Abstract

In 1787 Immanuel Kant published a second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. Within a new preface he reaffirmed an identity that his critics had failed to comprehend: we and God encounter things differently rather than different things. A century later Louis Lumière, by the first public screening of a movie, exemplified a comparable identity that a good many nonfilmmakers have ever since failed to comprehend: we see differently by means of movies the same things that stood before the camera as the film was exposed rather than different things. I sketch within this essay the consequences of those identities for logic and filmmaking, foremost among them that identity claims, carefully construed, are irrefutable, disposing of impotent counterarguments.