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Encyclopedia > Oneiric (film theory)

In a film theory context, the term oneiric (which means "pertaining to dream") is used to refer the depiction of dream-like states in films, or to the use of the metaphor of a dream or the dream-state to analyze a film. The connection between dreams and films has been long established; "The dream factory" “...has become a household expression for the film industry”[1]. The dream metaphor for film viewing is “one of the most persistent metaphors in both classical and modern film theory”[2], and it is used by film theorists using Freudian, non-Freudian, and semiotic analytical frameworks. Film theory debates the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for analyzing, among other things, the film image, narrative structure, the function of film artists, the relationship of film to reality, and the film spectators position in the cinematic experience. ... Dreaming is the subjective experience of imaginary images, sounds/voices, thoughts or sensations during sleep, usually involuntarily. ...


Filmmakers noted for their use of oneiric or dreamlike elements in their films include Luis Buñuel [3], Wojciech Has [4], Andrei Tarkovsky [5] , Lars von Trier [6] Krzysztof Kieslowski (e.g., The Double Life of Véronique from 1991) [7]and David Lynch (e.g., Mulholland Drive)[8]. Film genres or styles noted for their use of oneiric elements include 1940s and 1950s film noir and surrealist films; moreover, oneiric elements have also been noted in musicals, thriller and horror films and in comic films such as Marx Brothers movies [9]. The French surrealist playwright and director Antonin Artaud argued that the American burlesque genre, with its bizarre, lush costumes, and its mixture of dancing girls, comedians, mime artists and striptease artists, has oneiric qualities[10]. Cartoon of Luis Buñuel Luis Buñuel Portolés (February 22, 1900 – July 29, 1983) was a Spanish-born filmmaker who worked mainly in Mexico and France, but also in his native country and the United States. ... Wojciech Jerzy Has (born April 1, 1925 in Kraków - died October 3, 2000 in Łódź, Poland) was a Polish director, screenwriter and producer. ... Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (Андре́й Арсе́ньевич Тарко́вский) (April 4, 1932 - December 29, 1986) was a Russian film director, opera director, writer, and actor. ... Lars von Trier (born Lars Trier, April 30, 1956) is a Danish film director closely associated with the Dogme95 collective, calling for a return to plausible stories in filmmaking and a move away from artifice and towards technical minimalism. ... Krzysztof Kieślowski Krzysztof Kieślowski (June 27, 1941, Warsaw – March 13, 1996, Warsaw) was an influential Polish film director and screenwriter, known internationally for his film cycles Three Colors and The Decalogue. ... La Double vie de Véronique (The Double Life of Véronique; Polish title, Podwójne życie Weroniki) is a 1991 French- and Polish-language film directed by Krzysztof KieÅ›lowski, co-written by KieÅ›lowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz, starring Irène Jacob, with music by Zbigniew Preisner. ... For other persons named David Lynch, see David Lynch (disambiguation). ... Mulholland Drive (often abbreviated Mulholland Dr.) is a 2001 psychological thriller written and directed by David Lynch. ... This still from The Big Combo (1955) demonstrates the visual style of film noir at its most extreme. ... Yves Tanguy Indefinite Divisibility 1942 Surrealism[1] is a movement stating that the liberation of our mind, and subsequently the liberation of the individual self and society, can be achieved by exercising the imaginative faculties of the unconscious mind to the attainment of a dream-like state different from, or... The art of singing and dancing in a prepared fictional play has been a time-honored tradition ranging to the early days of civilization. ... The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ... Groucho, Gummo, Minnie (mother), Zeppo, Frenchy (father), Chico and Harpo. ... Antonin Artaud Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud (born September 4, 1896, in Marseille; died March 4, 1948 in Paris) was a French playwright, poet, actor and director. ... Photograph of Sally Rand, 1934. ...

Contents

History

Early film theorists such as Ricciotto Canudo (1879-1923) Jean Epstein (1897-1953) argued that films had a dreamlike quality. Raymond Bellour and Guy Rosolato made psychoanalytical analogies between films and the dream state, and claimed that films have a ‘latent’ content that can be psychoanalyzed as if it were a dream. Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini argued that dreams carry messages using a common store of signs. [11]Lydia Marinelli states that before the 1930s, psychoanalysts “...primarily attempted to apply the interpretative schemata found in Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams to films.” More recently, Robert Eberwein has “...cull[ed] dream scenes from the entirety of cinematic history” to establish “...the validity of psychoanalytic terminology in the form of a taxonomy.”[12] Ricciotto Canudo (1879-1923) was an italian film theorician. ... Jean Epstein, born 25 March 1897, died 3 April 1953, Paris, France, was a film director and early film theoretician. ... Pier Paolo Pasolini (March 5, 1922 - November 2, 1975) was an Italian poet, intellectual, film director, and writer. ... Sigmund Freud (May 6, 1856–September 23, 1939; IPA pronunciation: []) was a Jewish-Austrian neurologist and the co-founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology. ...


Another way that films and dreams are connected in psychological analysis is by examining the interaction between the cinema exhibition process and the passive spectator. Roland Barthes, a French literary critic and semiotician, described film spectators as being in a “para-oneiric” state, feeling “...sleepy and drowsy as if they had just woken up” when a film ends. Similarly, the French surrealist André Breton argues that film viewers enter a state between being “...awake and falling asleep,” what French filmmaker René Clair called a “dreamlike state.”[13] Edgar Morin's Le cinéma ou l'homme imaginaire (1956) and Jean Mitry's first volume of Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (1963) also discuss the connection between films and the dream state. Roland Barthes Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915 – March 25, 1980) (pronounced ) was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher, and semiotician. ... André Breton (February 18, 1896 – September 28, 1966) was a French writer, poet, and surrealist theorist. ... René Clair (November 11, 1898 – March 15, 1981) was a French filmmaker. ... Edgar Morin is a French philosopher and sociobiologist who was born in Paris on July 8, 1921 under his original name Edgar Nahoum. ... (1907-1988) film theorist, critic and filmmaker, co-founder of Frances first film society and later of the Cinémathèque Française. ...


In the 2000s, a graduate-level comparative literature course on oneiric aspects of film, entitled Dreamworks: Literature, Film, and the Oneiric, is being taught at the University of Western Ontario by Paul Coates. Coates’ course assesses the “...widespread habit of comparing certain filmic and literary works to dreams” by examining “literary and filmic works usually described as having an ‘oneiric' quality,” including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive; August Strindberg's A Dream Play; Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers; Jean Cocteau's Orphée; Paul Leni's Waxworks; poems by Emily Dickinson and by Polish Symbolist Boles aw Le mian. [14] Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English romantic/gothic novelist, the author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. ... Victor Erice (30 June 1940 -- ) is a Spanish film director whose few works have earned high acclaim from critics around the world. ... August Strindberg Portrait of August Strindberg by Richard Bergh   (January 22, 1849 – May 14, 1912) was a Swedish writer, playwright, and painter. ... Ingmar Bergman   (IPA: in Swedish) (born July 14, 1918) is a Swedish stage and film director who is one of the key film auteurs of the twentieth century. ... Cries and Whispers (original title Viskningar och rop) is a 1973 Swedish film which tells the story of two sisters who watch over their third sisters deathbed, both afraid she might die, but hoping she does. ... Jean Cocteau Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (July 5, 1889 – October 11, 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker. ... Paul Leni Paul Leni (July 8, 1885 – September 2, 1929) was a German filmmaker, and a a key figure in German expressionist filmmaking, making his most popular contributions with Waxworks, The Man Who Laughs, and The Cat and the Canary. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ...


Further Reading

  • Bächler, Odile, 'Images de film, images de rêve; le véhicule de la vision', CinémAction, 50 (1989), pp. 40-46.
  • Bulkeley, Kelly. [[Category:]]"Dreaming and the cinema of David Lynch." Dreaming. Vol 13(1), Mar 2003, pp. 49-60
  • Burns, Gary. 'Dreams and Mediation in Music Video', Wide Angle, v. 10, 2 (1988), pp. 41-61.
  • Eberwein, Robert T. Film & the dream screen : a sleep and a forgetting. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1984.
  • Halpern, Leslie. Dreams on film : the cinematic struggle between art and science.Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland & Co., 2003.
  • Hobson, J. Allan. 1980. "Film and the Physiology of Dreaming Sleep: The Brain as a Camera-Projector." Dreamworks 1(1):9–25.
  • Lewin, Bertram D. 'Inferences from the dream screen', International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. XXIX, 4 (1948), p. 224.
  • Marinelli, Lydia "Screening Wish Theories: Dream Psychologies and Early Cinema." Science in Context (2006), 19: 87-110
  • Petric, Vlada. 'Tarkovski's Dream Imagery', Film Quarterly, v. 43, 2 (Winter 89/90), pp. 28-34.
  • Rascaroli, Laura. 'Like a dream. A Critical History of the Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory', Kinema, 18 (Fall 2002), 5-22
  • Reia-Baptista, Vitor. THE HERETICAL PEDAGOGY OF LUIS BUÑUEL: a study of the pedagogical character of the heresies and moralities in the cinema of Luis Buñuel. Spring, 1987
  • Sparshott, F. E. "Vision and Dream in Film." Philosophic Exchange: Annual Proceedings, vol. 1, pp. 111-124, Summer 1971

References

  1. ^ Marinelli, Lydia "Screening Wish Theories: Dream Psychologies and Early Cinema." Science in Context (2006), 19: 87-110
  2. ^ Laura Rascaroli. Like a Dream: A Critical History of the Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory. Fall 2002. http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/rasc022.htm
  3. ^ Reia-Baptista, Vitor. THE HERETICAL PEDAGOGY OF LUIS BUÑUEL: a study of the pedagogical character of the heresies and moralities in the cinema of Luis Buñuel. Spring, 1987 http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:hzcEVwuecHwJ:www.bocc.ubi.pt/pag/_texto.php
  4. ^ University of Florida Professor Chris Caes’ ENG 4133 course on Polish Science Fiction and Fantasy – Films, Fiction, Artwork refers to Has as an oneiric filmmaker. Course description available at: http://web.english.ufl.edu/courses/undergrad/2005fall_up-d.html
  5. ^ Petric, Vlada. 'Tarkovski's Dream Imagery', Film Quarterly, v. 43, 2 (Winter 89/90), pp. 28-34.
  6. ^ Lars von Trier by Jack Stevenson (London: BFI Publications, 2002) Book Review by Mette Hjort, which states that “von Trier's first feature, the haunting and oneiric film noir entitled The Element of Crime (1984), won the Prix Technique at Cannes in 1984". Available at: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/books/03/24/von_trier.html
  7. ^ Corin Depper of the University of East Anglia, UK calls Kieslowski's The Double Life of Véronique "swooningly oneiric" in Depper's review of The Films of Krzysztof Kieslowski: The Liminal Image, by Joseph G. Kickasola. Continuum: New York, 2004. ISBN 0-8264-1559-8. 332pp. £12.99. Depper's review is in Scope a peer-reviewed online journal of the Institute of Film & Television Studies at the University of Nottingham. Available at: http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:idE1HyO1SWoJ:www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/bookreview.php%3Fissue%3D4%26id%3D102+filmmakers+oneiric&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=35
  8. ^ Bulkeley, Kelly "Dreaming and the cinema of David Lynch." Dreaming. Vol 13(1), Mar 2003, pp. 49-60.
  9. ^ Ado Kyrou. Le surréalisme au cinéma (1963), cited by Laura Rascaroli in Like a Dream: A Critical History of the Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory. Fall 2002. http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/rasc022.htm
  10. ^ Laura Rascaroli. Like a Dream: A Critical History of the Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory. Fall 2002. http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/rasc022.htm
  11. ^ Laura Rascaroli. Like a Dream: A Critical History of the Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory. Fall 2002. http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/rasc022.htm
  12. ^ Marinelli, Lydia "Screening Wish Theories: Dream Psychologies and Early Cinema." Science in Context (2006), 19: 87-110
  13. ^ Laura Rascaroli. Like a Dream: A Critical History of the Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory. Fall 2002. http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/rasc022.htm
  14. ^ http://www.uwo.ca/modlang/clgradcourses.html

La Double vie de Véronique (The Double Life of Véronique; Polish title, Podwójne życie Weroniki) is a 1991 French- and Polish-language film directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, co-written by Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz, starring Irène Jacob, with music by Zbigniew Preisner. ...

See also

  • Film noir, which has been noted for its oneiric elements
 

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