[1] His call for objective reality in film, as understood through the use of deep focus as well as the lack of montage,[2] were linked to his belief that the interpretation of an entire movie or a specific scene should be left to the spectator.

Although his death in his forties, occurring in the middle of his writing career, kept him from witnessing the seminal works in the French New Wave period firsthand, Bazin's viewpoints exercised a large influence on those filmmakers.

[2] Bazin met future film and television producer Janine Kirsch while working at Labour and Culture, a militant organization associated with the French Communist Party during the war.

He advocated the use of deep focus (Orson Welles, William Wyler),[9] wide shots (Jean Renoir) and the "shot-in-depth", and preferred what he referred to as "true continuity" through mise-en-scène over experiments in editing and visual effects.

For example, he extensively analyzes a scene in Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (with cinematography by Gregg Toland) to illuminate the function of deep-focus composition: The action in the foreground is secondary, although interesting and peculiar enough to require our keen attention since it occupies a privileged place and surface on the screen.

Paradoxically, the true action, the one that constitutes at this precise moment a turning point in the story, develops almost clandestinely in a tiny rectangle at the back of the room—in the left corner of the screen....

[13] This idea has been dismissed by certain authors, since Bazin privileged the long take as a means of liberty and Hegel understood that the unfolding of history would conclude in a perfectly systematized paradigm.

This idea had a pivotal importance in the development of the auteur theory, the manifesto for which François Truffaut's article "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema" was published by his mentor Bazin in Cahiers in 1954.