More than half a century ago, the great film critic Andre´ Bazin ([1946–1957] 2004) described what he called “the myth of total cinema” (2004: 17–22). In Bazin’s vision, the history of film could be seen as a progressive movement toward an ultimate goal: “a total and complete representation of reality . . . the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color, and relief . . . an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time” (2004: 21). Bazin calls this goal a “myth” for several reasons. First, because the ideal of a total representation of reality is just that, an ideal: something that we can always strive for, but that we will never fully attain. And second, because Bazin believes that it was the ideal of total cinema that drove the development of the actual technology of film—and not the reverse. Bazin says that the movies were not created by “the two industrialists Edison and Lumie`re” (2004: 22), the inventors who are generally credited with actually making the first movie cameras and projectors. Movies are rather the product, Bazin maintains, of a group of now-forgotten dreamers: “the fanatics, the madmen, the disinterested pioneers” (2004: 22) who were obsessed with the uncanny power of images.
Bazin’s myth is stranger than it might at first appear. It’s easy enough to dismiss it as philosophically “idealist,” an appellation that Bazin himself would not have rejected. But it’s an odd sort of idealism that entirely erases any trace of the Cartesian or phenomenological subject. Despite his own training in phenomenology, Bazin’s focus is entirely ontological, rather than epistemological or phenomenological. In Bazin’s vision, the world recreated by film seems to exist on its own account, “in its own image, independent of either the creator or the spectator. Photography and film are radically contingent on “the instrumentality of a nonliving agent” (2004: 13). The cinematic artist must therefore step aside from the image that he/she helps to bring into being, letting the machine do its work without imposing subjective interpretations on it. As for the spectator, there is no room in Bazin’s account for the voyeuristic subjectivity that is at the center of so much actual film, and so much film theory. Instead, Bazin presents an ideal of self-subsisting images, liberated from any particular perspective, as from any specifically implicated viewer. Film viewing for Bazin is entirely disinterested—as any aesthetic pleasure must be, according to Kant.
Though Bazin insists that the teleological development of film has never been driven by mere technological progress, his outlook still entirely depends on the conditions afforded by nineteenth- and twentieth-century technologies of mechanical reproduction. For Bazin, the indexical quality of photographic and cinematographic images is their most important feature. In traditional photography, there is a literal, cause-and-effect, point-for-point relationship between the object that stands before the lens, and the image that is inscribed on the photographic plate by light reflected off that object. The mechanistic nature of the camera eliminates any imposition of the artist’s hand: “for the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man” (2004: 13). Bazin bases his entire “ontology of the photographic image” (2004: 9–16) on its “essentially objective character. . . . In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us. . . . Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction” (2004: 13–14).
What are we to make of all this in the twenty-first century? Today, we might say that Bazin’s myth of total cinema has come closer than ever to realization, albeit in a manner that Bazin himself did not anticipate, and would not have appreciated. For what has happened in the last half century is that, instead of the movies becoming more like reality, reality has become more like the movies. The world we live in is saturated with images, and especially moving images. There are hundreds of cable TV channels, thousands of films available on DVD, surveillance cameras everywhere, lots of hyperrealistic, fast-moving video and computer games, and an ever-increasing number of Webcams and streaming video sources online. There are active, online screens everywhere, from giant electronic billboards looming over the urban landscape, through video monitors running real-time surveillance footage, to the miniature screens of iPods and mobile phones.
But it’s not just that the quantity of moving images has increased over the last fifty years; it is also that these images have changed the nature of reality itself. Bazin thought that movies were trying to reproduce a real world that already existed independently of them. Today, this seems hopelessly naive. Images are themselves a constituent part of the “real world.” They are as real as anything else, more real, perhaps. Nothing exists independently of TV, the movies, and the Internet. Film and video don’t reflect a prior reality; rather, they make the world over in their own images. For instance, political campaigns and professional sports scarcely exist apart from television; they are enacted directly for the camera. “Reality shows” go even further, by putting “real people” into situations that only exist as arbitrary constructions in the mind of some producer. And with video podcasts, and popular Websites like YouTube, people are able to transform their everyday lives directly into televisual performances. Today we live in a world that can itself be described, ironically, as “a total and complete representation of reality.”
Also, the indexical character of the photographic image has disappeared. Cheap, lightweight digital video cameras, with instantaneous playback, have made it easier than ever before to capture images of raw, immediate, everyday experience. Yet ironically, we can no longer put our faith in the truth-value of such images. It’s not just that anybody, at any time, may already be playing self-consciously for the cameras. But beyond this, photographic images themselves are no longer objective in Bazin’s sense. They can no longer carry their own self-evidence, in an age of digital sampling, image-manipulation programs like Photoshop, and CGI (computer-generated imagery). Even when images are not being actively manipulated, the very shift from analog to digital destroys the indexical nature of the photograph. Digital photography is no longer mimetic. The chain of cause and effect is ruptured: no longer does light reflected off an object, and entering a lens, produce analogous chemical changes on a photographic plate. Instead, the stream of light is sampled at precise intervals, and rendered into an abstract binary code (1s and 0s). This abstract code can be easily manipulated and overwritten: which is why it is so simple a task to edit and alter images on a computer, to lighten and darken and otherwise change appearances, to combine objects and scenes from totally different times and places, and even to convincingly render objects and scenes that never stood in front of the camera in the first place. In digital photography and film, even the most mimetically faithful images are artificial and fictive. There is no longer any ontological distinction between a “true” image and a “false” one.
The new digital technologies would seem to have vitiated all of Bazin’s founding assumptions. Yet we should remember Bazin’s insistence that technological capability per se was never the point of his myth of total cinema. The “basic technological discoveries,” he says, are “fortunate accidents but essentially second in importance to the preconceived ideas of the inventors” of cinema. In fact, the myth of total cinema “seems to call for a reversal of the historical order of causality” (2004: 17). Moreover, Bazin doesn’t care about—and indeed, shows no awareness of—the distinction between analog and digital. He is concerned, rather, with the difference between the automaticity of the camera and tape recorder, on the one hand, and the “inescapable subjectivity” (2004: 12) of the arts (like painting, drawing, and engraving) that require the intervention of the artist’s hand, on the other. To the extent that digital technologies reinforce the automaticity of the cinematic apparatus, one can imagine Bazin welcoming them. Indeed, this is precisely why the world of simulacra we inhabit today seems like an ironic fulfillment of Bazin’s myth of total cinema. If nothing else, the society of the spectacle works toward the goal of “completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays no part” (2004: 12).
I’d like to suggest that the real question, for Bazin, is one of time: a time that isn’t subject to human will because, conversely, the will can only realize itself within time, and as conditioned by it. Film and still photography are both mechanistic, indexical processes; but only film, Bazin says, “makes a molding of the object as it exists in time, and furthermore, makes an imprint of the duration of the object” (2004: 97). Film forces us to wait, just as the real world on which it is modeled forces us to wait. The actual length of time it takes for a process to unfold “is the very substance of the image, its true object” (2004: 27). Long-take mise-en-scene shows the actual passage of time, whereas montage (which Bazin deprecates) can only “suggest” it. In his concern with cinematic duration, Bazin looks backward to Bergson—and also implicitly forward to Gilles Deleuze’s (1989) concern with the time-image in post-Wellesian and post-Neorealist film.
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