The Myth of Total Cinema

In his essay "The Myth of Total Cinema" Andre Bazin explores questions around the invention of cinema and the "guiding myth"(21) which inspired it, courtesy of Villiers de I'sle-Adam's science fiction novel L'Eve Future in which de I'sle-Adams envisioned a woman dancing a traditional Mexican dance, with her movements and sounds being recorded.  Bazin then gets into how this myth was 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," (21).  It was a myth portraying a realistic depiction of life, "unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time." (21). If we take this origin myth as a true inspiration of the invention of cinema, then the inclusion of color and sound in the description of the Mexican dancer must be taken as crucial to cinema. Bazin argues that this is reason enough to consider the silent and colorless film era as a mere development on the path to what cinema truly aimed to achieve. I found this interesting, because we just familiarized ourselves with Arnheim and this is a direct contradiction to his beliefs on the silent film. Also, total cinema really seems like it could be playing on Arnheim's theory of the complete film. Bazin elaborates, "It is understandable from this point of view (the myth inspired the invention of cinema) that it would be absurd (emphasis mine) to take the silent film as a state of primal perfection which has gradually been forsaken by the realism of sound and color." (21). Before moving to his closing arguments Bazin makes the statement that "cinema has not yet been invented!" (21). Using context clues from "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema" and information from Bazin's life it seems reasonable to guess he wrote this statement sometime between the late 1940's and early 1950's. Now that we are able to replicate nature in film to near perfection I wonder what Bazin would say about the invention of cinema. Has cinema been invented yet?