Smith’s Film, Art and the Third Culture is dedicated to developing a naturalized aesthetics of film, and at the heart of his proposal for a methodological “triangulation” is the principle that our research should take serious account of three levels of analysis, each with its respective type of evidence: the phenomenological level, the psychological level, and the neurophysiological level. While Smith addresses many aspects of our perceptual, emotional, and cognitive engagement with movies within this framework, he rarely discusses what underlies our visual engagement with films: the fact that they are depictions, i.e. (moving) pictorial representations. In this paper, I aim to fill this gap by discussing the notions of depiction and pictorial experience within Smith’s methodological framework. In the first part, I analyse the relationship between empirical research in experimental psychology and neurocognitive sciences and the philosophy of pictures through the lens of triangulation, showing there are good empirical reasons to hold Wollheim’s seeing-in theory of pictorial experience. In the second part, I emphasise that pictures are cultural products grounded in authorial intentions, conventions, and norms, and I propose a way in which a naturalized account could shed light on the relationship between a subset of these norms—what Wollheim termed “the standard of correctness”—and pictorial experience.