Bazin, André. “Theater and Cinema” (from What is Cinema?). 1951. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 5^th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 408-418.

As Rosenkrantz wrote in 1937, in Esprit, in an article profoundly original for its period, “The characters on the screen are quite naturally objects of identification, while those on the stage are, rather, objects of mental opposition because their real presence gives them an objective reality and to transpose them into beings in an imaginary world the will of the spectator has to intervene actively, that is to say, to will to transform their physical reality into an abstraction. This abstraction being the result of a process of the intelligence that we can only ask of a person who is fully conscious.” 410

Let us compare chorus girls on the stage and on the screen. On the screen they satisfy an unconscious sexual desire and when the hero joins them he satisfies the desire of the spectator in the proportion to which the latter has identified himself with the hero. On the stage the girls excite the onlooker as they would in real life. The result is that there is no identification with the hero. He becomes instead an object of jealousy and envy. In other words, Tarzan is only possible on the screen. The cinema calms the spectator, the theater excites him…[About film]: Alone, hidden in a dark room, we watch through half-open blinds a spectacle that is unaware of our existence and which is part of the universe. There is nothing to prevent us from identifying ourselves in imagination with the moving world before us, which becomes the world. 410

Even when it appeals to the lowest instincts, the theater up to a certain point stands in the way of the creation of a mass mentality. 411

Incontestably, there is in the pleasure derived from cinema and novel a self-satisfaction, a concession to solitude, a sort of betrayal of action by a refusal of social responsibility. 411

What is really in dispute are two psychological modalities of a performance. The theater is indeed based on the reciprocal awareness of the presence of audience and actor, but only as related to a performance. 412

There is nothing to prevent us from identifying ourselves in imagination with the moving world before us, which becomes the world. 412

As Jean-Paul Sartre, I think it was, said, in the theater drama proceeds from the actor, in the cinema it goes from the décor to man. This reversal of the dramatic flow is of decisive importance. It is bound up with the very essence of the mise-en-scène. 412

Everyone knows that when the actor “retires to his apartment” from the yard or from the garden, he is actually going to his dressing room to take off his make-up. These few square feet of light and illusion are surrounded by machinery and flanked by wings, the hidden labyrinths of which do not interfere one bit with the pleasure of the spectator who is playing the game of theater. 413

When a character moves off screen, we accept the fact that he is out of sight, but he continues to exist in his own capacity at some other place in the décor which is hidden from us. There are no wings to the screen. 415

It is because that infinity which the theater demands cannot be spatial that its area can be none other than the human soul. 415

But if Racine, Shakespeare, or Molière cannot be brought to the cinema by just placing them before the camera and the microphone, it is because the handling of the action and the style of the dialogue were conceived as echoing through the architecture of the auditorium. What is specifically theatrical about these tragedies is not their action so much as the human, that is to say the verbal, priority given to their dramatic structure. 415

The dramatic force of the text, instead of being gathered up in the actor, dissolves without echo into the cinematic ether. 416

The play lies there before us apparently true to itself yet drained of every ounce of energy, like a battery dead from an unknown short. 416

Illusion in the cinema is not based as it is in the theater on convention tacitly accepted by the general public; rather, contrariwise, it s based on the inalienable realism of that which is shown. All trick work must be perfect in all material respects on the screen. 416

Gouhier’s formula, “The stage welcomes every illusion except the illusion of presence,” that “the cinematographic image can be emptied of all reality save one—the reality of space.” 416

The concrete forest of Die Nibelungen may well pretend to be an infinite expanse. We do not believe it to be so, whereas the trembling of just one branch in the wind, and the sunlight, would be enough to conjure up all the forests of the world. 418