More than sixty years ago, a wide-ranging debate took place among film scholars. At the centre of that controversy were Pasolini's theory on the relationship between cinematic language and reality. As is well known, Pasolini was reproached by semioticians for establishing too direct a relationship between them. The debate was largely inconclusive, leaving the contenders in their own positions. However, after decades of silence, several contributions have been published on this topic, especially within the Italian semiotic community, starting from Umberto Eco’s Kant and the Platypus. The aim of these contributions is to reconsider Pasolini's theoretical work; interestingly, they all seem to recognise that Pasolini's theory was far less naive than it appeared at the time, being in fact a theory of intersemiotic translation ante litteram. In this sense, Pasolini would have anticipated certain developments in semiotic theory, seeing the relationship between artistic languages and reality as a problem of translation – or “capture”, as Lancioni (2020) said with reference to Deleuze.It therefore seems useful to follow the developments of this recent debate, to renew our ideas not only on the relationship between art and reality in general, but also in relation to the challenges that digital cinema poses to us today.