What so?

SB writes…
Does it really matter whether it's the eye that is 'faulty' by not being sufficiently accurate to be able to distinguish individual fleeting images at 1/24th second and to register them instead as continuous movement, or whether it's the brain that is (consciously or not) more than happy to accept illusion? These are psycho-physiological technicalities, no?

Whether the illusion of picture motion happens in the eye (passively) or in the brain (actively) is more than a psycho-physiological technicality for it opens up the potential of an understanding of all vision as being inherently illusion based. Whether on or off screen it is all an active construction on the part of the viewer.

This potentially calls into question a number of issues around representation, as we are then dealing with the difference between a number of states of illusion rather than between an unmediated visual "reality" and a re-presented one. For example if all perception is illusory then terms such as non-representational take on a new meaning or non-meaning.

So far from being some scientific nicety, vision as illusion offers scope not only for an understanding of how cinema works but for a reinterpretation of it.