The Myth of Total CinemaAndre Bazin

From Andre Bazin, What is Cinema, 2 Volumes, trans.!ed. byHugh Gray, pp. 23-27. Copyright © 1967 The Regents of theUniversity of California. Reprinted by permission of theUniversity of California Press.

Paradoxically enough, the impression left onthe reader by Georges Sadoul's admirable bookon the origins of the cinema is of a reversal, inspite of the author's Marxist views, of the rela-tions between an economic and technical evolu-tion and the imagination of those carrying on thesearch. The way things happened seems to call fora reversal of the historical order of causality,which goes from the economic infrastructure tothe ideological superstructure, and for us to con-sider the basic technical discoveries as fortunateaccidents but essentially second in importance tothe preconceived ideas of the inventors. The cin-ema is an idealistic phenomenon. The conceptmen had of it existed so to speak fully armed intheir minds, as if in some platonic heaven, andwhat strikes us most of all is the obstinate resis-tance of matter to ideas rather than of any helpoffered by techniques to the imagination of theresearchers.

Furthermore, the cinema owes virtually noth-ing to the scientific spirit. Its begetters are in nosense savants, except for Marey, but it is signifi-cant that he was only interested in analyzingmovement and not in reconstructing it. Even Edi-son is basically only a do-it-yourself man of ge-nius, a giant of the concours Lepine. Niepce,Muybridge, Leroy, Joly, Demeny, even Louis Lu-miere himself, are all monomaniacs, men drivenby an impulse, do-it-yourself men or at best inge-

234

nious industrialists. As for the wonderful, thesublime E. Reynaud, who can deny that his ani-mated drawings are the result of an unremittingpursuit of an idee fixe? Any account of the cinemathat was drawn merely from the technical inven-tions that made it possible would be a poor oneindeed.· On the contrary, an approximate andcomplicated visualization of an idea invariablyprecedes the industrial discovery which alone canopen the way to its practical use. Thus if it isevident to us today that the cinema even at itsmost elementary stage needed a transparent, flex-ible, and resistant base and a dry sensitive emul-sion capable of receiving an image instantly-everything else being a matter of setting in order amechanism far less complicated than an eigh-teenth-century clock - it is clear that all the de-finitive stages of the invention of the cinema hadbeen reached before the requisite conditions hadbeen fulfilled. In 1877 and 1880, Muybridge,thanks to the imaginative generosity of a horse-lover, managed to construct a large complex de-vice which enabled him to make from the imageof a galloping horse the first series of cine-matographic pictures. However to get this resulthe had to be satisfied with wet collodion on aglass plate, that is to say, with just one of the threenecessary elements - namely instantaneity, dry.emulsion, flexible base. After the discovery ofgelatino-bromide of silver but before the appear-

ance on the market of the first celluloid reels,Marey had made a genuine camera which usedglass plates. Even after the appearance of cellu-loid strips Lumiere tried to use paper film.

Once more let us consider here only the finaland complete form of the photographic cinema.The synthesis of simple movements studied scien-tifically by Plateau had no need to wait upon theindustrial and economic developments of thenineteenth century. As Sadoul correctly pointsout, nothing had stood in the way, from antiquity,of the manufacture of a phenakistoscope or azootrope. It is true that here the labors of that'genuine savant Plateau were at the origin of themany inventions that made the popular use of hisd~scovery possible. But while, with the photo-graphic cinema, we have cause for some astonish-ment that the discovery somehow precedes thetechnical conditions necessary to its existence, wemust here explain, on the other hand, how it wasthat the invention took so long to emerge, sinceall the prerequisites had been assembled and thepersistence of the image on the retina -had beenknown for a long time. Itmight be of some use topoint out that although the two were not neces-sarily connected scientifically, the efforts ofPlateau are pretty well contemporary with thoseof Nicephore Niepce, as if the attention of re-searchers had waited to concern itself with syn-thesizing movement until chemistry quite inde-pendently of optics had become concerned, on itspart, with the automatic fixing of the image.

I emphasize the fact that this historical coinci-dence can apparently in no way be explained ongrounds of scientific, economic, or industrial evo-lution. The photographic cinema could just aswell have grafted itself onto a phenakistoscopeforeseen as long ago as the sixteenth century. Thedelay in the invention of the latter is as disturbinga phenomenon as the existence of the precursorsof the former.

But if we examine their work more closely, thedirection of their research is manifest in the in-struments themselves, and, even more undeni-ably, in their writings and commentaries we see

BAZIN / THE MYTH OF TOTAL CINEMA 235

that these precursors were indeed more likeprophets. Hurrying past the various stoppingplaces, the very first of which materially speakingshould have halted them, it was at the very heightand summit that most of them were aiming. In "\their imaginations they saw the cinema as a totaland complete representation of reality; they sawin a trice the reconstruction of a perfect illusion ofthe outside world in sound, coior, and relief.

As for the latter, the film historian P. Potonieehas even felt justified in maintaining that it wasnot the discovery of photography but of stere-oscopy, which came onto the market just slightlybefore the first attempts at animated photogra-phy in 1851, that opened the eyes of the re-searchers. Seeing people immobile in space, thephotographers realized that what they neededwas movement if their photographs were to be-come a picture of life and a faithful copy of na-ture. In any case, there was not a single inventorwho did not try to combine sound apd relief withanimation of the image - whether it be Edisonwith his kinetoscope made to be attached to aphonograph, or Demenay and his talking por-traits, or even Nadar who shortly before produc-ing the first photographic interview, on Chevreul,had written, "My dream is to see the photographregister the bodily movements and the facial ex-pressions of a speaker while the phonograph isrecording his speech" (February, 1887). If colorhad not yet appeared it was because the firstexperiments with the three-color process wereslower in coming. But E. Reynaud had been paint-ing his little figurines for some time and the firstfilms of Melies are colored by stencilling. Thereare numberless writings, all of them more o~wild t us ic, m 1C inventors conjure upnothing ess than a tota cinema that is to rovidet at co pete 1 lusion 0 life which is still a longway away. any are amiliar wit that passagehorn1:Eve Future in which Villiers de l'Isle-.Adam, two years before Edison had begun hisresearches on animated photography, puts intothe inventor's mouth the following description ofa fantastic achievement: " ... the vision, its trans-

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236 CHAPTER 9 • MIMETIC THEORY

parent flesh miraculously photographed in colorand wearing a spangled costume, danced a kindof popular Mexican dance. Her movements hadthe flow of life itself, thanks to the process ofsuccessive photography which can retain six min-utes of movement on microscopic glass, which issubsequently reflected by means of a powerfullampascope. Suddenly was heard a flat and un-natural voice, dull-sounding and harsh. Thedancer was singing the alza and the ote that wentwith her faIJdango."r The guiding myth, then, inspiring the inven-tion of cinema, is the accomplishment of thatwhich dominated in a more or less vague fashionall the techniques of the mechanical reproductionof reality in the nineteenth century, from photog-raphy to the phonograph, namely an integral re-alism, a recreation of the world in its own image,an image unburdened by the freedom of inter~pretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time.If cinema in its cradle lacked all the attributes ofthe cinema to come, it was with reluctance and

l because its fairy guardians were unable to pro-vide them however much they would have liked to.

If the origins of an art reveal something of itsnature, then one may legitimately consider thesilent and the sound film as stages of a technicaldevelopment that little by little made a reality outof the original "myth." It is understandable fromthis point of view that it would be absurd to takethe silent film as a state of primal perfectionwhich has gradually been forsaken by the realismof sound and color. The primacy of the image isboth historically and technically accidental. Thenostalgia that some still feel for the silent screendoes not go far enough back into the childhood ofthe seventh art. The real primitives of the cinema1existing only in the imaginations of a few men ofthe nineteenth century, are in complete imitationof nature. Ever new development added to thecinema must, para OXlca ly, t ~ndnearer to its ;ngms. In short, cinema has not yetbeen invented! ) J

It would be a reversal then of the concreteorder of causality, at least psychologically, to

place the scientific discoveries or the industrialtechniques that have loomed so large in its devel-opment at the source of'the cinema's invention.Those who had the least confidence in the futureof the cinema were precisely the two industrialistsEdison and Lumiere. Edison was satisfied withjust his kinetoscope and if Lumiere judiciouslyrefused to sell his patent to MeIies it was un-doubtedly because he hoped to make a largeprofit out of it for hirriself, but only as a playthingof which the public would soon tire. As for thereal savants such as Marey, they were only ofindirect assistance to the cinema. They had aspecific purpose in mind and were satisfied whenthey had accomplished it. The fanatics, the mad-men, the disinterested pioneers, cJ'pable, as wasBerard Palissy, of burning their furniture for a fewseconds of shaky images, are neither industrialistsnor savants, just men obsessed by'their own imag-inings. The cinema was born from the convergingof these various obsessions, that is to say, out of amyth, the myth of total cinema. This likewiseadequately explains the delay of Plateau in ap-plying the optical principle of the persistence ofthe image on the retina, a~ also the continuousprogress of the syntheses of movement as com-pared with the state of photographic techniques.The fact is that each alike was dominated by theimagination of the century. Undoubtedly thereare other examples in the history of techniquesand inventions of the convergence of research,but one must distinguish between those whichcome as a result precisely of scientific evolutionand industrial or military requirements and thosewhich quite clearly precede them. Thus, the mythof Icarus had to wait on the internal combustionengine before descending from the platonicheavens. But it had dwelt in the soul of everymansince he first thought about birds. To some extent,one could say the same thing about the myth ofcinema, but its forerunners prior to the nine-teenth century have only a remote connectionwith the. myth which we share today and whichhas prompted the appearance of the mechanicalarts that characterize today's world.

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