Parabolic automorphisms of projective surfaces (after M. H. Gizatullin)

In 1980, Gizatullin classified rational surfaces endowed with an automorphism whose action on the Neron-Severi group is parabolic: these surfaces are endowed with an elliptic fibration invariant by the automorphism. The aim of this expository paper is to present for non-experts the details of Gizatullin’s original proof, and to provide an introduction to a recent paper by Cantat and Dolgachev.