André Bazin
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Co-founder of Cahiers du Cinéma and the father of realist film theory. Bazin argued that cinema's vocation is reality — that deep focus and the long take respect the world's ambiguity where montage imposes a meaning on it — and mentored the young critics who became the French New Wave. What Is Cinema? remains the discipline's foundation stone; he died at forty, the day after Truffaut started shooting The 400 Blows.