MIMESIS
Since the Classical era, philosophy and literary criticism have applied the word mimesis (μίμησις, trans. 'imitation') to signify the artist's process or the act of applying the technical skills and knowledge, in order to produce a representation of reality.
Thematic Question: What is mimesis and how, through the interplay of the wide range of perspectives in ongoing development of cinema, has cinematic mimesis come to work? This way of construing the question may overlap with R.L. Sharman's treatment of the elements of cinematic 'language': "In fact, for more than a century, filmmakers and audiences have collaborated on a massive, ongoing and largely unconscious social experiment: the development of a cinematic language, the fundamental and increasingly complex rules for how cinema communicates language".
(R.L. Sharman, Moving Pictures: An Introduction to Cinema, 4. Creative Commons, copyright 2020)
In visual arts, representation takes the form of a visual image:
'the ambiguity of the status of any visual imagery hinges upon the complex relationship that we, as human beings, have with reality, extending to how we choose to represent reality. The ambiguity of visual imagery persists, and is perhaps amplified, within cinema: the advent of mechanical photo recording enabled the production of increasingly 'lifelike' moving images. The moving picture's verisimilitude means that understanding the relation between the image and the referent has become an all the more urgent and problematical matter'.
(Here, I've paraphrased Chiara Quaranta, Iconoclasm in European Cinema: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Image Destruction, 23. Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
Cinematic Verisimilitude: 
The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, Lumière Brothers (1896): legend has it that the audience members panicked when they first viewed this film because, as cinema was new, they failed to distinguish the moving image of a train hurtling towards them from reality of such an event. Apparently, the story may not be true. However, the fact that the story has been given credence points to the early recognition of a potent (and potentially disturbing) relationship between appearance and reality in the mind of the cinematic audience member: cinema appeared to have the power to challenge the (already tenuous) balance of truth and perception. The anxiety that this consideration occasioned, along with a reactionary impulse to impose a standard of 'decency' upon an unregulated film industry, led to the adoption of the Hays Code (initial draft1930, widespread adoption by the studios 1934).
Leni Riefenstahl filming Triumph of the Will (1935): I'm not sure that this anxiety is entirely unfounded.
Framing and Movement:
"What makes cinema special is, of course, movement, both in terms of how subjects move within the frame - also known as blocking - and how the frame itself moves through a scene".
Shangai Epress,(1932): The director, Josef von Sternberg, evocatively frames the motion of the train moving slowly though a busy alleyway.
Yojimbo (1961)
Within a perfectly composed framing, the protagonist walks down a street. The shot is filled with tension.
Note (for further consideration): we extrapolate upon Sharman's thought (we have collaborated ... in the development of a cinematic language); what he seems to describe in his text are the fundamental building blocks of that language and the ways in which they connect (I would liken this to a lexicon and a syntax of cinema); we might then seek to examine how this cinematic language is used most effectively or persuasively (this would suggest a rhetoric of cinema)
Manhatta (1921): by utilizing Walt Whitman's ode to frame cinematic images of Manhattan, Paul Strand invests the film with a rhetorical significance - for Whitman's poetic voice is known, perhaps above all, for its powerful rhetorical resonance. By associating his images with Whitman, Strand is associating the vision of Manhatta with an explicitly rhetorical impulse.
Genre... is one of the things that we talk about most often, when discuss a movie with those who might (or might not) have seen it: our appreciation of any film includes an understanding of the category or 'type' that film fits into. A partial list of the categories of genre might include: horror, mysteries, westerns, romance movies and film noir, Each genre is distinguished by certain narrative conventions: a genre will also tend to exhibit a certain look and feel. Sharman refers to this look and feel as the 'signature style' of the genre): he discusses how fil noir, for instance, is typically characterized by certain: lighting ('low key'), compositions ("off-balance'), settings ('gritty and urban') and, characters ('tough, no-nonsense' and fast-talking - the dialogue in film noir is often quite distinctive). The 1945 film, Mildred Pierce, is an example of the film noir genre. One of the tropes or motifs of that genre is the femme fatale - a woman who (to paraphrase Lady Carolyn Lamb) is mad, bad, and dangerous to know: Mildred's daughter, Veda, matches this description. . !
Genres tend to persist, as do the motifs asociated with them - the matter of genre is deeply ingrained in our comprehension of the language of cinema. Often, great movies cross categories (Mildred Peirce is a film noir and a melodrama) or subtly subvert the tropes of the genre to which they pay tribute.
Miller's Crossing (1990): "There's nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat".
Veda ...pumping her creepy stepfather/boyfriend full of lead, because he had the temerity to trash-talk her.