Introduction
In the silent film Sherlock, Jr. Buster Keaton plays an impoverished young cinema projectionist who dreams of being a great detective. The first time we see him, he’s wearing an outrageously false moustache and using a magnifying glass to read a book full of helpful hints on how to be a detective. Reality quickly intrudes when the manager of the theatre tells him to sweep up the debris on the sidewalk out front.
One of the dreams which seems to be within Keaton’s grasp is to buy a box of chocolates for the girl he’s sweet on. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have enough money for the impressive $4 box, so he buys her a box costing a single dollar and changes the price to make it look like it cost four dollars.
Meanwhile, Keaton’s rival has stolen and pawned a pocketwatch belonging to the father of their mutual love interest. He used most of the four dollars he received for it to buy a $3 box of chocolates. When the theft is discovered, Keaton decides to take the opportunity to solve the crime, thinking it will impress his girl. Unfortunately, the rival plants the pawn ticket on Keaton, who is subsequently branded a thief and banished from his love’s house.
Keaton suspects the rival, but is not a good enough detective to uncover any evidence. Dejected, he goes back to the movie theatre to project that afternoon’s matinee. As he does this, the love interest, who cannot believe he was capable of criminal behaviour, goes to the pawn shop and questions the owner about who stole the pocketwatch; she learns that it really was the rival.
At this point, the ostensible story of Sherlock, Jr. is effectively over; all that remains is to unmask the real culprit and for Keaton to be reconciled with the girl and her family. But all of this takes place within the first 15 minutes of a 45 minute film. The rest of Sherlock, Jr., a majority of the film, is actually an exploration of film as a medium (as, indeed, is much of Keaton’s cinematic ouevre). This paper will use Keaton’s films as a starting point for a discussion of the similarities between the way we experience film and another, more universal experience: dreaming.
Film Logic, Dream Logic
The film playing at Keaton’s theatre in Sherlock, Jr. is about the theft of a diamond necklace from a wealthy man’s safe. Keaton threads the film, starts the projector and promptly falls asleep on his stool next to the big machine. As the film-within-the-film progresses, it becomes a clear analogy to the story in the larger film. A ghostly Keaton rises from the sleeping body of the character and, to his astonishment, watches as the characters in the film turn into the people in his real life. He is so perturbed when the main villain, now in the person of his rival, propositions the female lead, now his love interest, that he runs down the aisle of the movie theatre and literally jumps into the film.
The film world’s response is swift and totally logical: his rival throws him out. Real human beings do not belong in the fictional world of film. Undaunted, Keaton sidles up to the side of the screen and jumps back into the film. Before he can confront his rival, however, the scene switches to a shot of the front door of the mansion. Just as Keaton is adjusting to this, the scene switches again to the backyard, where Keaton falls over a bench. There follows a series of quick cuts between various scenes in which Keaton is always reacting to the scene he has just previously left. In the end, he walks away scratching his head.
Two things stand out about this extraordinary sequence. The first is, Keaton is making a clear parallel between dreaming and film. At one and the same time, we are watching a film-within-a-film and a dream unfold. As psychologist Charles Levin puts it, “…film is a technological extension of the dream process…” [1] In this way, Keaton is inviting us to compare the similarities between the two human experiences.
This sequence also gives us the first aspect to compare: the treatment of space. Space in the film world is not the continuous, stable entity to which we are accustomed in the real world; as Keaton demonstrates, it is constantly shifting. Despite this, we are not only able to make sense of (well-crafted) films, but get enjoyment out of them. “The fact that time and space are often thrown into confusion,” Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams, “does not affect the true content of the dream, since no doubt neither of them are of significance for its real essence.” [2]
Towards the end of Sherlock, Jr., Keaton follows up his observation on film space with a similar scene involving film time. His girlfriend goes to the projection booth, wakes him up and tells him she knows he wasn’t the thief and all has been forgiven. Keaton, not knowing how to respond, looks at the movie screen, where the hero takes the heroine by the shoulders. Keaton takes his girlfriend by the shoulders. The hero looks deep into the heroine’s eyes. Keaton looks deep into his girlfriend’s eyes. The hero gives the heroine a passionate kiss. Keaton gives his girlfriend a peck on the cheek. The scene dissolves to the hero dandling two children on his knees as his wife knits them booties. Keaton scratches his head, not knowing how he’ll pull off that trick! [3] Clearly, time in film is almost always discontinuous (films like Nick of Time and Rope being exceptions that prove the rule), unlike the way we experience time in real life as a smooth succession of moments.
Manipulations of time and space are standard film techniques. In Doctor Strangelove, for instance, director Stanley Kubrick intercuts between scenes which take place in three distinct locations: an Air Force bomber, the War Room of the Pentagon and Burfelson Air Force Base. Or consider the shot in 2001: A Space Odyssey, also directed by Kubrick, in which an ape throws a bone in the air, and it comes down a space ship, neatly crossing millions of years of evolution in a single cut. It should be stressed, though, that these are spectacular examples of a very common process which film shares with dreams: whenever you cut from night to day, or vice versa, time has been elided; whenever you cut from one location to another, space has been elided.
Elisions of time and space mean that events which take place in film are not necessarily causally linked. In the real world, I know that if I hit myself over the head with a frying pan, I will likely start to bleed, perhaps lose consciousness, almost certainly have a headache. In film, somebody who gets hit over the head with a frying pan may next be seen drinking a beer with buddies, driving down a street or attending the funeral of his or her significant other. There is no necessary relationship between the elements of a film, as there is in real life events. Again, our experience suggests that this is true of dream as well.
If there is no necessary causal relationship between shots or scenes in a film, how do we create meaning out of projected pieces of celluloid? Early Russian film experimenter Lev Kuleshov showed that people fill in the gaps in the narrative themselves.
“In his most famous experiment…Kuleshov took unedited footage of a completely expressionless face (that of pre-revolutionary matinee idol Ivan Mozhukhin, who had emigrated to Paris after the revolution) and intercut it with shots of three highly motivated objects: a bowl of hot soup, a dead woman lying on a coffin, and a little girl playing with a teddy bear. When the film strips were shown to randomly selected audiences, they invariably responded as though the actor’s face had accurately portrayed the emotion appropriate to the intercut object.” [4]
In short, we learn how to “read” film and project meaning, as well as emotion, onto the images on the screen in front of us. Film is a “text” which must be interpreted by each viewer.
Film critic Christian Metz suggests that a similar process occurs in dreams:
“To study the script from a psychoanalytic (or more broadly semiotic) viewpoint is to constitute it as a signifier. In this the script is like a dream, as are many human products. The manifest dream, i.e. the dream as such — ‘dream content’ for Freud, in opposition to ‘dream-thoughts’ — is a signifier for the interpretation, and yet it has itself had to be established (narrated, and to begin with communicated to the conscious apperception of the dreamer) as the signified of different codes of expression, including that of verbal language (one does not dream in languages one does not know).” [5]
When we left Keaton in Sherlock, Jr., he was having trouble negotiating film reality. When we next see him, he has found a unique solution: he has taken on the persona of a film character, Sherlock, Jr., the world’s greatest detective. [6] With astonishing nonchalance, Sherlock, Jr. battles villains who are trying to kill him, his adventures are very exciting and in the end his brilliance enables him to solve the crime and win the hand of his love interest.
In short, Sherlock, Jr. succeeds at everything which, in real life, Keaton’s character botched.
Freud called this “wish fulfillment,” and claimed that it was behind every dream: “,,,a dream is a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish.” [7] In film, this roughly corresponds to an audience member’s identification with a character onscreen. Sitting in the theatre, we imagine ourselves to be the hero or heroine of the film; this is emotionally satisfying because for the duration of the film we get to be brave, strong, intelligent and a host of other personal qualities we may not feel we have in real life. Identifying with characters on the screen allows us to fulfill the wish of complete mastery over the world, of being larger than life (literally on the screen, as well as figuratively).
We can sometimes identify with villains as well (as when teenagers cheer on the killers in slasher films). [8] As Charles Rycroft points out, a somewhat different kind of psychology is at work here: “The term ‘persona’ was used by Jung to describe the mask or demeanour which people adopt to deal with the requirements of everyday life. According to Jung, people who identify excessively with their persona are apt to have dreams in which a person conspicuously unlike their persona appears, this other ‘opposite’ person being the dreamer’s ‘shadow’.” [9] For Jung, the shadow was where all the negative thoughts and emotions which a person repressed were stored, eventually taking on a character and force of their own. Dreams were a place where aspects of a person’s shadow could (and inevitably would) be expressed in relative safety; some films can be seen as performing a similar emotional function for some of their audience members.
In fact, viewers can alternate between identifications with hero and villain because the point of view in films is constantly shifting. In the final scene of Sherlock, Jr. described above, for instance, we sometimes see the film-within-a film from the point of view of Keaton’s character; at other times we see Keaton and his girlfriend from a disembodied point of view somewhere over the audience of the movie theatre. One of the most common visual strategies in film is to show a character (from either a neutral point of view or that of another character), then show what the character is looking at. This constantly shifting point of view is something we’ve all experienced in dreams.
Shifts of time, space and point of view are not the only malleable aspects of film which resemble dreams more than they do waking reality. Objects behave differently. In Sherlock, Jr., for instance, a convertible car in which Sherlock, Jr. and the heroine are fleeing the villains runs off the road and onto a lake; Keaton puts up the canvas top, using it as a sail and transforming the car into a boat. The transformation of objects is a common occurrence in Keaton’s films: in the Roman sequence in Three Ages (a parody of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance), Keaton takes his Centurion’s helmet and, turning it upside down, plants it in the ground, using it as a wheelstop for his chariot; in Our Hospitality, the coal car of a small train becomes a life raft, the coal shovel becoming an oar; and so on.
Not only can objects change, but they sometimes seem to behave with a purpose, taking on a life of their own. At the beginning of Sherlock, Jr., for example, Keaton takes a broom into a candy shop, where it picks up a sticky piece of paper. Returning to sweeping up the front of the theatre, he notices the paper and tries to pluck it off the broom and throw it away, but it sticks to his hand. He transfers it to his other hand, but can’t rid himself of it. It’s as if the object has a “mind of its own.” [10]
A much grander, and more original example of objects seeming to have a purpose occurs in the film Seven Chances. Keaton is running away from a mob of angry women to get to his girlfriend’s house before a certain time. He starts running up a hill, dislodging small rocks as he goes. The small rocks dislodge larger rocks, starting a rock slide. Trapped somewhere in the middle, all Keaton can do is dodge increasingly larger rocks and boulders as they go bounding by him. As the scene progresses, the rocks are invested with malevolent purpose, seemingly intentionally keeping Keaton from reaching his destination.
In film, as in dreams, our bodies are just as malleable as inanimate objects. For one thing, they can reproduce indefinitely. In a short called The Playhouse, for instance, Keaton plays the host of a Vaudevillean performance. There is a drunk heckler in an upper balcony — also played by Keaton. A woman in a seat on the floor tries to get him to be quiet; she, too, is played by Keaton. As are the husband and wife singing team, and all the comedians. Keatons proliferate throughout the film until, finally, nine Keatons are singing onstage at once.
Although benign in The Playhouse, the reproduction of the self can also have sinister implications. In the short The Goat, Keaton, unbeknownst to his character, is accused of a serious crime. Soon, posters start appearing around the city where he lives, causing people to shun him. He cannot figure out why. The posters increase in size and number until, in an idea which predates Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four by a good three decades, huge images of Keaton stare menacingly from every corner. When he finally becomes aware of what’s going on, Keaton has to flee the city in order to escape himself. [11]
The body in film can also move from one gender to another. In Sherlock, Jr., Keaton places a hoop with a woman’s dress in a window of a house, which he then enters in order to confront the villain. To escape, he jumps through the window, coming out the other side as an old woman. To use a different example, several of the characters in The Playhouse, although all undeniably Keaton, are women.
In film, it is also possible for the human body to become incorporated into machines. In the short The Balloonatic, there is a scene of Keaton in a canoe lazily fishing on a pond. He decides he’s had enough, and paddles toward shore. Instead of getting out of the canoe as he approaches the shore, he heads straight up onto it. Keaton has cut holes out of the bottom of the canoe for his legs, allowing him to walk onto shore without getting out of it. In this way, Keaton and the canoe have become a single unit. (A perhaps more well known example of this phenomenon is the scene from Chaplin’s Modern Times where he balletically moves through the cogs of a huge machine, eventually being stranded in them when the factory stops for lunch.)
While all of the foregoing may seem fantastic when described, it is perfectly commonplace when viewed in the context of a film. “Real and imaginary events appear in dreams at first sight as of equal validity…” Freud stated. [12] Through what is generally referred to as the willing suspension of disbelief, a similar process occurs when one is sitting in a movie theatre.
All of this suggests that the logic of film has more in common with the non-linear, often surreal logic of dreams than with the causal logic of waking life. In Sherlock, Jr., Keaton, firmly ensconced in the film-within-the-film, primps in front of a mirror, checking to see if he looks just so, then walks through the mirror into another room. A little later, he turns the dial on a large wall-safe, entering the combination, opens its door and walks onto a busy street. Still later, he literally jumps through the stomach of his assistant (dressed as an old woman) in a dead-end alley and disappears.
When we enter the film world, Toto, we’re no longer in Kansas.
Discussion: Differences and Qualifications
What happens to us in the movie theatre? Spanish filmmaker Louis Bunuel has eloquently described the experience:
Movies have a hypnotic power, too. Just watch people leaving a movie theatre; they’re usually silent, their heads droop, they have that absentminded look on their faces, unlike audiences at plays, bullfights and sporting events, where they show much more energy and animation. This kind of cinematographic hypnosis is no doubt due to the darkness of the theatre and to the rapidly changing scenes, lights and camera movements, which weaken the spectator’s critical intelligence and exercise over him a kind of fascination. [13]
Or, as Metz describes it,
The filmic situation brings with it certain elements of motor inhibition, and it is in this respect a kind of sleep in miniature, a waking sleep. The spectator is relatively immobile; he is plunged into a relative darkness, and, above all, he is not unaware of the spectacle-like nature of the film object and the cinema institution in their historically constituted form: he has decided in advance to conduct himself as a spectator (a function from which he takes his name), a spectator and not an actor (the actors have their assigned place, which is elsewhere: on the other side of the film); for the duration of the projection he puts off any plan of action. [14]
However, while the similarities between the two physical states are impressive, this do not necessarily mean that the internal processes which accompany them are identical. To understand the possible differences, we have to look at how dreams are thought to work.
As we have seen, Freud categorized dreams as representations of unfulfilled wishes. However, all of us have experienced dreams filled with images or ideas which made us anxious, which frightened or disgusted us or which contained things we couldn’t understand. For his theory to work, Freud had to explain how such dreams could be considered wish fulfilling. “[I]n cases where the wish-fulfillment is unrecognizable,” he wrote, “where it has been disguised, there must have existed some inclination to put up a defense against the wish; and owing to this defence the wish was unable to express itself except in a distorted shape.” [15]
Freud used his model of the unconscious to suggest that a complex process was behind the creation of dreams. On the one hand, there is the part of the unconscious which harbors the wish, which Freud placed in the id, the place where all our “primitive” impulses reside. On the other, there is the superego, the “civilized” or cultured part of the unconscious, which transforms these impulses into ideas acceptable to the conscious mind. In this way, dreams have two distinct levels: their manifest content (the consciously perceived dream) and their latent content (the unconscious wish which has been disguised in the dream). [16] For example, a person may wish harm to come to a loved one, a consciously repugnant idea. So, the person may dream that another person, a substitute, is harmed, while the loved one becomes the object of increased, perhaps exaggerated, affection. Freud compared this process to censorship:
We may therefore suppose that dreams are given their shape in individual human beings by the operation of two psychical forces (or we may describe them as currents or systems); and that one of these forces constructs the wish which is expressed by the dream, while the other exercises a censorship upon this dream-wish and, by the use of censorship, forcibly brings about a distortion in the expression of the wish. [17]
To get at the truth behind the construction, it becomes necessary to analyze the dream. This is true, also, of film, or, indeed, any work of art. “The first and most obvious similarity between dreams and products of the literary imagination is that they can be granted or refused meaning according to the predilection of the person who has, hears or reads them.” [18] For one, we employ psychoanalysis; for the other, film criticism.
Freud delineated two processes by which the manifest content of dreams was distorted: condensation and displacement. “The first thing that becomes clear to anyone who compares the dream-content with the dream-thoughts is that a work of condensation on a large scale has been carried out. Dreams are brief, meagre and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of dream-thoughts.” [19] For Freud, condensation meant the combining of the features of two different objects into one. If you want to dream about a relative, for instance, but need to disguise the wish your harbour towards him or her, you may combine his or her features with that of a friend, creating a third person. In film, this is roughly equivalent to dissolves where two images are briefly superimposed on each other; it can also be compared to multiple images within frames (a favourite device of director Brian DiPalma). More recently, it has an almost perfect cinematic analogue in the technique known as “morphing,” where two or more images are blended together.
I think we can go further, however, and say that the unimportance of time and space to dreams is also a form of condensation, the time or distance between events being elided out of the complete dream. As we have seen, film is full of this particular dream device. As Rycroft points out: “…condensation describes the non-discursive quality of dreams, a quality they share with poems, jokes, music and paintings, in which the various themes, points, meanings are not spelled out serially as in indicative and expository prose but are interwoven or presented simultaneously.” [20] Non-discursivity refers to works of art which express their ideas in images, rather than text, which is a common of film (as well as the other artistic media Rycroft quotes) and dreams. As we have seen, meaning in non-discursive media is created associatively, through the interplay of images, rather than linearly, through direct statements. “The film ‘language’ of images may be conceived as a prelinguistic thought process, which we can relate to Freud’s primary process dream work/play/defence mechanisms of condensation, displacement, mis-en-scene (considerations of representability), and symbolism — all of which serves as ‘doubles’ of waking life.” [21]
The other process which Freud identified was displacement.
It thus seems plausible to suppose that in the dreamwork a psychical force is operating which on the one hand strips the elements which have a high psychical value of their intensity, and on the other hand, by means of overdetermination, creates from elements of low psychical value new values, which afterwards find their way into the dream-content. If that is so, a transference and displacement of psychical intensities occurs in the process of dream-formation. [22}
Say you have feelings you cannot admit about a person close to you. You may have a dream about a completely different person, but project the emotions appropriate to the first person onto the person actually in the dream. This is displacement.
Of course, this happens all the time when we are at the movies. We take the negative feelings about friends or family members and project them onto characters in the film. In a similar manner, we take our wish of personal omnipotence and displace it onto the hero (as we have seen, through the process of identification).
There is a serious problem with Freud’s explanation of dreaming: it pathologizes what seems to be a universal experience. “…by categorizing dreams as ‘abnormal psychical phenomena,'” Rycroft explained,
…[Freud] succeeded in explaining them to his own satisfaction as analogous to neurotic symptoms, but at the cost of obliterating the distinction between health and illness. If dreams are both universally occurring experiences and abnormal psychical phenomena, then the healthy are virtual neurotics, and the distinction between health and wholeness on the one hand and illness and lack of integration on the other goes by the board. [23]
Rycroft suggested that dreaming is “a form of communicating or communing with oneself…a special case of reflexive mental activity, in which the self becomes twofold, one part observing, arguing with, reflecting upon, resisting the implications of, assenting to, ideas, thoughts, situations imaginatively presented to it by the other…” [24] These different parts of the self are created as we grow up, losing touch with certain aspects of ourselves which nonetheless remain present in our psyche.
Thus, “The alternative view [to Freud’s] of dreaming is that visual, symbolic, non-discursive mental activity is just simply the way in which we think while asleep and that there is no reason to suppose that symbolism is essentially a device by which dreamers deceive and obfuscate themselves, even though it may on occasion be used as such. According to this view dreams are, or can be, true, straightforward messages from one aspect of oneself to another…” [25] However, since the different aspects do not speak the same language, they usually require interpretation to be apprehended by the conscious mind. [26]
Processes of condensation and displacement still occur in dreams, but now they are simply defined as part of the language of dreams (as, indeed, they can be defined as part of the language of film), rather than an elaborate mechanism by which the mind deceives itself. Rycroft’s theory of dreams suggests the possibility that when we identify with characters in film, we are really “trying on” different aspects of our personality, acting out parts of ourselves which we had abandoned at earlier points in our lives, an idea consistent with the traditional way of looking at identification.
We should not allow the similarities between film and dream blind us to the fact that there are substantial differences. On the most basic level, the former experience is consciously chosen and entered into, while the latter is largely out of our conscious control. “The dreamer does not know that he is dreaming; the film spectator knows that he is at the cinema: this is the first and principal difference between the situations of film and dream.”[27]
In addition, as Metz points out, “Filmic perception is a real perception (is really a perception); it is not reducible to an internal psychical process.” [28] What we see on the screen engages our vision and hearing directly, whereas our dreams may recall our perceptions, but do not engage any of our senses directly (the suggestion that Rapid Eye Movement is an actual dream enactment of a visual event notwithstanding).
The externally created nature of the film experience means that it cannot be guaranteed to satisfy us emotionally in the same way that internally created dreams do. “As hallucinatory wish-fulfillment, the fiction film is less certain than the dream; it fails more often at its ordinary mission… The dream responds to the wish with more exactitude and regularity…” [29] Films can disappoint our fantasy needs in ways dreams cannot. (Remember: for film to work, we must willingly suspend our disbelief in their reality, a suspension we can just as willingly remove if they turn out not to satisfy our emotional needs.)
On the other hand, when we have discovered a film genre which satisfies us, we can seek out other films of its type with a reasonable assurance that they will offer us the same emotional gratification. Perhaps more importantly, though, if we find a single film which satisfies us, we can see it over and over again and derive more or less the same psychic pleasure out of it each time. Dreams, because they are not permanently stored and, for most of us, cannot be called up at will, do not offer the same convenience of access.
In addition, artists need to employ universally accessible symbols in order to ensure their meaning is understood by as many potential audience members as possible, the exact opposite of the way individuals construct dreams. “Dreamers, unlike poets and, indeed, unlike waking speakers of prose, are not concerned to universalize private meanings.” [30]
Conclusion
In Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, a character walks off a film screen and into the real world in an inversion of the basic story of Sherlock, Jr. Perhaps significantly, the film was set in the 1930s, at the height of the Depression, not the present; this suggests that the real world was by then itself becoming a simulation of real experience. This was partially confirmed a few years later in the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The Last Action Hero, in which, once again, real people and film characters travel between their different worlds. Set in the present, the “real” New York portrayed in this film seems equally unreal, equally constructed as the world in the film, making all attempts at delineating differences between the two meaningless.
It may or may not be true that the so-called real world is, itself, becoming like a dream. If it is, film, somewhere between reality and dream in the way it combines the visually accurate mapping of real objects with the logic of dreams, has been an integral part of the world’s transition from one to the other.
Notes
1) Charles Levin, Jean Baudrillard: A Study in Cultural Metaphysics (London: Prentice Hall, 1996), 149.
2) Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, James Strachey, trans. (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 344.
3) This scene actually cleverly intercuts between long shots of the movie screen which take in the audience and medium long shots of the window of the projection booth, in which Keaton and his girlfriend are framed as though they are on screen. This second series of shots does not have an explicit audience, but the implicit audience is the one which is watching Sherlock, Jr. In this way, Keaton invites us to identify more directly with what he’s showing us in the film-within-the-film.
4) David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 139.
5) Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Celia Britton et al, trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 30.
6) The film was made at the height of popularity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, and is certainly, in one of its aspects, a parody of the mystery genre.
7) Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 194.
8) In fact, in many films the villain is said to be more interesting than the hero.
9) Charles Rycroft, The Innocence of Dreams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 34.
10) This is, of course, an old Vaudeville routine. Keaton ends the scene with a typically inventive twist: he waits for a customer to come out of the theatre and places the sticky paper in his path. Stepping on it, the customer becomes the bearer of it.
11) Unlike most silent comedians, Keaton’s work seems fresh and not out of place in today’s culture. The device in The Goat, for instance, seems to anticipate post-modern criticism about the proliferation of images, while Keaton’s exploration of the film world in Sherlock, Jr. is quite sophisticated. The multiplying images of Keaton in The Goat may have been an ironic comment on the actor-director’s growing popularity.
12) Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 323.
13) Luis Bunuel, My Last Sigh, Abigail Israel, trans. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 69.
14) Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 116/117.
15) Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 175.
16) ibid, 155.
17) ibid, 177.
18) Rycroft, The Innocence of Dreams, 162
19) Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 312/313.
20) Rycroft, The Innocence of Dreams, 15.
21) Levin, Jean Baudrillard, 149.
22) Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 342/343.
23) Rycroft, The Innocence of Dreams, 4/5.
24) ibid, 45.
25) ibid, 64.
26) Using this framework, dreaming is no longer defined as part of an illness, but part of a natural process. This does not mean that dream interpretation cannot be used to diagnose mental illness; the dreams of, say, psychotics have common features which can be recognized in therapy.
27) Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 101.
28) ibid, 109.
29) ibid, 112.
30) Rycroft, The Innocence of Dreams, 46.
Bibliography
Bunuel, Luis. My Last Sigh. Abigail Israel, trans. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.
Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. James Strachey, trans. New York: Avon Books, 1965.
Levin, Charles. Jean Baudrillard: A Study in Cultural Metaphysics. London: Prentice Hall, 1996.
Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Celia Britton et al, trans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.
Rycroft, Charles. The Innocence of Dreams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.