"When we see a film, he claims, each of us may identify with the characters in the narrative, but more basically each identify with his or her self. The machinery makes us the camera, seeing what it sees, as if its gaze were our own. Cinematic illusion provides the famous “illusion of reality” not by what it shows but by the way it shows it, which mimics our usual act of perception. But it mimics it to a higher degree, because the camera can go anywhere in space or time. As Pudovkin had suggested, we become an idealized eye, not a real one. The movie viewer is a purely perceiving subject. This confirms us in our own sense of identity: I see and hear, therefore I am."

David Bordwell goes through Film History with a psychological eye in his essay, The Viewers Share.

Fun retread through some stuff from school.  Especially the stuff about how “viewers can be “conditioned” to take their experience to a higher level.” PREVIOUSLY