While questioning what he calls “cultural optics,” the author of this article seeks to examine certain fundamental traits of the cinematographic apparatus regarding the specific nature of visual illusion that it proposes to spectators. As the example of fantasmagoria demonstrates, the illusion created by the optical devices of the 19th century is of an exceptionally contradictory nature, one that casts doubts on the theories of the cinematographic apparatus that have come out of the 1970’s. Classical film theory, while embracing the ideological project of the Enlightenment, seems to have closed its eyes to the dialectic aspect of mystification and revelation ushered in by optical culture, and which is at the origin of the ludic potential of film and its power of fascination.