From 2007:
Though the metaphor embodied in its nickname is long dead, everyone in the world understands that a “movie” consists of “moving pictures,” and it is in the nature of a picture–a photograph–that we take for granted its unfaked reality. A century ago, our great-grandparents were scared out of their wits when one of the villains in The Great Train Robbery pointed his gun at the audience and fired it. Nowadays we’re more sophisticated than that, but most of us still cling to the belief that a film is in some attenuated but still meaningful sense a record of something that actually happened, if only on a soundstage.
Will our children feel this way about film? I doubt it….
Read the whole thing here.