Technical arts and reality: The status of the referent in photography and cinema

Abstract It is quite obvious that both photography and cinema have a strong documentary effect, making for an intimate contact with reality. Of course, most films are deliberately and overtly fictitious, yet at the same time they have a verisimilitude of the highest degree, which has to do with the very nature of representation on screen. What is less obvious, however, is that the two media are linked to time, and this affects the nature of human perception. It is this connection with time in photography and cinema which we will be examining here, both to delineate distinctions, and to bring out similarities between them. Hopefully, this will result in a better understanding of the essence of both arts which are so much a part of our daily lives.