Bazin

mjraine at uchicago.edu mjraine at uchicago.edu
Wed Mar 9 02:08:03 EST 2011


>________________
>Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2011 10:23:23 +0100
>From: Mathieu Capel <mathieucapel at gmail.com>  
>Subject: Bazin in Japan  
>To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
>
>   Dear Kinejapaners,
>   Would someone know precisely since when André Bazin
>   were known in Japan ? The oldest reference I could
>   get is from Iwasaki Akira's Gendai Nihon  no Eiga,
>   published in 1958, where he gave account of Bazin's
>   "La leçon de style du cinéma japonais". But, by
>   that time, were his texts about Italian neorealism
>   known by critics or cinematographers ?
>   Many thanks,
>   Mathieu Capel
>   Paris
>
>   --
>   Mathieu Capel
>   67 rue de la Roquette
>   75011 Paris
>   06 50 32 45 00 / 01 43 79 19 19
>   mathieucapel at gmail.com

I second Ryan's recommendation of Nozaki Kan's essay. I don't know if he mentions them but I've seen some earlier mentions of Bazin in Japanese film journalism, all of them trivial. I haven't seen the the taidan on Rene Clement that Mark refers to (Okada met Bazin??) but before he published the translation from What is Cinema Okada announced Bazin's death in Kinema junpo in February 1959, and referred to him more extensively in an article on Truffaut in November of that year. Okada was clearly sympathetic to Bazin (in 1966 he said Bazin was his favorite critic) and even before Bazin was translated there were probably others who were reading him in the original. At the time, I think Alexandre Astruc's essay on the "camera-stylo" (published in France in 1948 but not widely discussed in Japan until 10 years later) was more significant, perhaps because Astruc was already known as a filmmaker. 

Michael



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