The paper starts from the assumption that cinema forms a semiotic system and proposes to explore how pictures get their meaning in the semiotic domain of the visual, to which the cinema belongs as well. The author returns to the classic theories in the semiotics of the cinema and finds that U. Eco and his conception about the triple articulation of cinema, although in many ways mistaken, was very close to discover the model of transformation which is representative for the film rhetoric. Drawing on the Peircean theory of iconicity and Husserlian concept of Lifeworld, the author concludes that the cinematic picture is an iconic sign.