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Chapter 7 Film Studies Although the analogy between dreaming and cinema has been a staple of popular culture and film theory almost since the first appearance of moving pictures, it is only rarely that serious dialogue between dream studies and film studies has been undertaken. Both dreaming and cinema consist of the detailed, elaborate, audiovisual presentation of imagined scenes, in states that induce in the subject a distance from the everyday world and an almost hallucinatory immersion in a fantasy. The differences are just as evident: Most importantly, the dream is considered the definitively private experience, whereas films are intensely collaborative products, experienced (at least until recently) in a collective space subject to its own specialized social conventions. This fact alone often has placed the dream in the realm of personal psychology, whereas cinema is studied as an aesthetic field and a social discourse. The same is true of the relation between the dream and other cultural productions that are studied in the arts and humanities. As already suggested, one of the great advantages of encouraging dream studies in general humanities education may be its special potential for training students in bridging the gap between private experience and public expression through informed critical reflection. Because of its unique ability to present a sensorially detailed, shared public dream, film offers special possibilities for exploring with students new perspectives on dreaming—and dream studies may help students frame questions about the cinema in new and productive ways. As was the case with our discussion of general humanities, we attempt to raise issues that may be discussed in a range of courses, from specialized studies of the dream–film analogy to dream studies classes featuring a short unit on film. Cinematic dream sequences, as well as the use of the dream as a narrative convention to frame a fantastic plot, are very familiar to popular audiences, and most instructors of dream studies are accustomed to choosing favorite examples to illustrate concepts. But for the discipline of film studies, the key issue has 119 120 Dreaming in the Classroom been and remains the characterization of cinema as “dream art” (or “oneiric art”). In addition to broadly describing the similarities and differences between dream and film as quasi-hallucinatory experiences, filmmakers, philosophers, and theorists have considered the implications of an actual derivation of the medium of film from the experience of dreams. Susanne Langer was one of the first to argue (in her influential survey of aesthetics, Feeling and Form) that basic conventions of narrative cinema reproduced key features of the dream experience, rather than perceptions of external reality as was often assumed. For example, the montage technique of cutting from scene to scene with minimal transition, or the symbolic use of spatial relations to convey emotions, are elements of cinema that appear to derive from our dreams, even when they are employed in the service of realism.1 Parker Tyler, who explored psychoanalytic perspectives on Hollywood films in pioneering and influential essays, eloquently demonstrated that mainstream cinema actually thrives on lyrical use of symbolism and associative patterns of imagery—”the order of the dream”—just as much as experimental films. Countering the prevailing assumptions of cinematic realism, he argued that narrative films actually attempt to represent not what cameras can objectively record, but the world as humans experience it—not a world of appearances but of constant imaginative transformation, whose richest realization in ordinary experience is in our dreams.2 The fullest exploration in print of the dream–film analogy to this date, is the philosopher Colin McGinn’s The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact, which provides a highly discursive overview of the many questions raised by the intuition that movies are “like” dreams. McGinn essentially holds that cinema, like dreaming, allows for projection of the spectator into emotionally rich and evocative situations that constitute virtual experience of our central concerns in life.3 An advantage of acquainting students with this approach is that it provides a model for paying close attention to their own experience of the basic perceptual features of both dreaming and viewing films. McGinn accordingly directs his readers to consider in careful detail the means that movies use to convey that a scene takes place in a dream—an indispensable focus for any classroom examination of oneiric cinema. A radically different line of exploration of the dream–film analogy is found in French film theory of the 1960s, which attempted to ground semiotic analysis of cinema—the...

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