Introduction by Pavlos Kontos

Translation of the original text.

The texts that follow are the result of the workshop "Philosophy and cinema: when André Bazin and Andrey Zvyagintsev met by the river" that I offered at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Greece (CHS Greece) and were written by participants of the seminar. The individual topics were chosen by the authors themselves and were discussed, on their own initiative, more or less during the seminar. For my part, I organized the material and, with the authors' official permission, made minor changes or adjustments and assembled the material into a whole.

The theme of the workshop was a paradox: what is the relationship between philosophy as a science and cinema as art and what do we mean today when we say that cinema is a sort of philosophy. This initial question became more concrete and tangible in two stages: (1) The workshop focused on André Bazin –whose contribution to film theory was decisive and is still today a point of reference– and his positing that cinema is genuine and true only insofar as it is "realistic" and attempted to analyse what "realism (réalisme)" means for Bazin. (2) Based on this theoretical groundwork, we "read" Andrey Zvyagintsev's great film The Return (Russia, 2003, 105') as an example of "realism" in the sense that Bazin attributes to the term.

The seminar’s subtitle, "When André Bazin and Andrey Zvyagintsev met by the river," constructs an imaginary encounter, exploiting the former's use of the river metaphor (actually, he refers to a stream) to describe “his” realism, while in the latter's film, the sequence with the child on the bridge over the river is a high example of cinematic "realism."

Why are we interested in Bazin's theoretical positioning and what is its relevance? We are interested because, even today, it is a key reference point for any theoretical approach to cinema. There is, however, a double problem: (a) this reference is based, in most cases, on completely misleading English translations of some of Bazin's articles and (b) it includes only 2-3 of Bazin's texts, ignoring the vast amount of material he bequeathed to us. The happy coincidence is that we now have Bazin's Complete Works available to us, in an extremely well-curated edition, Écrits Complets I-II, Paris: Éditions Macula, 2018. This edition offers an entirely new insight into Bazin's "realism."

In this context, we used Andrey Zvyagintsev's film The Return as a case study (hereafter: Zvyagintsev). The working hypothesis is that the film is an example of "realism." [Regardless of all this, however, the film is a cinematic masterpiece and has been honored with numerous international awards. More information about the director and all his films can be found here: https://az-film.com/en/.]
In what sense is this film "realistic"? Three clarifications: (a) the term "realism" is, for Bazin, extremely broad, so much so that it can include the films of Italian neo-realism, Robert Bresson, Olson Welles, Jean Renoir, Federico Fellini, etc.; (b) sometimes the term simply means "genuine/authentic" cinema; (c) the meaning of the term is determined by Bazin's reflection on the relationship of cinema and photography to reality, a reflection that permeates our film.

The short texts that follow illuminate important aspects of the film and offer the reader an extremely rich material that will motivate them to watch the film or to rethink it.

Pavlos Kontos
Professor
Department of Philosophy, University of Patras