Representation, Illusion, and the Cinema

Abstract

Contemporary film theorists have tended to assume that the average film spectator is fundamentally deceived into believing what is seen is real. For example, in his influential essay, Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus, Jean-Louis Baudry argues that projection and narration in film work together to conceal from the spectator the technology and technique that underpin the production of the cinematic image, so that the film viewer believes she or he is in the presence of unmediated reality.' One task of the film theorist has been to expose the false nature of the beliefs about the image that the spectator is induced to hold by revealing the mechanisms of concealment and deception using Marxist-inspired and psychoanalytically informed semiotics. However, Noeil Carroll has argued recently, and in my view correctly, that what he terms the epistemically pernicious sense of implied by contemporary film theory's account of spectatorship, in which the spectator involuntarily takes the cinematic image to be real, does not reflect our experience of the cinema. The film spectator is not duped by the cinematic apparatus or forms of narration in the cinema; the spectator is fully aware that what is seen is only a film. However, the problem with Carroll's argument is that he not only rejects contemporary film theory's account of illusion, he rejects altogether the applicability of the concept of to the cinema on the basis that the cinematic image does not differ in any essential aspects from other forms of pictorial representation that do not involve illusion.2 In this essay I argue that the experience of illusion, suitably differentiated and correctly construed, is central to our experience of the cinema. My specific claims about the nature of in the cinema are deferred until the third and final sections of the essay. In the second section, I describe a form of the cinematic image shares with the photograph. It is derived from the photographic properties of the cinematic image. I call this kind of illusion because it trades upon the reproductive properties the cinematic image and the photograph share. In order to understand the significance of these reproductive properties for our experience of photography and film, I begin by contrasting how we perceive photographs and how we look at