This book materialized at a quite precise moment, albeit the periodization and determinations of this moment remain fairly difficult to specify. It lies in the midst of a period when ‘cinema’ is being transformed, with the gradual abandonment of its original system of analogue image and sound recording on a photo-chemical base in favour of their digital coding and storage. This evolution has not only affected cinema: it has already had an impact on music and sound recording, photography, book publishing, etc. In the case of cinema, its complexity has delayed somewhat a process that soon appeared inevitable.

This shift has shaken up every field in which cinema operates: with the creation of new professions and the transformation of existing trades; the appearance of new industries and the bankruptcy of film laboratories and motion picture camera manufacturers; companies no longer producing film stock; major transformations in the ways in which ‘copies’ of ‘films’ are distributed; profound alterations to the system's overall economy involving entirely new circulations of money; radical changes to the way moving images are consumed by viewers (on computers, mobile telephones, etc.); new problems for film archives; the list goes on and on. The scope of the transformations appears so great that our vocabulary no longer seems adequate to the task: can we still call cinematic works ‘films’ if film, meaning light-sensitive film stock, is no longer present at any point in the production, storage, or dissemination process? Can we still use the term ‘cinema’ to name what is produced or consumed in ways seemingly so different from the traditional model – or must we speak more broadly and more vaguely of moving images, of media, of expanded cinema, of ‘post-cinema’?

The terms ‘technological invention’ and ‘technological innovation’ pose a dual problem from the outset: that of defining an invention and an innovation, and that of defining the technological. This two-fold problem, at once historiographical and theoretical, raises another in passing: does this question have any specific aspect in the case of technological innovation in the cinema? Or yet another problem: does this question have any specific epistemological aspect in the case of film history and theory?

Innovation in Cinema and the Film Spectator

Technological discourses on the film medium have largely been built on a now-classical schema connecting a very limited number of invariable fundamental moments: the emergence of the base dispositif, the arrival of sound and colour, and then that of a few other less crucial or partially futuristic elements: widescreen cinema, special dispositifs (Imax, Showscan, etc.), 3D cinema. This segmentation structures both Jean Vivie's Historique et développement de la technique cinématographique (1946) and Steve Neale's essay Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Colour (1985), to take two classic examples. The division volumes such as these establish is undoubtedly intended to be historical, involving a more or less precise periodization, but it also has a strong theoretical aspect, or rather it is manifestly organized according to a strong theoretical conception of the medium: cinema is moving photographic images, with the addition of the supplements sound and colour. We might ascribe to these supplements a theoretical value of increased realism (the drive towards ‘total cinema’) or power of attraction; nevertheless, they remain supplements, and adding or subtracting them does not dent the medium's fundamental integrity.

The Idea and the Question of Origins: André Bazin as Historiographer

‘The Myth of Total Cinema’ constitutes André Bazin's incursion into the writing of film history and historiographical methodology. I refer to the 1958 version of the essay included in What is Cinema?, not the original article published in Critique in 1946, entitled ‘The Myth of Total Cinema and the Origins of the Cinématographe’. The 1946 book review was radically different from the rewritten text of 1958: in 1946, Bazin more timidly stuck to writing an interesting but often approximate summary of the book he was reviewing by Georges Sadoul, in the end forming his own hypothesis only unobtrusively. Relations between the critic Bazin and the historian Sadoul were quite simply more respectful in 1946 than they were twelve years later, when Bazin extensively revised the text. In that version, the historiographical criticism absent in 1946 revealed the more complex relations between the men in 1958.

Placed by Bazin right after ‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’ in the first volume of his ‘summa’, ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’ appears to the reader as the historicized – and amused – pendant to the theoretical, ahistorical, anthropological, and highly serious opening text. The article is certainly among the better known of Bazin's texts, whose principal argument can be summarized by this remark:

In 1995, in a text that, not at all by chance, addressed the question of colour, Georges Roque remarked that ‘we have undoubtedly not fully grasped the importance that the concept of movement took on for both science and art beginning in the 1880s.’

Naturally, this could only be a statement in hindsight; for people of the day, it was not so much the concept of movement that had the importance described here, but rather movement itself. It was not a change of paradigms; it was a transformation of the world. This suddenly manifest presence of movement was certainly connected, as has frequently been noted, with the rapid evolution of the means of transport in the early twentieth century – automobiles, trains, planes, streetcars, subways – which completely redrew the body's relations with physical and geographic space and created hitherto unseen situations of perception. The latter were not only unprecedented in their regular and passive high-speed conveyance through the landscape, these conveyances also effected – more so than today – a singular kind of jolting, trembling, and shaking of the entire body and thus also the eyes. The connection between these modes of transportation and the cinema was obvious at the time on this point as well, as Jules Claretie remarked, for example, in 1896:

The Cinématographe and the Question of Invention

When the Lumière Cinématographe was invented, was cinema invented too? And was the Cinématographe a true invention, or only an innovation within an ensemble of machines already well in place by 1895? These are certainly among the most debated questions in the historiography of cinema, and in its technological historiography in particular. They reappeared on a regular basis, in particular at the time of ‘anniversaries’ of the invention (1925, 1935, etc.), before being revived for other reasons by the transformation to digital encoding.

An initial response to these questions has been proposed, for example, by André Gaudreault in his article ‘On Some Limitations of the Definition of the Dispositive “Cinema”‘: it points out the indisputable difference between the cultural phenomenon cinema and the Cinématographe (Illus. 26), which is, ‘basically and quite simply […] only […] a machine to shoot views – extraordinary and brilliantly designed, to be sure, but a machine all the same.’ When cinema was invented is essentially a poor question, a false problem: ‘Who invented cinema? Answer: the cinema cannot be invented (there is no patent to be registered): it becomes established, gradually and collectively’.