This article bridges twentieth and twenty-first-century theories of cinematography through a discussion of Soviet montage theory, Lacanian suture, structuralist ideology, obfuscation/expression in code, and phenomenology. The final section presents a case study on dinosaurs as exhibited through Gertie the Dinosaur (Winsor McCay, 1914) and Jurassic Park: Dominion (Colin Trevorrow, 2022), both of which exhibit what I call, “ciné-paleontology.” I argue that these case studies exhibit the preeminence of animation aesthetics in the non-profilmic ontologies of digital cinema. In sum, this essay points out that in the advent of the digital, spectators become reliant not on what they see, but rather, in what they believe.