Do modern big-budget blockbuster motion pictures like Gravity stream whatever in us that's essentially almost like what avant-garde and experimental movies have performed for greater than a century? In a strong problem to mainstream movie thought, Cinema’s physically Illusions demonstrates that this is often the case. 

Scott C. Richmond bridges genres and classes through focusing, such a lot palpably, on cinema’s energy to awaken illusions: feeling like you’re flying via area, experiencing 3D with no glasses, or maybe hallucinating. He argues that cinema is, firstly, a know-how to modulate conception. He provides a thought of cinema as a proprioceptive expertise: cinema turns into paintings by way of modulating audience’ embodied experience of house. it really works basically now not on the point of the mind yet on the point of the physique. Richmond develops his idea via examples of direct perceptual phantasm in cinema: hallucinatory flicker phenomena in Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, eerie intensity results in Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma, the appearance of physically stream via onscreen house in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. In doing so he combines insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of belief and James J. Gibson’s ecological method of conception. the result's his distinct ecological phenomenology, which permits us to refocus at the cinema’s perceptual, instead of representational, power.

Arguing opposed to modernist behavior of brain in movie concept and aesthetics, and the attendant proclamations of cinema’s demise or irrelevance, Richmond demonstrates that cinema’s proprioceptive aesthetics make it an pressing web site of latest inquiry.