Today, we might say that Bazin's myth of total cinema has come closer than ever to realization, only not in a manner that Bazin himself would have appreciated. For what has happened in the last half-century is that instead of the movies becoming more like reality, reality has become more like the movies. The world we live in is saturated with images, and especially with moving images. This is mostly because of television and video: there are hundreds of cable TV channels; thousands of movies available on VHS, laser disc, and DVD; surveillance cameras everywhere; lots of hyperrealistic, fast-moving video and computer