This essay investigates the relationship between filmic visuality and cultural identity from the origins of cinema to the most recent developments of film theory. With specific reference to the revisioning of indigenous cultural traditions in the ‘other’ cinemas, the author insists on the active role of the recipient, specifically opposing the filmic significations of identities as having a transcultural appeal to the constructions of fixed sexual, cultural or national identities. With film, people’s identification of who they are can no longer be regarded as a mere ontological or phenomenological event. Such identification is now profoundly enmeshed with technological intervention, which ensures that even when the camera seems the least intrusive, the permeation of the filmic spectacle by the apparatus is complete and unquestionable, thus making the interpretation of filmic visuality controversial to this day, and especially in a post-colonial context.