technological media. For him, the technological development in visual arts
has historically demonstrated the intention of:
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, 1967: 21).
Indeed, the advent of photography caused a revolution in our system of
representation of reality and provoked a dilemma in fine arts as its aesthetic
monopoly of the image was questioned. It is through the use of technology
that photography became paradoxically more pure and more artificial than its
precedent arts and transformed the relationship of the object with its
representation; more pure as it captured and reproduced the object with
(theoretical) fidelity and objectivity, and more artificial as it introduces
between the object and the artist the filter of the technological equipment.
In this sense, Hugo Münsterberg understands that, in photography, and this
was inherited by cinema, the mind develops memory and imaginative ideas
that give sense to the image. Therefore, the image is absolutely dependent
on two factors: the perception of the eye and the mind of the spectator
(Münsterberg, 2004: 58).
The primary difference between the transcendental moment of
photography and the existential moment of cinema is that photography can
only be contemplated while cinema can be lived. Cinema spectators can be
absorbed by a film and ‘transported’ via the combination of the narration of
the story and their personal experience, whilst photography requires a
‘mystic experience’ in which the observation needs to find the right
memories and experiences to be personalized. In this respect, Baudrillard
(2004: 193-202) observes the higher illusionism of photography over the
cinematographic image. Indeed, the illusion of cinema itself gradually
disappeared with the introduction of sound, colour, special effects and all the
developments that have arisen during the last century and that have brought
the medium closer to the reproduction of (un)reality. The illusion of cinema
nowadays is fundamentally based on the fascination of the spectators about
the (un)realities that it is able to create, the spectacular (un)realities and
simulations, and not so much on the solution of an enigma in which the
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