[The dis-positive: metapsychological observations of the reality impression]

In the author's view, Plato's myth of the cave is an exact description of the movie theatre. In both there is a constraint to immobility, repetition and a return to a former state--a primary-process throwback to the immobility of the newborn infant and the sleeper. The captive in the cave, the cinema-goer and the sleeper are all-albeit in different ways--victims of an illusion of reality, an impression that deviates from reality, and are hence subjects of the unconscious. It is this more-than-the-real, this desire for desire, that in Baudry's view informs the history of cinema.