ABSTRACT
There is a kind of primal pleasure, of anthropological joy in images, a kind of brute fascination unencumbered by aesthetic, moral, social or political judgements. The image medium has imposed itself between the real and the imaginary, upsetting the balance between the two, with a kind of fatality which has its own logic. Cinema plagiarises and copies itself, remakes its classics, retro activates its original myths, and remakes silent films more perfect than the originals. A whole generation of films is appearing which will be to those we have known what the android is to man: marvellous, flawless artifacts, dazzling simulacra which lack only an imaginary and that particular hallucination which makes cinema what it is. Transgression and violence are less serious, for they only contest the distribution of the real. Hyper reality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and of every objective; they turn against power this deterrence which was itself so well utilised for a long time.
