ABSTRACT
The evolution of the photographic image into the moving narrative image is itself a narrative of the making and comprehension of illusions. It is a narrative that runs almost as smoothly as a good Hollywood film. And it is a narrative that is tightly linked to the economic history of filmmaking. Almost from the beginning, filmmaking and moneymaking went hand in hand, one determining the other. Filmmakers, from very early on, understood on an intuitive level that images were profoundly desirable and manipulable. They knew that by their manipulating the image, the image in turn would manipulate how and what people saw and the way they responded to what they saw. This would in its turn create the desire to see more images and to pay to see more. As sophisticated as the Renaissance painters, who plotted the sight lines in their paintings to create the illusion of depth and presence, filmmakers could plot all aspects of the image for very similar purposes. Sight lines, plot lines, character, spectator positioning—how an ideal viewer is literally created by the images and the narrative going on up on the screen—all are planned to reduce the sense of distance between spectator and image and to optimize an illusion of participation.
