Book excerpt: Andre Bazin (1918-1958) is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit, as well as with being the spiritual father of the French New Wave. Among the film critics who came under his tutelage were four who would go on to become the most renowned directors of the postwar French cinema: Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, and Chabrol. Bazin can also be considered the principal instigator of the equally influential auteur theory: the idea that, since film is an art form, the director of a movie must be perceived as the chief creator of its unique cinematic style. Unlike nearly all the other authors of major film theories, Bazin was a working or practical critic who wrote regularly about individual films. He based his criticism on the film actually made rather than on any preconceived aesthetic or sociological principles; and for the first time with him, film theory therefore became not a matter of pronouncement or prescription, but of description, analysis, and deduction. Indeed, Bazin can be regarded as the aesthetic link between film critics and film theorists. During his relatively short writing career, his primary concern was not to answer questions but to raise them, not to establish cinema as an art but to ask, "What is art?" and "What is cinema?" Regrettably, Andre Bazin died tragically young of leukemia in 1958. Yet he left much material behind, all of which is now duly noted and annotated, for the first time, in this book's comprehensive bibliography of writings by Bazin and about Bazin, in all languages. Also featuring a contextual introduction to Bazin's life and work, An Annotated Bibliography of the Writings of the Film Critic Andre Bazin represents a major contribution to the still growing academic discipline of cinema studies, as well as a testament to the continuing influence of one of the world's pre-eminent critical thinkers.