Murray Pomerance, venerated film scholar, is the first to take on the 'cheat' in film, where 'cheating' constitutes a collection of production, performance, and structuring maneuvers intended to foster the impression of a screen reality that does not exist as presented. This usually calls for a suspension of disbelief in the viewer, but that rests on the assumption that disbelief is problematic for viewership, and that we must find some way to "suspend" or "disconnect" it in order to allow for the entertainment of the fiction in its own terms.
The Film Cheat explores forty-five aspects of the 'cheat,' analyzing classic films such as Singin' in the Rain and Chinatown, to more contemporary films like The Revenant and Baby Driver, with Pomerance engaging his encyclopedic knowledge of film history to point out numerous instances of suspensions of disbeliefs. Whether or not Gene Kelly is actually dancin' in the rain, or if Elliott is really flying on his bicycle carrying E.T., these cheats are what make movie magic.
Elegantly weaving the narrative for one to dip into at random or to read from cover to cover, Pomerance turns things upside down so that the audience actually finds pleasure in the cheat itself, pleasure in the disbelief. To see the elegant fake, the supremely accomplished simulacrum is a pleasure in its own right, indeed one of the fundamental pleasures of cinema.

Murray Pomerance is an independent scholar living in Toronto, Canada, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of The Hitchcock Quartet (An Eye for Hitchcock, A Dream of Hitchcock, A Voyage with Hitchcock, and A Silence from Hitchcock); Uncanny Cinema: Agonies of the Viewing Experience (Bloomsbury, 2022); Color It True: Impressions of Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2022); The Film Cheat: Film Artifice and Viewing Pleasure (Bloomsbury, 2020); Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor's Magic (Bloomsbury, 2019); Cinema, If You Please: The Memory of Taste, the Taste of Memory (Bloomsbury, 2018), and many other volumes including, with Matthew Solomon, The Biggest Thing in Show Business: Living It Up with Martin & Lewis (2024). Pomerance's fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, New Directions, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere; he is the author of Grammatical Dreams, A King of Infinite Space, and other books.

Preamble: The Viewer as "Mark"
Of Scripts
1. Yesterdays
2. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
3. Narrative Transparency
4. The Cheating Cut
5. Narrative Opacity
6. The Narrator Hides
7. Taxi Cheat
8. And Here Endeth my Tale
9. Only Pretending
10. Keeping Minutes
Of Performing
11. Monster!
12. A Star, Not a Star
13. Pain
14. Measuring Up
15. Privacy
16. Signed
17. Keyed Up
18. Don't Believe It
19. "I Love You"
20. Surrender
Of Cameras
21. Corral
22. Show Me
23. On the Road
24. "Good Cinematography"
25. "Look at the Picture"
26. Peek-a-Boo
27. Moving On
28. Behind the Camera Behind
29. All the Way Not to Holland
Of Scenes
30. No There There
31. Where are We?
32. Walk on the Wild Side
33. Happy Trails
34. The Thing
35. Heist
36. The Reality Effect
37. Stand-ins
38. A Superheroic Universe
Of Cuts
39. Believe in Me
40. Over Thames
41. Something is Happening
42. Veni creator spiritus
43. "Bite the Dust"
44. Reflect on That
45. Presence and Presentation
46. By Contrast
47. The Blood Effect
48. Our Cheating Heart: Not an Introduction
Bibliography
Index