History is a strong myth, perhaps, along with the unconscious, the last great myth. It is a myth that at once subtended the possibility of an »objective« enchainment of events and causes and the possibility of a narrative enchainment of discourse. The age of history, if one can call it that, is also the age of the novel. It is this fabulous character, the mythical energy of an event or of a narrative, that today seems to be increasingly lost. Behind a performative and demonstrative logic: the obsession with historical fidelity, with a perfect rendering […], this negative and implacable fidelity to the materiality of the past, to a particular scene of the past or of the present, to the restitution of an absolute simulacrum of the past or the present, which was substituted for all other value — we are complicitous in this, and this is irreversible. Because cinema itself contributed to the disappearance of history, and to the advent of the archive. Photography and cinema contributed in large part to the secularization of history, to fixing it in its visible »objective« form at the expense of the myths that once traversed it.
Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects hosts, and it itself is lost therein.
Jean Baudrillard: Simulacra and Simulation (translated by Sheila Faria Glaser) (via fuckyeahphilosophy)