Arnheim is just one of many, now as in his own day, who say that film creates illusion. Like others, he qualifies the claim, saying the illusion is partial. I say film does no such thing; it creates no illusion, partial or otherwise. Film has considerable powers to engage and to persuade, but these powers are not accounted for in terms of illusion. I'll argue in Part II that they are accounted for in terms of imagination. In this chapter we shall see that there are different kinds of illusions, and that claims that film engenders illusion can be more or less plausible depending on what kind of illusion is in question. I'll distinguish two kinds of illusions film might be said to engender, concluding that it engenders neither of them. Before I get to that, I need to distinguish claims about the illusory nature of film from other claims which are sometimes made.

TRANSPARENCY, LIKENESS AND ILLUSIONISM

Let us start by distinguishing three doctrines about cinema; all of them have been called “realism”, and each is to some degree deserving of the name. They are, however, quite distinct, and to underline their distinctness I shall give each a different title.

There is first the claim that film, where it uses the photographic method, reproduces rather than merely represents the real world, because photographs capture objects themselves rather than likenesses or representations of them.