Cinema Total

The famous French film theorist AndréBazin talked about Cinéma Total detailedly in an article named The Myth of Cinéma Total. He said,"The concept of film is the same as reproducing the reality; What they've being thinking of is to reproduce an illusion of the outer world with sound, color, stereoscopic perception and all the other attributes."The theory of Cinéma Total is mainly about the relationship of film and reality. As a question been studied by theorists from the very beginning of innovation of film, this is what the film theory should face with first. Headed by AndréBazin and Siegfried Kracauer, theorists of film recording theory support Cinéma Total. However, another group of theorists headed by Rudolf Arnheim is strongly against Cinéma Total. From this we can see how the theory of Cinéma Total has influenced the concept of film in history."What is film?"This is an inevitable question for film theory studies. Cinéma Total is a theory which attempts to discover the essential nature of film. Reviewing the history of film theory, the early film theorists believe"film is art". The Russian film theorists believe"film is montage". Bazin and Kracauer thought"film is record". Theorists of Structuralism and semeiology believe"film is language". Until now we can find four kinds of different answers for the question of"What is film?"They are"Film is film. Film is media. Film is art and film is language."Film is the production of technology. It is hard to separate film from scientific progress. The coming of digitalization era is the most important and revolutionary scientific progress in human history. The human life is influenced deeply and comprehensively by Digitalization. So does film. Bazin believes Cinéma Total is the dream of film. Although this dream of"reproducing the whole world completely"has been postponed to be true because of limitation of the technology, it will finally come true in Digitalization Era.In Digitalization Era, Virtual Reality is the existing form of Cinéma Total. Apparently, Virtual Reality is not the thing what we used to call film. From this aspect we can conclude Cinéma Total as the end of film. Meanwhile the other forms of film will not disappear. The presence of Cinéma Total will make the other forms of film focus on their own specialized fields. From this aspect we can conclude Cinéma Total as the dream of film.