The article discusses the representations of television in three Bulgarian films from the late socialist period, Whale (1970), A Dog in a Drawer (1982) and Interview by Popular Request (1984). The rare cinematographic representations of the TV screen articulate it as a field of conflicting forces eroding the performativity of official discourse. The three films visualize such discursive failures by different means: as an incongruity between body and words; as meaningless or excessive significations; as a visual or auditory noise; and as a fractured face that does not provide an appropriate ground for the official discourse. The final section discusses how such modes of visualization stimulated the emergence of a new concept of the real, central to Bulgarian postmodernism
