Bazin at 90

André Bazin would have turned 90 today. In his honor, I opened the new e-issue of Cahiers du Cinema, which has been publishing (and translating into English) one of Bazin’s uncollected articles each month. Here’s a tiny snippet from this month’s article, “To Encourage Quality Films, We Have to Change the Law for Subsidizing Cinema” (Radio-Cinéma-Télévision, no. 64, 8 April 1951), translated by Bill Krohn.

“...the producers reply that it is impossible to apply the criterion of quality. To hear them talk, one would think that this notion is as impossible to get hold of as a sea serpent or a flying saucer, as untrustworthy as the testimony of a five-year-old child about the trauma of being weaned. This terrorizing assertion, energetically repeated, is simply ridiculous.”