The idea of Cinema tends toward a full and total representation of reality, and immediately considers the dream of a perfect illusion of the outside world with sound, color, and depth. If the cinema in its infancy did not have all the attributes of the total cinema of tomorrow, this was no fault of its own, and was only because if fairies were technically impotent and couldn't give it to them even though they wanted to.

The guiding myth, then, inspiring the invention of cinema, is the accomplishment of that which dominated in a more or less vague fashion all the techniques of the mechanical reproduction of reality in the nineteenth century, from photography to the phonograph, namely an integral realism, 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. […] Every new development added to the cinema must, paradoxically, take it nearer and nearer to its origins. In short, cinema has not yet been invented! (“The Myth of Total Cinema,” in André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray [University of California Press, 1967])