Three responses to ‘Bazin's third hand’

The publication of ‘Bazin’s third hand’ should awaken three generations of Screen’s readers who have tussled with this theorist, admired his reach, or been inspired to extend or bend his consequence. Goethe now stands within the litany of thinkers (beginning with Plato) who have been shown to throw light on Bazin’s already luminous ideas about cinema. Although the index to his complete works indicates that Bazin mentions Goethe on just five occasions, and never substantively, Zeke Saber demonstrates an affinity between these men in the way they approach the world, including the worlds of science and of art. I worry that the valuable discussion of ‘metamorphosis’ in Goethe, related as it is to ‘transformation’ and ‘adaptation’ in Bazin, may be lost in the controversy generated by Saber’s title and opening gambit.

Sure enough, the first response to Saber’s essay that has reached me concerns neither Goethe nor Saber’s thesis, but the aptness and accuracy of Saber’s starting point, Hugh Gray’s inaccurate English translation of Bazin’s Qu’est-ce que le cinema?. Dominic Lash takes issue with Saber’s reliance on a review of What is Cinema? that Richard Roud published in Sight and Sound shortly after Gray’s book appeared. Roud mercilessly impugned the translation, coming up with numerous examples of egregious mistranslations. Yet Lash, going back to his copy of Gray’s work, finds almost none of these in Gray. Did Roud base his letter on proof pages of the book, rather than on the one published by University of California Press? He asks if anyone can clarify this.

I can do so, at least to some extent, for I instantly bought, and still retain, a first edition of What is Cinema? which I reviewed for Film Comment in 1969. This hardbound copy in fact contains the errors Roud excoriates, but which I did not notice at the time. I next bought a paperback edition in 1970 for my dissertation director, Angelo Bertocci, which he returned to me full of his insightful marginalia. Its copyright indicates ‘Third printing, 1970’. It has been cleaned up. So either Roud mailed Ernest (Chick) Callenbach, who oversaw film at California Press, with his list of errata, or else Callenbach reacted quickly to the Sight and Sound review. I have not yet found the ‘Second printing’, and do not know if the changes were put into effect when it came out. Likely the second printing was the first paperback version.

While Gray may be exonerated, having (thanks to Callenbach) repaired his mistakes for posterity, he is responsible for the title of Saber’s essay, with his offhand mishandling – if I may put it so – of Bazin’s construction, ‘d’une part … d’autre part’, which he translated as ‘on the one hand … on the other hand’. There is no ‘third hand’ in Bazin. There is no hand at all, since the French idiom employs part (portion or part) not main (hand). No other language translates Bazin’s ‘d’une part’ as an equivalent of ‘on one hand’. Furthermore, as I have pointed out on more than one occasion, the final sentence of the ‘Ontology’ essay was isolated by a dividing graphic in its original French publication, a graphic used elsewhere between sections in the text that Timothy Barnard properly included when he translated the essay. More to the point, Bazin deliberately added this final one-sentence paragraph as a kind of exclamation point to an article first published 14 years earlier. He wanted in 1958 to echo André Malraux’s conclusion to Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma (Sketch for a Psychology of Cinema), which ends ‘D’autre part le cinéma est une industrie’. I believe Bazin extended his text with this sentence (extended this third hand, in Saber’s terms), in order to connect his cornerstone article on ‘ontology’ to the rest of the volume in which it takes the primary position. For Volume 1 of Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? bears the subtitle: Ontologie et Langage.

Though peculiar, Saber’s gambit does encourage us to return to Gray’s prosody, which is indeed mellifluous in comparison with that of Barnard’s crisper, drier, and more literally accurate translation. Gray’s free-flowing version can be seductive but slippery, as I discovered when, for André Bazin on Adaptation,¹ I republished two of the most important pieces that Gray translated, ‘In Defense of Mixed Cinema’ and ‘Le Journal d’un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson’. Banking on the philological advice of Tadas Bugnevicius, I authorised numerous rectifications of infelicities and actual errors.

These translation issues are exceedingly important, as Lash makes clear. On the other hand, Saber, despite his title and opening, and despite a lengthy discussion of Benjamin’s ‘Task of the translator’, has little interest in this kind of philology. He does not proceed to lay out how Bazin’s innumerable ingenious tropes have been variously translated. Nevertheless, after recognising just one translation glitch, Saber set off to make considerable gains, some quite splendid, on other grounds – those of intellectual history. I am glad to encounter Bazin, Goethe, and Saber, there.

Footnotes