In July 1984 Baudrillard gave the inaugural Maria Kuttna Memorial Lecture at the University of Sydney in Australia, a lecture series which was designed to present film-makers and theorists of cinema to the Australian public. Baudrillard had an enduring love of film and was a long-time fan of regularly going to the cinema. Kuttna had been a film critic and Baudrillard cites films such as The China Syndrome and The Last Picture Show in his lecture but it was his theorising of the moving image which was most in demand. Baudrillard's influence in Australia, and especially on the discipline of Australian Cultural Studies, in the 1980s was quite considerable. Journals such as Art and Text and On the Beach featured his writing translated from the French and in the same month as his film lecture the international conference ‘Futur*Fall: Excursions into Postmodernity’ took place in Sydney catapulting his ideas around the world and solidifying Baudrillard's growing international reputation for being the pre-eminent theorist of ‘the postmodern’ and the major global commentator on postmod-ernism's supposed pervasive relationship to the mass media and contemporary culture of the era. The extract here is the full text of the lecture, translated from the French by Paul Patton and Paul Foss.