The Myth of Total Cinema vs. Thesis Argument

The Myth of Total cinema was a term mentioned by French film critic Andre Bazin in his essay What is Cinema. He envisioned the ultimate goal or motivation of why the human civilization creates the cinematic machine: a desire to completely recreate reality, a complete illusion of life.

Bazin asserted in ‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’ that, at its purest and most organic, photography and cinema is realist in aesthetic. The innate motivation behind cinema, and therefore also the best style, is realism. Bazin attempts to add to this position by examining the history and emergence of the technology of cinema. Bazin asserts that cinema was not borne from the advances of technology and economy in the late 19th century but from that innate desire to reproduce the world around us in perfect detail. Bazin explains that ‘the basic technical discoveries [are] fortunate accidents… essentially second in importance to the preconceived ideas of the inventors’. What Bazin is arguing is that the inventors of photography and cinema were not just satisfied with producing technology for sale – though he does concede that some were primarily concerned with this – but were, at the heart of it, striving for the replication and reproduction of the “real” world.

In that respect, virtual reality can be considered a natural progression of the cinematic machine to reproduce reality. Critics and scholars argue that what cinema as it is now has to offer cannot be matched by virtual reality, all the complexities of the narrative form is explored by the technological condition of cinema already and virtual reality, like 3D cinema is a weak but not potent to what the masters or the authors had done with the medium. One can argue that is the case when virtual reality as a continuation of the narrative medium, where the cinematic frame presents the point of view of the filmmaker as a device to convince the viewer of a unique perception of the world, a thesis argument to persuade the viewer intellectually and emotionally. Without the frame, there will be no point of view in virtual reality. However, what if the constructed reality is a form of point of view? Instead of the cinema screen or frame, the entire fabrication of a particular reality is a point of view. By immersing into that reality the players of VR engage in the world created by the VR Maker. There is an interesting question remains, why do human want to completely recreate reality? To reshape it, to remake it, what's the problem of changing the physical world?