André Bazin (1918–1958)

André Bazin started to write about film as a young man, and was a co-founder and editor of the pioneering French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1951, along with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. He originally studied to be a teacher, but a speech impediment prevented him from getting hired. Bazin became a major figure in post-World War II film studies and criticism. He is credited with establishing the study of film as an intellectual field. He contributed daily reviews to Paris’s largest-circulation newspaper, Le Parisien libéré, and wrote hundreds of essays for weeklies such as Le nouvel observateur and Télérama and monthly journals such as Esprit. A four-volume collection of his writings was published posthumously, covering the years 1958 to 1962, entitled Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? (What is Cinema?). A selection from this collection was translated into English and published in two volumes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These books became mainstay texts of film courses in the English-speaking world. Bazin developed friendships with many directors he wrote about, including François Truffaut, to whom he was a mentor and whose "auteur theory" he influenced, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Orson Welles, and Luis Buñuel. He died at age 40 from leukemia.