In the forty years of André Bazin's brief life (1918–58), he managed to re-map the relationship between the average moviegoing spectator, the film critic and the cinema industry, insisting that a thoughtful and demanding public could in fact shape the trajectory of cinema as an institution. Bazin developed a unique approach to the arts founded in a combination of Catholic mysticism, intellectual humanism and a combination of existentialism and phenomenology weaned from philosophers of the post-war period. Intellectuals of the French Resistance also instilled in Bazin a sense of activism that he directed towards his roles in the foundation of film clubs, the administration of France's first film school and the direct support of many founders of post-war European cinema, including Roberto Rossellini and Alain Resnais. As co-founder in 1951 and editor of the groundbreaking French journal Cahiers du cinéma, Bazin instilled film criticism with a profound humanism, and as the cultural godfather of his writing staff (including, among others, Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol and Rivette) Bazin exerted an incalculable influence on the cinematic explosion known as the French New Wave. At his death, Bazin left a range of uncollected and unpublished works, most of which are compiled into a multi-volume collection titled What is Cinema? (1958, 1959, 1961, 1962), as well as his lesser-read works: Jean Renoir (1971; English trans. 1973), Orson Welles (1972; English trans. 1978) and The Cinema of Cruelty (1975; English trans. 1982).