Although virtually all films produced today are made within the IMR, it is not the only possible mode of representation.
Burch's goal is to show that the IMR was a class-determined practice, developed out of the bourgeois desire for totalizing illusionistic representation.
André Bazin had identified the “myth of total cinema,” or a constant desire to represent reality as completely as possible, which he claimed as the root of cinema innovations (both technology such as sound, color, and widescreen as well as techniques such as more elaborate editing).
The audience is completely imaginatively involved in the film, instead of being distant from it and seeing it as an object to be examined.
"[2] Various techniques (often referred to as the “language of cinema”) were developed in order to accomplish this identification: