This article explores the figure of cinema as hallucinatory machine in a time where mental disorders such as hysteria, neurasthenia and somnambulism provoke an overload of sensorial stimuli. But while the cinema is conceived as a hallucinatory dispositive, perceptual disturbances are described in medical and psychological literature as a projection of images on a mental screen. Around 1910, picture shows become not only an epistemological model in the theories of hallucination, but also—more broadly—in the conceptualization of perception and subjectivity that is closely related to technological and social modernity.