André Bazin, What is Cinema?, translated by Timothy Barnard, Montréal, Caboose, 2009.

In one of the boldest moves ever seen in Anglophone cinema studies, Timothy Barnard, the director of Caboose, a new Montreal-based publishing house, has bucked the University of California’s authority over André Bazin’s What is Cinema? to present a selection of his own translations of these landmark essays in an elegant one-volume edition. Taking advantage of Canada’s more reasonable fifty-year limit on author’s rights (rather than the seventy—and counting—that applies in most other places), he launched his rocket just after midnight last New Year, the minute it became legal. Feeling ambushed and poached upon, California and the French may well pursue this renegade edition of what are arguably the most valuable of all Film Studies texts. Meanwhile, anyone who cares about Bazin or his titular question can applaud with glee, for we now can routinely give him a second reading, something that never fails to pay off. If the publication’s carnivalesque rebuff to corporate control of “intellectual property” will amuse Film Studies scholars, we should not fail to recognize the far more important provocation in Barnard’s claim that this is “the first accurate and reliable English translation of these essays to appear.” If Film Studies as the discipline we know today began with Bazin, and if its development has in some sense always been governed by that beginning—even, and perhaps most strongly, when his ideas have been repudiated—then these new translations offer a rare platform on which to take stock of our foundations. Is it possible that we never got Bazin right in the first place? These new translations challenge us to jettison the received wisdom and take a fresh look at what he actually wrote. Those of us who own the French edition will be sent back to the original again and again so as to try to resolve the frequent discrepancies between Hugh Gray’s forty-year-old version and Tim Barnard’s, hot off the press. Reading even a few cunning sentences in the French original of “Editing Prohibited” (known heretofore as “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage”) sets off vibrations among the three versions that wake us up to the micro-nuances and macro-concepts we would otherwise have been oblivious to. In fact, however, despite their matching titles, the two English versions don’t fully overlap. Bazin’s original four slim volumes consist of sixty-three selections. Hugh Gray chose twenty-six for the two volumes that California brought out in 1967 and 1971. Barnard gives us half as many, ten taken from selections that also appear in Gray, but three that Gray had passed over: the lengthy, indispensable essay on William Wyler, plus the delightful “Monsieur Hulot and Time” and “On Jean Painlevé.” A further discrepancy follows from Barnard’s decision to translate five of the essays not from Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? but from the original versions as they appeared in Esprit and elsewhere. Why did he nullify Bazin’s effort to bring his own work into a form that endures? Barnard’s answer that “some of the discussions later excised [are] worthy of preservation” is not satisfactory, for it ought to apply to all thirteen. (What a shock to film theory would be Bazin’s initial and wilder “Ontology” essay, first drafted when he was 26.) Did he take the essays as he found them in Bazin’s volume one (“Ontologie et Langage”) because he knew Bazin had monitored this right up to the point of reading page proofs? Perhaps Barnard surmises that, sick as he was in 1958, Bazin may not have reworked the five pieces that were typeset posthumously. Did someone perform the operation of “excision” that Barnard now reverses? But Jacques Rivette is adamant …