Half a century ago, the great film critic André Bazin described what he called "the myth of total cinema." In Bazin's vision, the history of film could be seen as a progressive movement toward an ultimate goal: "a total and complete representation of reality... the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color, and relief... a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time." Bazin called this goal a "myth" for a couple of reasons. First, the ideal of a total representation of reality is just that, an ideal: something we can always strive for but will never fully attain. And second, Bazin believed it was the ideal of total cinema that drove the development of the actual technology of film, and not the reverse. Bazin said that the movies were not created by "the two industrialists Edison and Lumière," the inventors who are generally credited with actually making the first movie cameras and projectors. Movies are rather the product, Bazin maintained, of a group of now-forgotten dreamers: "the fanatics, the madmen, the disinterested pioneers" who were obsessed with the uncanny power of images.

Today, we might say that Bazin's myth of total cinema has come closer than ever to realization, only not in a manner that Bazin himself would have appreciated. For what has happened in the last half-century is that instead of the movies becoming more like reality, reality has become more like the movies. The world we live in is saturated with images, and especially with moving images. This is mostly because of television and video: there are hundreds of cable TV channels; thousands of movies available on VHS, laser disc, and DVD; surveillance cameras everywhere; lots of hyperrealistic, fast-moving video and computer