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: