Below are my lecture notes (hastily tidied up into more-or-less grammatical sentences for the benefit of the reader) and slides from a talk I have just this morning given at the international conference Film and Media 2011, at the Institute of Education, London. This is very much work in progress, …

When Jean Baudrillard visited the USA, he wrote: ‘I was here in my imagination long before I actually came here’ (1988: 72). His words evoke an uncanny rendering of the culturally familiar, through the eyes of a European who has walked onto the world’s biggest movie set. Such a secondary experience of America was …