The cinema is truth 24 frames per second © Philippe René Doumic - 1963
The cinema is truth 24 frames per second © Philippe René Doumic - 1963
We all are creators of fictions. We all are Godard.

The magic of cinema resides in the way it generates in us the perception of continuous movement through a succession of still images (24 frames per second, or an image taken every 41.7 thousands of a second), which the Lumière brothers dubbed "animated photographic views".

Staggering continuous movement across 24 frames per second means that all we retain about this continuous movement is that series of instantaneous images taken every 1/24th of a second.

A wagon wheel in a spaghetti western, or the wheel of a car, seems to turn in the opposite direction to the way the vehicle is traveling.

Even though we know for sure which way the wheel is really rotating, and even though we are well aware we are seeing an illusion, the illusion remains and takes firm root in our consciousness.

The wheels that turn backwards - University of Geneva © RTS - 2016
Developing this phenomenon of the wheel turning backwards, Swiss scientists from this University of Geneva have conceptualized a theory about travel toward the past that they perfectly resume by this famous quote: hurry up slowly. Remind that to travel toward the future, you just have to ride your bike, take your car, or catch a train or plain when the covid era shall belong to the past.

What is more amazing than this stroboscopic effect, what is even unimaginable, is that our brain does the same thing! It captures discontinuous images from the external world (13 FPS) but manages to make us perceive them as continuous movements. These still images are very quickly put together by a filling mechanism, or rather an inventing mechanism, to convey a subjective impression of continuity.

In other words, when we have our eyes open to the world, we are already, in fact, kind of in a cinema.

Our perception is the product of our internal projector.

Consuming cannabis, LSD or other psychedelic substances, even some medications that act on our brains, can trigger these special varieties of visual perceptions.

Psychedelic Trip © Hareck Lyckeren - GD/Prog - 2013
Stop the video scrolling when little red dots come embedded into it
Warning! Don't look at this video in case of epileptic disorders
All of these situations display alterations in the editing stage of our internal cinema.

The magic number of 13 frames per second is just an average.

Each of us have our own personal projector and the sampling varies around this average for countless reasons, such as our level of mental stress, concentration, tiredness, and so on.

Aristotle theorized art as imitation of nature in his Physics.

It is now possible to adapt this definition and venture that rather than imitating nature directly, art imitates our perception of nature.

"Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions." Nietzche.
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