With an analysis of texts, this article explores the motive of the cinema as a halluciner machine, at a time when nervous disorders such as hysteria, neurasthenia and somnambulism lead the subjects concerned to be too fully sensory to control. But if the cinema is designed as a hallucinatory device, the perception disorders are described in the form of a projection of moving images on a mental screen. Around 1910, the filmmaker then became a preferred thinker in the study of hallucination, but also more broadly, an epistemological model of perception and subjectivity in the age of technological and social modernity.