Like the train, the photograph, the telephone and the automobile, cinema has been characterised as a modern technology that enacts a new experience of time and space. In theorising cinema as a ‘vernacular modernism’, Miriam Hansen asserts that film, driven by a new technology and distributed for mass consumption on a global scale, activates ‘new modes of organising vision and sensory perception, a new relationship with “things,” different forms of mimetic experience and expression, or affectivity, temporality and reflexivity, a changing fabric of everyday life, sociability, and leisure.’ Hansen challenges the notion that the consolidation of greater narrative integration restored pre-cinematic ways of storytelling, or redressed the jarring discontinuities of an earlier cinema that traded openly in the amazement inspired by the newness of the medium. The standardisation of the ‘classical’ filmmaking style is instead the very ‘incarnation of the modern, an aesthetic medium up-to-date with Fordist- Taylorist methods of industrial production and the promises of mass consumption, with drastic changes in social, gender, and generational relations, and with the restructuration of experience and subjectivity’. To explain film style in the terms of a pre-cinematic past, by this reasoning, neglects the new modes of production, reception and perception engendered by this modern, technology-driven mass medium.

Hansen's challenge to existing accounts of film's development has not gone uncontested. However, for the ‘de-westernised’ Camargue films of the 1920s and 1930s, examined in the previous chapter, the characterisation is fitting. Through the elimination of both rustic cowboys and modern telephones, or of Native Americans both on horseback and in automobiles, the cinematic mise-en-scène of the ‘traditional’ Camargue's landscapes, people and culture provides a ‘cultural horizon in which the traumatic effects of modernity [are being] reflected, rejected or disavowed, transmuted or negotiated’ – and, one may add, forgotten and remembered.

This horizon, however, is not immutably traced in stone. It is an ever-receding zone of contest, and what once was rejected and disavowed may return in a new guise. In subsequent decades, after World War II, the traditional Camargue on film remains a site where the anxieties of the present are negotiated.