A fiction film is a visual and a pictorial work. It is visual because our mode of access to it is visual; it is pictorial because its mode of representation is pictorial. Its material is moving pictures – pictures which really move rather than simply create the illusion of movement. Nor is film typically productive of any cognitive illusion to the effect that what it represents is real; our standard mode of engagement with the film is via imagination rather than belief. Imagination is, however, parasitic on belief, for it consists of running our belief (and desire) system off-line, disconnected from standard inputs and outputs. But while the pictures of film are not productive of illusions, they are typically realistic pictures: pictures which are like, in significant ways, the things they represent. And it is partly in virtue of their likeness to these things that we are able to recognize the depictive content of these pictures. For this reason film is not a linguistic medium, nor is it in any interesting sense like a linguistic medium.

There is something distinctive about our imaginings in response to film. It is not, as many theorists have claimed, that we imagine ourselves to be witnesses of the action, placed where the camera is. Rather, it is that our imaginings have a distinctively visual structure. Nor do we imagine that the action represented is occurring in the present as we watch; film is preeminently an art of time, but it does not represent fictional things as co-occurrent with our watching.