The first generations of film theorists---known to Anglo-American scholars of cinema as "classical" film theorists---were overwhelmingly preoccupied with finding an answer to the question, What is cinema? Some of these theorists argued that the cinema is a powerful visual technology that reveals truths about reality that cannot be seen with the naked human eye, much like other visual technologies, such as microscopes and telescopes. And they conceived of cinema's revelatory capacity as an awesome, even miraculous power that has the potential to bring about a fundamental change for the better in human existence.; Through a detailed examination of the writings of Jean Epstein. Bela Balazs, and Dziga Vertov from the 1920s and early 1930s, this dissertation seeks to explain why it was these theorists believed the cinema's revelatory power could bring about a revolutionary transformation for the better in human life. It argues that this belief arose out of a skepticism about normal human vision that is characteristic of modernism. This skepticism, which the author---drawing on the philosophy of Wittgenstein---argues constitutes a departure from ordinary language, gave rise to a desire for visual certainty and authenticity among modernist artists in general, for ways of seeing that depart from uncertain, inauthentic, unreliable, all-too-human sight. Because of its capacity to diverge from normal human vision by revealing features of reality inaccessible to it, the cinema was seen by these modernist film theorists as compensating for the eye's unreliability and allowing for visual certainty and authenticity. Hence their belief in its utopian potential. For them, the cinema promised a visual redemption from the doubt and blindness that, according to modernists in general, besets the eye. The author also shows how, because of their systematic doubts about normal vision, these theorists departed from ordinary language in two further ways: sometimes by construing phenomena that, in our ordinary language, it is logically impossible for human beings to see as empirical phenomena the naked eye is too weak to see; and sometimes by denying everyday sight the capacity to see phenomena that, in our ordinary language, it can see perfectly well unaided.
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