ABSTRACT
The end of the twentieth century came a little bit later, by a decade or so, than the end of the first century of cinema, but the specific character of the twentieth century can hardly be grasped, and imaginaries about the new millennium can hardly be formed without recognizing the crucial function of film and, later, the other visual media, in helping the era be resolved into representations. The visual media (mass media from the very beginning and used deliberately as instruments of mass perception as well as mass distraction) have facilitated and enabled a popular or demotic sense of the world which has been thicker, stronger and more consistent than in any other era. Even if older channels of perception-like books and newspapers-can be said to have been gradually democratized over the course of the nineteenth century, their efficacy was immediately and spectacularly outstripped by the appearance of the technologies of the visual mediathose technologies that have marked this century as surely as (or in symbiotic cahoots with) total wars, holocausts, genocides, revolutions, and so on. From the very first exhibited films which terrified audiences with the realism of their representations, to present-day movies like The Blair Witch Project that terrify audiences with the realism of their representations, mass visual productions have caught the imagination of subjects and held them in thrall with a thoroughgoing efficiency.
