ABSTRACT
From the earliest days, film has struggled with two opposite impulses-to make its narratives
as realistic as possible and to create the fantastic, the reimagined reality. These two impulses were represented in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Louis Lumie`re and his brother, and by
George Me´lie`s. Now, over 100 years later, digitization of the image, including special effects
and postproduction, has fused the two opposite worlds. Now images can look real, yet originate out of an imagined reality rather than out of a captured (filmed) reality. In this chapter,
our goal is to examine how artifice has become real and how realism of the old-fashioned sort has taken on a new meaning in the film experience.
