See also: Bazin

André Bazin (April 18th 1918, Angers - November 11th 1958, Nogent-sur-Marne) is a French critic of Cinéma.

To achieve its vocation of teacher it enters in 1938 to the teacher training school of Saint-Cloud but in 1941 it fails the oral examination of professorship, it approaches then Pierre Aimé Touchard which has just founded the Maison of the letters to Paris.

André Bazin founds a film club there where it regularly invites Roger Leenhardt of which it reads the chronicle for a long time the Small school of the spectator in the review Esprit .

The Release is one period intense during which one wants to bring the people to the culture and the culture with the people . Extremely of this conviction, it engages through Travail and culture and Peuple and culture in the popular education.
In the factories, in Germany, Algeria, in the Morocco, it takes part in the foundation of film clubs, with training courses, animates conferences.

It in parallel starts a deliberation by writing for the French screen , the Parisian one released , Esprit , by writing monographs. It takes part in the creation of Radio-Cinema-Television (which will become Télérama ), it is at that time that it engages, to assist it, an impassioned young person of cinema, François Truffaut, of which he becomes the spiritual father and the guard.

It founds with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, in 1951, the Books of the cinema in which writes a whole generation of criticisms and future scenario writers who will belong to the New wave.

André Bazin makes the bet that while presenting and by explaining works of quality to the popular public this one will become more demanding, less subjected with purely commercial works. For him, the culture is a means of emancipation of the people. It is also to this end that it writes works on Orson Welles which it meets and questions for the exit of its film the Thirst for the evil in 1958, Charlie Chaplin, Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné of which it estimates that the day rises is approached the degree of perfection that only Citizen Kane of Orson Welles reached. Man of brilliant and opened spirit, it has as a principle of writing only on what rained to him. Thus, it yields its feather to Truffaut: “I did not find If Paris to us were told very filling with enthusiasm, Sacha Guitry having accustomed us to better. But apparently François Truffaut liked it, and as it seems that he is the only person in Paris to speak about it in good, I yield the place to him”.

While dying in 1958, one year before first film of Truffaut, André Bazin did not on the occasion to see emerging the new generation of scenario writers whom it deeply marked by his intelligence and its engagement.