David Sorfa

André Bazin’s critical work on film is often reduced to the clichés that he favoured long takes and championed realism as opposed to montage and artifice in the cinema. This position on Bazin has been the subject of recent critiques by Richard Rushton and Robert Sinnerbrink, building on Daniel Morgan’s »Rethinking Bazin« (2006). I will outline the terms of this new development and show that this »absolute realist« phase of understanding cinema is a return of sorts to Jacques Derrida’s analysis of textuality in the 1960s. For the New Bazinians, fiction film is as much as part of reality as anything else and I will develop this thought in the context of analytic philosophy’s understanding of »fictionalism«. I discuss the films of Preston Sturges in this context. I will concentrate particularly on Sturges's more or less forgotten final film »Les carnets du Major Thomson« aka »The French, They Are a Funny Race« (1955). This is part of a broader project in which I explore the work of Derrida in relation to cinema.

David Sorfa is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh and is managing editor of the journal »Film-Philosophy«. He co-edited »The Cinema of Michael Haneke: Europe Utopia« (Columbia University Press) and has written extensively on Jan Švankmajer and Czech cinema as well as a broad range of other film subjects. He has particular interests in film-philosophy, phenomenology, the work of Jacques Derrida and film adaptation. He has recently published a reappraisal of the Czech screenwriter Ester Krumbachová as well as contributing a video essay, »There Is Nothing Outside the Real: Preston Sturges on André Bazin«, to the journal »Intransition«.