Film has an overpowering illusion of immediacy. It is only when the spectators are engrossed in the content of cinematic presentation that they start to experience an illusion of nowness, ongoing contemporaneity; otherwise they always remain aware of the sources of the audio information as well as the pre-recorded, reconstructed nature of the visual information, and they perceive both as unfolding in time, subject to historisation. Arguably, it is the work of imagination that creates an impression of reality, and not the apparatus of cinema itself. What is at the core of the problem here is the imperative to provide a set of conventions that enable such illusions. The history of film as a medium is a history of technical innovation: from black and white images to colour photography; monophonic sound gives way to stereophonic; and panoramic and 3D films emerge. It has been suggested that each stage in film development gives a sense of a more immersive experience of cinema, serving the primary imagination. While in general the cinematic image remains transparent, its ability to affirm the ontology of the object fully depends on the conceptual progress of epistemology, with the binds between the image and its referent being increasingly loose, unless, of course, the system of referents is viewed as texts rather than objects.

In this study, I examine the epistemology of film, but only insofar as its capacity to produce signification. I am interested in modes of discourse, and to a lesser extent in the structural critique of film as a form of art. While I showcase how the symbolic mode operates on the level of composition, my main purpose is to elaborate on the meaning which the symbolic mode enables. This book is not about (a classification) of figurative devices, but about a field of meaning they enable; hence, my focus is on the imaginative rather than rhetorical account of the symbolic mode. To put it differently, the book is about a specific manner of seeing, about identifying how through the visible the subject renders the invisible, the emanation and the overtone of truth. I put myself in the position of the viewer who – in the mode of co-creation – mediates on the cinematic image.