Bazin and the Ontology of the Photographic Image

André Bazin (1918–1958) is widely regarded as the most influential French film critic and theorist of the postwar era. In 1951, together with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Lo Duca, he co-founded the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, which became the intellectual home both of his own criticism and of the auteur politique that would shape the French New Wave — François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette all wrote for the journal before becoming directors themselves. Bazin's single most consequential essay, "Ontologie de l'image photographique" ("The Ontology of the Photographic Image"), first published in 1945 and later collected, alongside dozens of other pieces, in the four-volume Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? (1958–1962; translated into English by Hugh Gray as What Is Cinema?, 1967 and 1971), opens with an anthropological claim: that the plastic arts, from ancient Egyptian embalming and funerary statuary onward, answer a deep psychological need Bazin calls the "mummy complex" — a drive to preserve the living form against the erosion of time and the fact of death by fixing a lasting likeness.