Andre Bazin's "The Myth of Total Cinema"

This video offers an overview of Andre Bazin's essay "The Myth of Total Cinema," which can be found in the essay collection What is Cinema? Volume 1. The video begins with a brief comparison of this essay with Bazin's most well-known and canonized essay, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image.

[@kristopherdorval9516]

PLEASE DONT STOP MAKING VIDEOS, THEY’RE SO INFORMATIVE AND EDUCATIONAL, THEY HELP ME OUT SO MUCH, IM TYPING IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE IT’S IMPORTANT TO ME!!!! THANK YOU FOR ALL YOU DO AND DONT STOP!!!! AAHHHHH

[@filmandmediastudieschannel]

Thanks, Kristopher! That means a lot!

[@showhow275]

Omg this is so brilliant!! Thank you so much!! I didn’t open the caption and I haven’t finished reading the “total cinema” by Bazin, but your lecture just made me understand everything!! It is SUPER CLEAR and EASY TO FOLLOW!! Love this so much, thank you professor ❤❤❤

[@grayareaproductions6379]

What a fascinating essay! Thank you so much for this video.

[@soumyadipdey426]

It's a treat, every time you post a lecture.

[@lopezklu]

Thanks for making these, as someone who can't afford school, this is so helpful

[@Matt-ff9ou]

The essays are not always easy to understand and videos help me quite a lot. Thank you so much!

[@franccontreras5157]

Viewed Christmas Day, 2023, in Mexico City after reading Bazin essays.

[@VideoCr4azy]

Thanks for this! Really helpful

[@duygukaya846]

Thanks so much for the great work you have been doing! We are forever grateful, for you have made clearer to us the very intricate topics of CINEMA. I was wondering if you plan on making a presentation on representation & representation systems in film. Looking forward to it!

[@filmandmediastudieschannel]

Thank you! By representation do you mean something in the realm of cultural studies? Stuart Hall etc?

[@duygukaya846]

@@filmandmediastudieschannel Hi, thanks for the reply :) I didn't mean representation of the "identity" but representation as in the discussions claiming cinema "represents" reality. Representation as a filmic construct of the image in respect of its relation to reality. More in the direction of discussions Richard Allen and Gregory Currie make, for example.
Thank you! ☺️

[@filmandmediastudieschannel]

@@duygukaya846 Ah, OK that makes perfect sense. I do find the topic interesting, but given how niche it is, it'll probably be a while before I get to it.

[@duygukaya846]

@@filmandmediastudieschannel I was just curious if it was on your agenda :) I'd love it if you could get to it. If not, you are doing a great job as it is now anyway. ❤️
Thank you!

[@bogdanbuturuga4972]

The so called 4D cinema seems to be a next step in fulfilling Bazin's ideal in the sense that it provides you, apart from image and sound, also with smell, wind, drops of water and a moving chair for a more immersive experience

[@SantanuMandal-bl2nq]

Thank you so much. Learnt a lot. Could you please do something on Film historians and their theoritical evaluation.
And isn't the "Total cinema" totally opposite of the "Counter cinema" of Peter Wollen ?
Thank you so much for your effort.

[@filmandmediastudieschannel]

In a certain way, yeah, total cinema is opposed to counter cinema insofar as total cinema emphasizes cinema's capacity for illusion while counter cinema emphasizes the breaking of that illusion. But as concepts, they're not really comparable at a certain level because they're trying to describe very different things. Counter cinema names an actual practice of filmmaking, while "total cinema" generally doesn't (i.e. I don't think Bazin would want us to identify certain films as examples of 'total cinema'). That's why it's called "the myth" of total cinema. Bazin's essay is about an idea that people have tended to have about the medium of film, even before the medium of film even existed.

[@SantanuMandal-bl2nq]

@@filmandmediastudieschannel Thank you so much Professor for your response. But I'm really looking forward for your Deleuze part 4,5 lectures and so on. I think there are lots of enthusiasts are waiting along with me! Your lectures are so illuminating, everytime learn a lot.
Thank you!

[@the_projectionist]

Great video! Well explained! I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about how visual effects would fit into Bazins ontology of cinema. So for example, a photo of an apple shares in the being of the apple because it's a mechanically produced copy of the apple, but what if the photo is edited to the point that it no longer resembles the original apple? I guess what I'm asking is would Bazin care whether the image is a faithful copy of reality, or does it only matter that we believe the image is a copy of reality?

[@filmandmediastudieschannel]

Thanks for the question! Film scholar Tom Gunning talks a bit about the situation that you describe - "what if the photo is edited to the point that it no longer resembles the original apple" - in an essay that I talk about in another video: th-cam.com/video/Dztn_hGEv48/w-d-xo.html
But I'd say generally your question is a hard one to answer definitively partly because an essay like 'myth of total cinema' has such a different take on realism than does 'the ontology of the photographic image.' Most standard accounts of Bazin, which tend to emphasize the ontology essay, would say yes, Bazin above all else cares about the photographic image being a faithful copy of reality, as that more or less defines his theoretical position. But the 'myth' essay seems to suggest a position that is less dependent on the truth claims attached to photography. And beyond this, there are plenty of interpretations of the 'ontology' essay that suggest that what Bazin is saying has a lot more to do with "belief" (as you suggest) than with any objective property of photographic images. See, for instance, Philip Rosen's essay "Belief in Bazin" in the Opening Bazin edited volume. That interpretation is part of a larger tradition in the last 20 years to rescue Bazin from claims that he is a "naive" realist.
So yeah, it's a good question, since there's no simple answer answer!