaboration with Godard, whose camera is visibly besotted with her) is beguiling as the mysterious woman with whom Forestier becomes infatuated. Banned for two and a half years by French censors for its depiction of brutal tactics on the part of the French government and the Algerian fighters alike, Le petit soldat finds the young Godard already retooling cinema as a vehicle for existential inquiry, political argument, and ephemeral portraiture—in other words, as a medium for delivering “truth twenty-four times per second". - Critereon
Le petit soldat [The Little Soldier] (1963), 88 mins
Before his convention-shattering debut, Breathless, had even premiered, Jean-Luc Godard leapt into the making of his second feature, a thriller that would tackle the most controversial subject in France: the use of torture in the Algerian War. Despite his lack of political convictions, photojournalist Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor) is roped into a paramilitary group waging a shadow war in Geneva against the Algerian independence movement. Anna Karina (in her first collaboration with Godard, whose camera is visibly besotted with her) is beguiling as the mysterious woman with whom Forestier becomes infatuated. Banned for two and a half years by French censors for its depiction of brutal tactics on the part of the French government and the Algerian fighters alike, Le petit soldat finds the young Godard already retooling cinema as a vehicle for existential inquiry, political argument, and ephemeral portraiture—in other words, as a medium for delivering “truth twenty-four times per second". - Critereon
