Beginning his essay, André Bazin dives right into the practice of embalming, how ancient Egyptians used to mummify bodies and keep them from decaying. He compares this practice to the birth of the plastic arts. He states that there is a basic psychological need in man to outwit time and preserving a bodily appearance is fulfilling this desire. Because, however, pyramids and labyrinths could be pillaged, statuettes were developed as substitute mummies in case anything were to come of the real one. This is the birth of the idea of “the preservation of life by a representation of life.” Rather than requesting to be embalmed, Louis XIV is an example of an eternal image that is set to survive via painting. Veering away from this, Bazin makes the assertion that within today’s society (keep in mind he is referring to the mind around 1945), we are no longer solely concerned with survival after death but also with the creation of an ideal world with its own temporal destiny.

In the fifteenth century, Western painting turned from a concern with spiritual realities and aesthetics to one in which spiritual expression is combined with an imitation of the outside world that is as close as possible to reality. The camera of Niepce was credited to be the invention of photography in the 1800s, meaning things could, and began to, exist as we see them in reality. This left painting torn between two ambitions–the expression of spiritual reality and symbol and the desire for duplication of the world around us. Bazin continues to explain that the desire to see reality, though it is merely an illusion created via painting, is a mental need and realism in art is caught between the aesthetic and a deception aimed at fooling the eye. This being said, photography and cinema have freed mankind from the obsession of illusion in painting because they themselves satisfy our obsession with realism.

Bazin compares two filmmaking styles, the style concerned with an image and the style concerned with reality. A photograph is of a specific moment in time and a specific place, while art can be of any moment in any place which is why Bazin argues that a painting is more eternal than a photograph. Photography ranks high in the order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely, an hallucination that is also a fact. Thus, as a final blow, Bazin makes the assertion that photography is the most important event in the history of the plastic arts and then leads us into his article on the development of the language of cinema and how we analyze it.