discourse itself. In Lacan’s terms, cinema sutures the reality and the
imaginary, and produces (un)conscious satisfaction in the audiences.
The continuous play of contemporary cinema with presence and
absence, with reality and unreality, produces a new harmonic co-existence
within the ‘cinematic dream’. The perceptual equality of the image, as real
and unreal objects have the same status on the screen, means that, in filmic
terms, the imaginary can be just as credible as the real. Therefore the
consequence is a disconcerted consciousness where the imaginary seems
perceptual and the perceptual seems imaginary. In Sartre’s terms we can
deduce that there is a displacement of the real by the unreal and it is this
which produces pleasure in the audience (Orr, 1993: 85-90).
To achieve this connection of the (un)reality of the film with the
spectator, cinema has created a series of shared conventions, a kind of
accepted (un)reality, to watch films in a certain way. The assumption is that
the initial reality is being substituted for an illusion of reality, and
consequently, it has become an established complex set of abstractions
mixed up with elements of ‘authentic’ reality. A perfect illustration of the
‘real’ status achieved by (un)real conventions of cinema is sound and colour.
We certainly perceive the world with colour and sound and therefore an
accurate representation of it should have these characteristics. But in spite of
this, when it became technically feasible, colour and sound in audiovisual
media did not faithfully reflect the reality perceived when we are not in front
of the screen. The social habits, the education of perception, play a
fundamental role in the acceptance of cinematic (un)real conventions and
therefore are adapted according to the circumstances and technology
available at the time. In this sense, one of the most relevant conventions we
can find is the use of the black and white image. It seems to be completely
artificial, but nevertheless human perception has managed to give it
cinematic (un)reality. Language and certain sounds are other conventions
that have ‘gained reality’ through the historical cinematic education; the
language in a film may not necessarily correspond with the time and location
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