Build a movie plot around this: Who is seen and the end of the movie? Miss Dupree
Illusions depicts a fictional 1940s Hollywood studio and defines film as a powerful historian, however, one that omits many cultures from its history. The protagonist Mignon Dupree expresses the need for "films that give the public situations and characters that they can recognize as part of their own lives." Illusions is a candidly self-aware film because it takes place in a fictional studio, and its characters discuss Hollywood's film production directly. The films title refers to the faults in cinemas portrayal of reality. Furthermore, Illusions also points to its own artificiality, identifying itself as a film object. Illusions features two invisible blacks: Mignon Dupree, invisible as an African American studio executive passing for white, and Esther Jeeter, as the invisible singer hired to dub the singing parts for white film star Leila Grant.Self-reflexive films identify themselves as cinematic objects by calling attention to the filmmaking process. Using editing techniques that depart from realism and/or film content that portrays features of the filmmaking process indicate to the viewer that, in addition to a central narrative, this is a film about a film. This film begins with a slow-zoom on a rotating Oscar and the following voice-over which is a quotation from Ralph Ellison's 1949 essay The Shadow and the Act: "To direct an attack upon Hollywood would indeed be to confuse portrayal with action, image with reality. In the beginning was not the shadow, but the act, and the province of Hollywood is not action, but illusion."Parallel instances of self-reflexive images appear, that apply to the medium of film then to the film itself. Illusions begins with an aged "3-2-1" film-leader-countdown. This exact footage is repeated within the film, in the studio, when the filmmakers are reviewing the movie of Leila Grant singing. The film of the white starlet plays on a screen alongside Esther as she sings in the dark studio. This juxtaposition implies Hollywood's institutional racism and highlights an...