What Cinema Is!

Dudley Andrew is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale University. The author of many books, including Mists of Regret (1995) and Popular Front Paris (2005), he is an Officier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• Acknowledgments ixPrologue: The Target of Film Theory xiii1 The Camera Searching in the World 1Is a Camera Essential? 1The Cahiers Axiom 4Tracing Bazin’s Trace 11Images Contested Today 172 The Editor’s Discovery of Form 29Bazin’s Forerunners 31Documentaries in the Cauldron of History 37The Cahiers Line 42Pursuing Cinema in the Twenty-First Century 483 The Projector as Spectator’s Searchlight 66The Power of Projection 69Opening the Screen’s Dimensions 74Frame as Threshold 79Writing out of the Frame 904 The Evolution of the Subjects of Cinema 98Modern Film: Between Classic and Avant-Garde 99The Ontogeny of Cinema 110Credits and Auteurs: An Ecology of Adaptation 123Fidelity: The Economy of Adaptation 129Index 147