What Cinema Is!: Bazin's Quest and its Charge

Acknowledgments ix

Prologue: The Target of Film Theory xiii

1 The Camera Searching in the World 1

Is a Camera Essential? 1

The Cahiers Axiom 4

Tracing Bazin’s Trace 11

Images Contested Today 17

2 The Editor’s Discovery of Form 29

Bazin’s Forerunners 31

Documentaries in the Cauldron of History 37

The Cahiers Line 42

Pursuing Cinema in the Twenty-First Century 48

3 The Projector as Spectator’s Searchlight 66

The Power of Projection 69

Opening the Screen’s Dimensions 74

Frame as Threshold 79

Writing out of the Frame 90

4 The Evolution of the Subjects of Cinema 98

Modern Film: Between Classic and Avant-Garde 99

The Ontogeny of Cinema 110

Credits and Auteurs: An Ecology of Adaptation 123

Fidelity: The Economy of Adaptation 129

Index 147