Exploration, Invention and Imagination: The Myth of Icarus in André Bazin

In this essay, I intend to elucidate the ontological implications of André Bazin’s integral realism: "a recreation of the world in its own image." The connection that he draws between the world and the image is in harmony with his mythical project for cinema, which argues that an imaginative myth of "total cinema" preceded its actual invention and thus moves beyond technological determinism. I argue that, while Narcissus has been named the inventor of painting (Damisch), Bazin considers the myth of Icarus to prefigure the invention of cinema. Moreover, the fact that his most elaborate explication of the figure of Icarus occurs in his work on exploration cinema (especially Cousteau’s Le Monde du silence) is not coincidental. As I will argue, his view of cinema as an art of reality, i.e. his ontology-thesis, indeed solidifies in his straightforward admiration for the post-war "grand film de voyage," a genre in which Bazin saw the return of a documentary authenticity of photographic cinema.