Hi deviant friends!

Wow, I haven't been online for so long!! I'm very busy with assignment at the moment, because I'm graduating. I should actually be working on my assignment about the magic of film NOW. It so interesting! I have often asked myself when looking at the photos on dA: How do photos work? How do we know what we see? Do they, like a language, work on the basis of signs? Where is the art in photography then? Isn't it magic?
I've taken two university courses on this topic and it is still fascinating me. The novel "The Last Magician" inspired me to think about film, or better: cinema, in the same respect.
Has anyone heard about the history of film and how Muybridge invented the zoopraxiscope? He was a British photographer who wanted to find out if a galloping horse does lift all four legs off the ground at any stage of its movement. So he set up 12 cameras and photographed a horse and proved that it did! But his critics did not believe what the photo told them, so to prove that the photo is "true", he invented the zoopraxiscope, a projector, and turned his photos into a film. So I asked myself: Why do we believe films? More than we believe our own eyes sometimes?