“A film is not the telling of a dream, but a dream in which we all participate together through a kind of hypnosis… By dream, I mean a succession of real events that follow on from one another with the magnificent absurdity of dreams, since the spectators would not have linked them together in the same way, or have imagined them for themselves, but experience them in their seats as they might experience, in their beds, strange adventures for which they are not responsible…”
- Cocteau, The Art of Cinema.
Describe a ‘strange adventure’ or ‘image sequence’ motivated by at least two films on the unit of study, and any other films you might care to interpose.
A ‘strange adventure’ in a film does not necessarily assume a reification of a dream. On the contrary, as Cocteau suggests, a film itself is a mimetic dream, in which the ‘image sequence’ creates a world for its spectators to ‘live in imaginatively’. Such a proposition however, must be analysed. This essay will therefore attempt to delineate how the cinema reifies the “magnificent absurdity of dreams” , through examining the role of audience participation in the cinema, and the function memory serves in regards to the ‘image sequence’, as well as exploring the kaleidoscopic nature of cinema. In order for an audience to be led on a strange adventure by a film, a certain degree of audience participation must exist. The audience must be convinced by the world created by the director, overtaken by a sense of verisimilitude. On the other hand, the audience must not become overwhelmed by the illusion of the cinema, but remain aware that they are externally viewing the film. Time and space act “as a ‘container’ in which objects and events take place,” which influence the generation of memory ‘sites’, as the creation of memory is generally bound to the temporal or spatial. The cityscape therefore is an important environment to be considered through the medium of film, as “any building and any place may be used as a site of memory.” Furthermore, film creates a dialogue between the conscious and the ‘pre-’ conscious, as meaning is derived from “‘primary processes’ of unconscious formation.” As dreams and film both “freely [leap] from one place or situation, or one position in a place or situation, to another,” it may be understood that the experience of cinema transforms the private phenomenon of dreaming into a mimetic work constructed and visualised within the public sphere.
In order to glean how the image sequence of a film may present a reification of dreams, this essay will focus primarily on scenes from Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 Berlin: Symphony of a City (Berlin) and Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera, while also referencing Jean Cocteau’s 1930 Le Sang d’un Poète (The Blood of the Poet), as well as Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., from 1924. By comparing the role of audience participation, as well as the nuances of each film’s use of ‘image sequence’, it may be possible to develop a better understanding of how dreams may be reified through cinema.
Before commencing analysis of the ‘strange adventure’ of films, a distinction between the ‘image sequence’, and the ‘sequence-image’ must be made. Victor Burgin identifies the ‘sequence-image’ through his own experience, describing it as “a sequence of such brevity that I might almost be describing a still image.” Burgin suggests that, “the sequence image as such is neither daydream nor delusion. It is fact – a transitory state of percepts of a ‘present moment’ seized in their association with past affects and meanings.” Alternatively, the ‘image sequence’ may be understood as “the combination of images into narrative sequence.” Furthermore, Burgin cites Freud as emphasising that “the dream… is to be understood not as a unitary narrative, but as a fragmentary rebus.” If sequence-image folds “the diachronic into the synchronic,” while the telling of a dream “places items from a synchronous field into the diachrony of narrative,” it may be therefore understood that the formation of the dream is akin to the formation of the image sequence, as fragmented images are developed into the overall progression of the film or dream. This essay will therefore be primarily concerned with examining the corporation of the synchronic into the diachronic, that is, the combination of complete ‘sequence-images’ into a more narrative image sequence.
Such a technique is utilised in both Ruttmann’s Berlin and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. Each individual shot captures a sequence, whether it is the shot of industrial buildings during the ‘phantom ride’ on the train into Berlin, or the somewhat more narrative introduction of the Camera Man in Man with a Movie Camera, getting into a waiting car. These scenes are complete scenes within themselves, and heighten our accumulative knowledge of the film. As Burgin aptly describes however, while the ‘sequence image’ “is in itself sharply particular, it is in all other respects vague: uniting ‘someone’, ‘somewhere’ and ‘something’, without specifying who, where and what.” This is especially emphasised in Vertov’s film, in the scene set in the editing room. Static images are examined by the editor, who then puts each image sequence in motion. This scene is a striking example of how both films use an accumulation of sequence-images of the cityscape and city lifestyle in order to gauge a mimetic experience of modernity in the metropolis.
Furthermore, while similarities are common between Man with a Movie Camera and Berlin, the differences between these two films highlight individuality in direction. While both films may be considered homage to their respective cities, Vertov and Ruttmann decide to capture city life in two very different ways. While Vertov includes an agent in his film, the Cameraman, who chooses his subject matter, Ruttmann’s film retains a certain passiveness, rejecting the archetypal narrator. Berlin however is divided into five acts, and these acts may be understood as enabling the film to have some form of structure. These two films may therefore act as an example of Cocteau’s assertion that “spectators would not have linked [image sequences] together in the same way, or have imagined them for themselves,” as neither director has looked at the modern metropolis in the same way. As a form of “subversive mimesis” therefore, film enables its spectators to experience a multitude of different perspectives of reality.
As an artistic form of mimesis, film allows its audience to experience beyond the limitations of their own context. Cocteau’s observation that the audience should “experience… in their seats as they might experience, in their beds,” is therefore inaccurate, as it implies previous knowledge or contact with what they are experiencing. The cinema however, allows us to view, for example, “devastating catastrophes that either could not be experienced in life at all… or could not be experienced without revulsion, horror and pain.” Here, Gerald Mast highlights the mediated experience of watching a film. Unlike a dream we may unconsciously experience ‘in our beds’, cinema generates a world for us which is “controlled by both the artistic consciousness of the creator and the consciousness of the spectator.” This notion is delineated further by Richard Curry in his article ‘Films and Dreams’, as he writes: “The space of a film world is made vividly, even authentically present to us – we live in it imaginatively, as we say – but we can inhabit our dream worlds.” It may be also argued that the spectator is ‘sutured’ into the narrative of a film, thus emphasising cinema as a kind of superimposed, inorganic dream. Furthermore, the spectator is not her own agent in the ‘space’ of a film, but at the liberty of the director. The spectator is led on “strange adventures for which they are not responsible”, nor could “have imagined them for themselves.” The “director determines the audience's spatial relationship to his film… [the audience] are within the film's space without being part of its world, and observe from a viewpoint at which [they] are not situated.”
Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., successfully illustrates this ambiguous relationship between dreams and film. In Keaton’s film, main character (played by Keaton) is a ‘Moving Picture Operator’. One afternoon on the job, Keaton’s character falls asleep and his dream world becomes mingled with the space of the film he is projecting. The Keaton of the dream world walks onto the screen, and gradually becomes part of the action of the film. One image sequence is especially illustrative: a somewhat confused a dejected Keaton attempts to sit down on the front steps of a grand house, but before he realises, the scene leaps to a back garden, where Keaton falls over a stone bench, which in turn leaps to a busy city road, which in turn transforms into a mountainous rock landscape, which morphs into a scene with two lions in a natural landscape… which continues until Keaton returns to the scene of the back garden. Keaton’s gags between the transition of each sequence image highlights the “spatio-temporal discontinuities [of dreams] that are very like cuts in a film,” as Keaton’s “dream, like [a] film, freely leaps from one place or situation, or one position in a place or situation, to another.” Keaton’s ‘dream ego’ “finds itself projected into a new world, without feeling the astonishment which this world would rouse in it in a waking state,” while he simultaneously attempts to placate his audience after the sudden changes in scene, through physical humor.
Alternatively, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera explicitly ‘sutures’ an audience into the image sequence of the film, in its introduction. Vertov opens with a mimetic sequence of the ritual of early 20th century cinema: the audience arriving and filling the theatre, the orchestra poised for the opening score, the projectionist assembling the film reels and projector, and finally setting the picture in motion. The screen of the film’s theatre then becomes our screen also, as both the audience in the film and the audience of the film travel through the lace covered window together.
Does Vertov’s double audience illustrate the true role of audience participation? The audience in Vertov’s film represent the part of the spectator which is engaged within the world of the film, while the audience of Vertov’s film represents the part of the spectator which remains outside the world of the film, ‘connecting the narrative,’ or identifying and analysing the symbolic. Here it may be possible to apply George Linden’s term ‘bi-presence’ in order to explain this response to film: “in speaking of a dreamer's [read ‘spectator’s’] sense of bi-presence… the [spectator] has a sense of being in the [film world] and at the same time being a kind of spectator of the [film].” Similarly, Mast explains, “the successful work of mimetic art makes us know we are undergoing an experience at the same time that we know we are sitting in a theatre or in our homes.” There is a duality of experience, an internal and external experience of film, which reiterates cinema as being a kind of superimposed, inorganic dream.
The duality of experience generated by film is bound to the conviction the spectator must invest in the experience. Conviction implies a sympathetic response to a mimetic work. A purely subjective, individual decision, conviction enables us to “accept the realness of the fiction until the work does something to unconvince us.” A convincing cinematic experience encourages a sense of ‘verisimilitude’, as the spectator ‘lives in the film world imaginatively.’ The spectator may also develop a voyeuristic relationship with the film, as “voyeurism is a constant of the audience-reader’s relationship to any mimetic work of time art.” A sense of voyeurism enables the spectator’s ‘bi-presence’ experience of film, Mast argues, as the spectator is ‘wrapped in a cloak of invisibility’, allowing her to derive a sense of ‘vicarious’ pleasure from the film, without being bound to its responsibilities.
Both film and dream offer a mode for expression. Both film and dreams offer platforms for a mediation or representation of the real, and therefore may offer a response to “unfulfilled desires.” In a psychoanalytical reading of dreams,
A dream is the hallucinatory fulfilment of a wish, but a wish that is unacceptable to the conscious mind of the subject who wishes… The manifest dream, therefore, is a transformation of the latent content in the service of the defence.
Interpretation of a dream therefore is “the means by which latent meanings are derived from manifest content.” Similarly, Mast quotes Stanley Cavell’s assertion of film “as satisfying the wish for the magical reproduction of the world by enabling us to view it unseen.” In his 1989 thesis, Richard Allen claimed,
Film and television appropriate the real, unfulfilled desires of the subject, and provide them with an illusory but realised fulfilment in a substitute reality which is thoroughly permeated by the logic of the commodity.
Both forms of ‘pre-’ conscious or sub-conscious expression therefore attempt to make the ‘unseen’ seen. If Freud perceived the meaning of dreams to derive from “‘primary processes' of unconscious formation,” it may therefore be understood that the image sequence is a verbalisation of ‘inner speech’. Each individual “would not have linked [the image sequence together] in the same way, or have imagined them for themselves,” but composed a series of images derived from their own primary processes. This process therefore, attempts to ‘fold’ the imagined into the real world, because, as Burgin writes,
Shape-shifting hybrid objects that coalesce in psychical space from the mnemic debris of films, photographs, television shows and other sources of images… are situated partly in imaginary worlds and partly in the real world.
Both films and dreams therefore allow their spectators to develop a heterotopic, ‘psychical’ space, influenced by real experiences and imagined or unfulfilled desires.
The heterotopic space, “where ‘several sites that are in themselves incompatible’ are juxtaposed,” is created in film through the image sequence. Here Burgin refers to the term used by Michael Foucault, a heterotopia (via utopia) being “places with no physical substance other than that of representations.” ‘Cinematic’ heterotopia, Burgin continues, “is constituted across the variously virtual spaces in which we encounter displaced pieces of films.” While Burgin refers to ‘the Internet’ and ‘the media’ as contemporary examples of ‘cinematic heterotopia’, Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart, composed with disused pieces of cinema reel may be considered a modernist example. By extension however, it may be argued that the ‘Second Episode’ of The Blood of a Poet is itself a heterotopia of incommensurable scenes (which take place behind closed doors.) The Poet enters this “place without a place” through the mirror, therefore entering into a place “with no physical substance other than that of representations.” Each door in the corridor the Poet finds himself in holds its own diametrically opposing scene: An execution in Mexico in Room 17, which is replayed, backwards in slow motion before the Poet leaves the room; in Room 19, the Poet finds a ‘celestial ceiling’, where men are making shadow puppets; ‘Flying Lessons’ are taking place in room 21; Hermaphrodite sits in Room 25, transforming from man to woman in front of the Poet. Viewing the heterotopia Cocteau has created evokes Charles Baudelaire’s concept of ‘kaleidoscopic consciousness’, as the audience experiences the “psychical space of a spectating subject.”
Baudelaire’s notion of “the newly emerged metropolis as a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness” is explored further in films such as Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and Ruttmann’s Berlin, as well as Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta, from 1921. In Manhatta, for example, the camera sweeps over the tops of skyscrapers, enabling its contemporaneous audience to see the city from a new perspective not commonly experienced before. This may be understood as kaleidoscopic, as Jacques Lacan explains: “the subjective possibility of the mirror projection of such a field into the field of the other gives human space its originally ‘geometrical’ structure, a structure that I would be happy to call kaleidoscopic.” Thus the modern metropolis acts as a ‘geometrical’ human space, and the city symphony a mirror by which to reflect the exotic experience into an ‘endotic’ experience. Through these films, the city is thus viewed by a means of ‘primary processes’, which prefers “images to words”; the representation of something which is “‘eternally, superbly, outside the sentence.’” Furthermore, as Leonardo Cremonini asserts, “the specific function of the work of art is to make visible, by establishing a distance from it, the reality of the existing ideology.” It may be understood therefore, that the city symphony reflects a certain perspective of the modern metropolis, situating its audience in a state of distanced immediacy with the city.
In Berlin, Ruttmann examines modernity through the lens of everyday city life. The audience is brought into the city by train, a physical manifestation of modern technology. Ruttmann then shifts from the movement of the ‘phantom ride’ on the train, to the “stasis” of the waking city. Here, the inhabitants are “dwarfed, silhouetted and fused with a spectrum of automata”, such as mannequins, trams and mechanised store fronts, “that seem to simply turn themselves on for the day.” Through these establishing scenes Ruttmann explores “the potential space between the subjective object and the object objectively perceived,” attempting to present to his audience a visual representation of “the interplay between there being nothing but me and there being objects and phenomena outside omnipotent control.” This is especially emphasised in the camera’s exploration of the waking city. Furthermore, these establishing image sequences may be understood as Ruttmann simultaneously commenting on the pervasive role technology has come to play in 1920s society, which is, as Billy Stevenson writes, “reiterated by the increasing preponderance of long takes and low angles to generate awe.” While Stevenson perceives Ruttmann as reflecting the city to his audience with a certain sense of ‘awe’, the mannequins in these establishing scenes are ambiguous. One the one hand, these lifelike statuettes manifest modern consumerism; alternatively, the mannequins embody the inauthentic, the simulacra of the real. Through this understanding, the city symphony is an allusion to the reality of the modern metropolis, a visual representation of the heterotopia of cultural experience.
Vertov similarly portrays a city of frenetic modern activity. The gothic representations of machines found in Ruttmann’s film however, are not present in Vertov’s documentation of daily life in Odessa. In Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov repeatedly cuts to the city intersection, which is controlled by human hand rather than traffic light, as a visual manifestation of man living alongside machine. Furthermore, Vertov’s film is consciously aware of its generation of a visual simulacrum of the modern metropolis. The first shot of the film the audience is met with is of a motion picture camera which fills two-thirds of the screen. Vertov then uses a horizontal split shot to place the ‘Man with a movie camera’ on top of the motion picture camera, as a striking image not only of man and machine, but also of the significant ability of film to make a true representation of its context. The candid nature of film is emphasised in the opening intertiles of Vertov’s film. Vertov prepares his audience for his conscious, documentary approach, proclaiming, “this film is an experiment in cinematic communication of real events,” from “excerpt from a camera operator’s diary.” Furthermore, Vertov claims his film to be an “absolute separation from the language of theatre and literature.” Void of narrative, Vertov’s film is also void of the structure Berlin exhibits, as Ruttmann focuses each image sequence on a specific aspect of life in the modern metropolis. The scene of the editor, in Man with a Movie Camera, inspecting the film reel reiterates the consciousness of Vertov’s film, as the sequence-images proceed to become image sequences within the film. This may also be understood as Vertov commenting on the pre-eminence of the moving picture. This example further identifies Man with a Movie Camera as a true “kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness,” a conscious reference to the real.
Both Man with a Movie Camera and Berlin take their audience on a ‘strange adventure’ for which the spectators are ‘not responsible’. The representation of buildings in Berlin, for example is stylised and not a perspective from which the building would be viewed everyday from the public passing by. Similarly, the shots of the young woman waking up and washing in Man with a Movie Camera would be an aspect of city life not experienced by everyone everyday. Furthermore, to a non-contemporaneous audience, these two films present a foreign, even simplistic lifestyle of the past, equipped with steam trains and traffic controllers. The image sequences of these two films portray precisely what Cocteau describes:
A succession of real events that follow on from one another with the magnificent absurdity of dreams, since the spectators would not have linked them together in the same way, or have imagined them for themselves, but experience them in their seats as they might experience, in their beds, strange adventures for which they are not responsible.
While neither of these two films appear to be a reification of a dream, they both develop a seemingly oneiric nature about them, their image sequences a “fragmentary rebus”, comparable to dreams.
Films may also create ‘sites of memory’, as “a recollected image may serve as the catalyst that prompts remembrance.” Through the attempt to communicate ‘real events’ through cinema, separate “from the language of literature and theatre,” the city symphony creates a memorialisation of the phenomenon of the modern metropolis. According to Pierre Nora, such archiving is necessary, as “modern societies need to create ‘sites of memory’ because without them the events commemorated might be effaced from recollection.” Furthermore, as “‘there is no spontaneous memory, …we must deliberately create archives... because such activities no longer occur naturally.’” Films such as Berlin and Man with a Movie Camera not only communicate to their audiences a ‘strange adventure’, for which ‘[the spectators] are not responsible’, but also create for us an archive of the modern metropolis of the early 19th century. In the kaleidoscopic representation of urban modernity of both Vertov and Ruttmann, “the connective tissue of narrative must be supplied by the spectator.” Therefore, ‘chains of association’ must be established, as the spectator engages in a dialogue between the conscious, preconscious and unconscious. This notion reiterates Burgin’s claim that “a recollected image may serve as the catalyst that prompts remembrance.”
Buildings especially may be used as a ‘site of memory’. In Manhatta, for example, shots of the skyline evoke memories of trips to New York, or other familiar representations of the famous urban environment, such as Sex and The City or Law and Order, or even King Kong. As Nora asserts, “although such lieux de mémorie are in a broad sense ‘shared’, their meanings may nevertheless vary widely according to the particularities of individual lives.” Films therefore are a perspective, an idea which is embodied by the character of ‘the Cameraman’ in Man with a Movie Camera. Furthermore, like dreams, the significance of a film generally emerges “only when situated in a specific individual context.” While the spectator has no control over the content of a film, or its direction, through engaging with the film, the spectator is able to create their own, individual experience of the work, ‘as if they were experiencing it in their beds.’
Films lead us on a strange adventure, presenting to their audiences places and ideas the spectators would not have ‘imagined for themselves.’ A strange adventure, however, does not assume the reification of a dream, but a reification of the “magnificent absurdity of dreams.” A film itself is a mimetic dream, ‘dreamt’ by the director and experienced by her audience. Cinema therefore encourages participation, as the spectator must be simultaneously involved within the world of the film, as well as remaining outside the film, connecting the narrative and identifying and analysing the symbolic. This is especially necessary in Cocteau’s Blood of the Poet, as the spectator is drawn into the oneiric environment of the film, yet must retain a distance to the film in order to glean an understanding of Cocteau’s themes and use of symbolism. A ‘successful’ work of mimetic art therefore “makes us know we are undergoing an experience, at the same time that we know we are sitting in a theatre.” Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., explicitly manifests this dual existence of the spectator in the cinematic experience, as Keaton’s character is physically absorbed into the film on the screen. More subtly however, Vertov and Ruttmann’s respective explorations of modernity in the metropolis draw their audience into their strange urban adventure, while the disjointed, kaleidoscopic nature of their respective representations maintain a distance between audience and heterotopic space. Both films and dreams “freely [leap] from one place or situation, or one position in a place or situation, to another,” as the “spatio-temporal discontinuities [of dreams]… are very like cuts in a film.” The image sequence therefore resembles a “kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness,” as film navigates its audience through ‘spatio-temporal discontinuities,’ on a strange adventure, “for which [the spectators] are not responsible.”
Curry continues, “If one is asked to describe a dream, the first pronoun occurring will almost always be ‘I.’ In contrast, we describe films by using ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘they.’”
Richard Curry, ‘Films and Dreams’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Autumn, 1974), p85 [own emphasis].
Jean Cocteau, The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin Buss, London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001, p. 40.
Victor Burgin, ‘Brecciated Time’, In/different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture, Berkley: University of California Press, 1996, p212.
Victor Burgin, ‘Introduction: The noise of the marketplace,’ The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2004, p22.
Burgin 1996, p205.
Curry, p83.
Jean Cocteau, ‘On Dreams’, The difficulty of being, trans. Elizabeth Sprigge, New York: Da Capo Press, 1995, p56-7.
Both terms come from Victor Burgin’s Introduction to The Remembered Film.
Burgin 2004, pp14-28.
Burgin 2004, p16.
Burgin 2004, p21.
Burgin 2004, p23.
Burgin 2004, p14.
Burgin 2004, p26.
Burgin 2004, p16.
Burgin 2004, p16.
Cocteau 2001, p40.
Richard Allen, ‘The Cinema, Mimesis and Modernity’, Representation, Meaning and Experience in the Cinema, PhD thesis, University Of California, 1989, p264.
Gerald Mast, ‘Kinesis and Mimesis’, Film/Cinema/Movie: A theory of experience, New York: Harper and Row, 1977, p45.
Cocteau 2001, p40.
Mast, p39.
Mast, p42.
Curry, p85 [own emphasis].
Burgin 1996, p239.
Cocteau 2001, p40.
F.E Sparshott, in Curry, p84 [own emphasis].
Curry, p83.
Ibid.
Cocteau 1995, p56.
Burgin 2004, p12.
Curry, p86.
The original line reads, “in speaking of a dreamer's sense of bi-presence… the dreamer has a sense of being in the dream and at the same time being a kind of spectator of the dream.” Curry highlights the interchangeability of the sentence between ‘dream’ and ‘film’, as he claims “a film tends to induce a self-forgetful involvement very like the involvement of a dreamer in his dream-and this despite the fact that a film world is but a two-dimensional world.” (p89).
Mast, p46.
Mast, p46 [existing emphasis].
Mast, p47.
Referring to Tzvetan Torodov’s notion of ‘verisimilitude’, in Mast, p46 – “that which feels real to the reader despite the fact it is obviously not.” [existing emphasis]
Curry, p85.
Mast, p41.
Mast, pp40, 44.
Curry, p86.
Allen, p260.
Burgin 1996, p205.
Burgin 1996, p205.
Stanley Cavell, in Mast, p41.
Burgin 1996, p205.
Burgin 2004, p11.
Burgin 1996, p239-240.
Burgin 2004, p10.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Burgin 2004, p10.
Charles Baudelaire, in Burgin 1996, p192 [existing emphasis].
Billy Stevenson, ‘Berlin: Symphony of a city’, University of Sydney, 24th March 2009.
Jacques Lacan, in Burgin 1996, p192 [existing emphasis].
Borrowing here from Paul Virilio, who explains, “seeing that which is not really seen becomes an activity that exists for itself. This activity is not exotic but endotic, because it renews the very conditions of perception.”
Paul Virilio, in Burgin 1996, p185 [own emphasis].
Burgin 2004, p11 [existing emphasis].
Leonardo Cremonini, in Burgin 1996, p200 [existing emphasis].
Stevenson, ‘Berlin: Symphony of a city.’
Ibid.
D.W. Winnicott, in Burgin 1996, p185 [existing emphasis].
Ibid.
Stevenson, ‘Berlin: Symphony of a city.’
Man with a Movie Camera, dir. Dziga Vertov, writ. Dziga Vertov, perf. Mikhail Kaufman, DVD, VUFKU, 1929.
Ibid.
Burgin 2004, p10.
Cocteau 2001, p40.
Burgin 2004, p14.
Burgin 2004, p22.
Man with a Movie Camera, 1929.
Burgin 2004, p21-2.
Pierre Nora, in Burgin 2004, p22.
Burgin 2004, p12.
Freud has claimed, “What in everyday speech is called ‘memory’ is located in the preconscious,” as “memory itself cannot be a conscious phenomenon… All memory then is unconscious in the ‘descriptive’ sense.”
Burgin 1996, p217.
Burgin 2004, p22.
Nora, in Burgin 2004, p22.
Burgin 1996, p206.
Cocteau 2001, p40.
Mast, p46 [existing emphasis].
Curry, p83.
Curry, p83.
Burgin 2004, p10.
Cocteau 2001, p40.
Bibliography:
Allen, Richard. ‘The Cinema, Mimesis and Modernity.’ Representation, Meaning and Experience in the Cinema. PhD thesis. University Of California, 1989. p252-276.
Burgin, Victor. ‘Introduction: The noise of the marketplace.’ The Remembered Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2004. pp7-28.
Burgin, Victor. ‘Brecciated Time.’ In/different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture. Berkley: University of California Press, 1996. Pp179-278.
Cocteau, Jean. ‘On Dreams.’ The difficulty of being. Trans. Elizabeth Sprigge. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995. p55-8.
Cocteau, Jean (dir.). Le Sang d’un Poète. DVD. Vicomte de Noailles. 1930.
Cornell, Joseph (dir.). Rose Hobart. 1936, accessed 5th June 2009.
Curry, Richard. ‘Films and Dreams.’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 33, No. 1 (Autumn, 1974). pp83-89.
Keaton, Buster (dir.). Sherlock Jr. DVD. Kino International Corporation. 1924.
Mast, Gerald. ‘Kinesis and Mimesis.’ Film/Cinema/Movie: A theory of experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. pp38-61.
Ruttman, Walter (dir.). Berlin: Symphony of a City. DVD. Deutsche Vereins-Film. 1927.
Stevenson, Billy. ‘Berlin: Symphony of a city.’ University of Sydney. 24th March 2009.
Vertov, Dziga (dir.). Man with a Movie Camera. Writ. Dziga Vertov. Perf. Mikhail Kaufman. DVD. VUFKU. 1929.
- Cocteau, The Art of Cinema.
Describe a ‘strange adventure’ or ‘image sequence’ motivated by at least two films on the unit of study, and any other films you might care to interpose.
A ‘strange adventure’ in a film does not necessarily assume a reification of a dream. On the contrary, as Cocteau suggests, a film itself is a mimetic dream, in which the ‘image sequence’ creates a world for its spectators to ‘live in imaginatively’. Such a proposition however, must be analysed. This essay will therefore attempt to delineate how the cinema reifies the “magnificent absurdity of dreams” , through examining the role of audience participation in the cinema, and the function memory serves in regards to the ‘image sequence’, as well as exploring the kaleidoscopic nature of cinema. In order for an audience to be led on a strange adventure by a film, a certain degree of audience participation must exist. The audience must be convinced by the world created by the director, overtaken by a sense of verisimilitude. On the other hand, the audience must not become overwhelmed by the illusion of the cinema, but remain aware that they are externally viewing the film. Time and space act “as a ‘container’ in which objects and events take place,” which influence the generation of memory ‘sites’, as the creation of memory is generally bound to the temporal or spatial. The cityscape therefore is an important environment to be considered through the medium of film, as “any building and any place may be used as a site of memory.” Furthermore, film creates a dialogue between the conscious and the ‘pre-’ conscious, as meaning is derived from “‘primary processes’ of unconscious formation.” As dreams and film both “freely [leap] from one place or situation, or one position in a place or situation, to another,” it may be understood that the experience of cinema transforms the private phenomenon of dreaming into a mimetic work constructed and visualised within the public sphere.
In order to glean how the image sequence of a film may present a reification of dreams, this essay will focus primarily on scenes from Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 Berlin: Symphony of a City (Berlin) and Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera, while also referencing Jean Cocteau’s 1930 Le Sang d’un Poète (The Blood of the Poet), as well as Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., from 1924. By comparing the role of audience participation, as well as the nuances of each film’s use of ‘image sequence’, it may be possible to develop a better understanding of how dreams may be reified through cinema.
Before commencing analysis of the ‘strange adventure’ of films, a distinction between the ‘image sequence’, and the ‘sequence-image’ must be made. Victor Burgin identifies the ‘sequence-image’ through his own experience, describing it as “a sequence of such brevity that I might almost be describing a still image.” Burgin suggests that, “the sequence image as such is neither daydream nor delusion. It is fact – a transitory state of percepts of a ‘present moment’ seized in their association with past affects and meanings.” Alternatively, the ‘image sequence’ may be understood as “the combination of images into narrative sequence.” Furthermore, Burgin cites Freud as emphasising that “the dream… is to be understood not as a unitary narrative, but as a fragmentary rebus.” If sequence-image folds “the diachronic into the synchronic,” while the telling of a dream “places items from a synchronous field into the diachrony of narrative,” it may be therefore understood that the formation of the dream is akin to the formation of the image sequence, as fragmented images are developed into the overall progression of the film or dream. This essay will therefore be primarily concerned with examining the corporation of the synchronic into the diachronic, that is, the combination of complete ‘sequence-images’ into a more narrative image sequence.
Such a technique is utilised in both Ruttmann’s Berlin and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. Each individual shot captures a sequence, whether it is the shot of industrial buildings during the ‘phantom ride’ on the train into Berlin, or the somewhat more narrative introduction of the Camera Man in Man with a Movie Camera, getting into a waiting car. These scenes are complete scenes within themselves, and heighten our accumulative knowledge of the film. As Burgin aptly describes however, while the ‘sequence image’ “is in itself sharply particular, it is in all other respects vague: uniting ‘someone’, ‘somewhere’ and ‘something’, without specifying who, where and what.” This is especially emphasised in Vertov’s film, in the scene set in the editing room. Static images are examined by the editor, who then puts each image sequence in motion. This scene is a striking example of how both films use an accumulation of sequence-images of the cityscape and city lifestyle in order to gauge a mimetic experience of modernity in the metropolis.
Furthermore, while similarities are common between Man with a Movie Camera and Berlin, the differences between these two films highlight individuality in direction. While both films may be considered homage to their respective cities, Vertov and Ruttmann decide to capture city life in two very different ways. While Vertov includes an agent in his film, the Cameraman, who chooses his subject matter, Ruttmann’s film retains a certain passiveness, rejecting the archetypal narrator. Berlin however is divided into five acts, and these acts may be understood as enabling the film to have some form of structure. These two films may therefore act as an example of Cocteau’s assertion that “spectators would not have linked [image sequences] together in the same way, or have imagined them for themselves,” as neither director has looked at the modern metropolis in the same way. As a form of “subversive mimesis” therefore, film enables its spectators to experience a multitude of different perspectives of reality.
As an artistic form of mimesis, film allows its audience to experience beyond the limitations of their own context. Cocteau’s observation that the audience should “experience… in their seats as they might experience, in their beds,” is therefore inaccurate, as it implies previous knowledge or contact with what they are experiencing. The cinema however, allows us to view, for example, “devastating catastrophes that either could not be experienced in life at all… or could not be experienced without revulsion, horror and pain.” Here, Gerald Mast highlights the mediated experience of watching a film. Unlike a dream we may unconsciously experience ‘in our beds’, cinema generates a world for us which is “controlled by both the artistic consciousness of the creator and the consciousness of the spectator.” This notion is delineated further by Richard Curry in his article ‘Films and Dreams’, as he writes: “The space of a film world is made vividly, even authentically present to us – we live in it imaginatively, as we say – but we can inhabit our dream worlds.” It may be also argued that the spectator is ‘sutured’ into the narrative of a film, thus emphasising cinema as a kind of superimposed, inorganic dream. Furthermore, the spectator is not her own agent in the ‘space’ of a film, but at the liberty of the director. The spectator is led on “strange adventures for which they are not responsible”, nor could “have imagined them for themselves.” The “director determines the audience's spatial relationship to his film… [the audience] are within the film's space without being part of its world, and observe from a viewpoint at which [they] are not situated.”
Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., successfully illustrates this ambiguous relationship between dreams and film. In Keaton’s film, main character (played by Keaton) is a ‘Moving Picture Operator’. One afternoon on the job, Keaton’s character falls asleep and his dream world becomes mingled with the space of the film he is projecting. The Keaton of the dream world walks onto the screen, and gradually becomes part of the action of the film. One image sequence is especially illustrative: a somewhat confused a dejected Keaton attempts to sit down on the front steps of a grand house, but before he realises, the scene leaps to a back garden, where Keaton falls over a stone bench, which in turn leaps to a busy city road, which in turn transforms into a mountainous rock landscape, which morphs into a scene with two lions in a natural landscape… which continues until Keaton returns to the scene of the back garden. Keaton’s gags between the transition of each sequence image highlights the “spatio-temporal discontinuities [of dreams] that are very like cuts in a film,” as Keaton’s “dream, like [a] film, freely leaps from one place or situation, or one position in a place or situation, to another.” Keaton’s ‘dream ego’ “finds itself projected into a new world, without feeling the astonishment which this world would rouse in it in a waking state,” while he simultaneously attempts to placate his audience after the sudden changes in scene, through physical humor.
Alternatively, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera explicitly ‘sutures’ an audience into the image sequence of the film, in its introduction. Vertov opens with a mimetic sequence of the ritual of early 20th century cinema: the audience arriving and filling the theatre, the orchestra poised for the opening score, the projectionist assembling the film reels and projector, and finally setting the picture in motion. The screen of the film’s theatre then becomes our screen also, as both the audience in the film and the audience of the film travel through the lace covered window together.
Does Vertov’s double audience illustrate the true role of audience participation? The audience in Vertov’s film represent the part of the spectator which is engaged within the world of the film, while the audience of Vertov’s film represents the part of the spectator which remains outside the world of the film, ‘connecting the narrative,’ or identifying and analysing the symbolic. Here it may be possible to apply George Linden’s term ‘bi-presence’ in order to explain this response to film: “in speaking of a dreamer's [read ‘spectator’s’] sense of bi-presence… the [spectator] has a sense of being in the [film world] and at the same time being a kind of spectator of the [film].” Similarly, Mast explains, “the successful work of mimetic art makes us know we are undergoing an experience at the same time that we know we are sitting in a theatre or in our homes.” There is a duality of experience, an internal and external experience of film, which reiterates cinema as being a kind of superimposed, inorganic dream.
The duality of experience generated by film is bound to the conviction the spectator must invest in the experience. Conviction implies a sympathetic response to a mimetic work. A purely subjective, individual decision, conviction enables us to “accept the realness of the fiction until the work does something to unconvince us.” A convincing cinematic experience encourages a sense of ‘verisimilitude’, as the spectator ‘lives in the film world imaginatively.’ The spectator may also develop a voyeuristic relationship with the film, as “voyeurism is a constant of the audience-reader’s relationship to any mimetic work of time art.” A sense of voyeurism enables the spectator’s ‘bi-presence’ experience of film, Mast argues, as the spectator is ‘wrapped in a cloak of invisibility’, allowing her to derive a sense of ‘vicarious’ pleasure from the film, without being bound to its responsibilities.
Both film and dream offer a mode for expression. Both film and dreams offer platforms for a mediation or representation of the real, and therefore may offer a response to “unfulfilled desires.” In a psychoanalytical reading of dreams,
A dream is the hallucinatory fulfilment of a wish, but a wish that is unacceptable to the conscious mind of the subject who wishes… The manifest dream, therefore, is a transformation of the latent content in the service of the defence.
Interpretation of a dream therefore is “the means by which latent meanings are derived from manifest content.” Similarly, Mast quotes Stanley Cavell’s assertion of film “as satisfying the wish for the magical reproduction of the world by enabling us to view it unseen.” In his 1989 thesis, Richard Allen claimed,
Film and television appropriate the real, unfulfilled desires of the subject, and provide them with an illusory but realised fulfilment in a substitute reality which is thoroughly permeated by the logic of the commodity.
Both forms of ‘pre-’ conscious or sub-conscious expression therefore attempt to make the ‘unseen’ seen. If Freud perceived the meaning of dreams to derive from “‘primary processes' of unconscious formation,” it may therefore be understood that the image sequence is a verbalisation of ‘inner speech’. Each individual “would not have linked [the image sequence together] in the same way, or have imagined them for themselves,” but composed a series of images derived from their own primary processes. This process therefore, attempts to ‘fold’ the imagined into the real world, because, as Burgin writes,
Shape-shifting hybrid objects that coalesce in psychical space from the mnemic debris of films, photographs, television shows and other sources of images… are situated partly in imaginary worlds and partly in the real world.
Both films and dreams therefore allow their spectators to develop a heterotopic, ‘psychical’ space, influenced by real experiences and imagined or unfulfilled desires.
The heterotopic space, “where ‘several sites that are in themselves incompatible’ are juxtaposed,” is created in film through the image sequence. Here Burgin refers to the term used by Michael Foucault, a heterotopia (via utopia) being “places with no physical substance other than that of representations.” ‘Cinematic’ heterotopia, Burgin continues, “is constituted across the variously virtual spaces in which we encounter displaced pieces of films.” While Burgin refers to ‘the Internet’ and ‘the media’ as contemporary examples of ‘cinematic heterotopia’, Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart, composed with disused pieces of cinema reel may be considered a modernist example. By extension however, it may be argued that the ‘Second Episode’ of The Blood of a Poet is itself a heterotopia of incommensurable scenes (which take place behind closed doors.) The Poet enters this “place without a place” through the mirror, therefore entering into a place “with no physical substance other than that of representations.” Each door in the corridor the Poet finds himself in holds its own diametrically opposing scene: An execution in Mexico in Room 17, which is replayed, backwards in slow motion before the Poet leaves the room; in Room 19, the Poet finds a ‘celestial ceiling’, where men are making shadow puppets; ‘Flying Lessons’ are taking place in room 21; Hermaphrodite sits in Room 25, transforming from man to woman in front of the Poet. Viewing the heterotopia Cocteau has created evokes Charles Baudelaire’s concept of ‘kaleidoscopic consciousness’, as the audience experiences the “psychical space of a spectating subject.”
Baudelaire’s notion of “the newly emerged metropolis as a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness” is explored further in films such as Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and Ruttmann’s Berlin, as well as Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta, from 1921. In Manhatta, for example, the camera sweeps over the tops of skyscrapers, enabling its contemporaneous audience to see the city from a new perspective not commonly experienced before. This may be understood as kaleidoscopic, as Jacques Lacan explains: “the subjective possibility of the mirror projection of such a field into the field of the other gives human space its originally ‘geometrical’ structure, a structure that I would be happy to call kaleidoscopic.” Thus the modern metropolis acts as a ‘geometrical’ human space, and the city symphony a mirror by which to reflect the exotic experience into an ‘endotic’ experience. Through these films, the city is thus viewed by a means of ‘primary processes’, which prefers “images to words”; the representation of something which is “‘eternally, superbly, outside the sentence.’” Furthermore, as Leonardo Cremonini asserts, “the specific function of the work of art is to make visible, by establishing a distance from it, the reality of the existing ideology.” It may be understood therefore, that the city symphony reflects a certain perspective of the modern metropolis, situating its audience in a state of distanced immediacy with the city.
In Berlin, Ruttmann examines modernity through the lens of everyday city life. The audience is brought into the city by train, a physical manifestation of modern technology. Ruttmann then shifts from the movement of the ‘phantom ride’ on the train, to the “stasis” of the waking city. Here, the inhabitants are “dwarfed, silhouetted and fused with a spectrum of automata”, such as mannequins, trams and mechanised store fronts, “that seem to simply turn themselves on for the day.” Through these establishing scenes Ruttmann explores “the potential space between the subjective object and the object objectively perceived,” attempting to present to his audience a visual representation of “the interplay between there being nothing but me and there being objects and phenomena outside omnipotent control.” This is especially emphasised in the camera’s exploration of the waking city. Furthermore, these establishing image sequences may be understood as Ruttmann simultaneously commenting on the pervasive role technology has come to play in 1920s society, which is, as Billy Stevenson writes, “reiterated by the increasing preponderance of long takes and low angles to generate awe.” While Stevenson perceives Ruttmann as reflecting the city to his audience with a certain sense of ‘awe’, the mannequins in these establishing scenes are ambiguous. One the one hand, these lifelike statuettes manifest modern consumerism; alternatively, the mannequins embody the inauthentic, the simulacra of the real. Through this understanding, the city symphony is an allusion to the reality of the modern metropolis, a visual representation of the heterotopia of cultural experience.
Vertov similarly portrays a city of frenetic modern activity. The gothic representations of machines found in Ruttmann’s film however, are not present in Vertov’s documentation of daily life in Odessa. In Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov repeatedly cuts to the city intersection, which is controlled by human hand rather than traffic light, as a visual manifestation of man living alongside machine. Furthermore, Vertov’s film is consciously aware of its generation of a visual simulacrum of the modern metropolis. The first shot of the film the audience is met with is of a motion picture camera which fills two-thirds of the screen. Vertov then uses a horizontal split shot to place the ‘Man with a movie camera’ on top of the motion picture camera, as a striking image not only of man and machine, but also of the significant ability of film to make a true representation of its context. The candid nature of film is emphasised in the opening intertiles of Vertov’s film. Vertov prepares his audience for his conscious, documentary approach, proclaiming, “this film is an experiment in cinematic communication of real events,” from “excerpt from a camera operator’s diary.” Furthermore, Vertov claims his film to be an “absolute separation from the language of theatre and literature.” Void of narrative, Vertov’s film is also void of the structure Berlin exhibits, as Ruttmann focuses each image sequence on a specific aspect of life in the modern metropolis. The scene of the editor, in Man with a Movie Camera, inspecting the film reel reiterates the consciousness of Vertov’s film, as the sequence-images proceed to become image sequences within the film. This may also be understood as Vertov commenting on the pre-eminence of the moving picture. This example further identifies Man with a Movie Camera as a true “kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness,” a conscious reference to the real.
Both Man with a Movie Camera and Berlin take their audience on a ‘strange adventure’ for which the spectators are ‘not responsible’. The representation of buildings in Berlin, for example is stylised and not a perspective from which the building would be viewed everyday from the public passing by. Similarly, the shots of the young woman waking up and washing in Man with a Movie Camera would be an aspect of city life not experienced by everyone everyday. Furthermore, to a non-contemporaneous audience, these two films present a foreign, even simplistic lifestyle of the past, equipped with steam trains and traffic controllers. The image sequences of these two films portray precisely what Cocteau describes:
A succession of real events that follow on from one another with the magnificent absurdity of dreams, since the spectators would not have linked them together in the same way, or have imagined them for themselves, but experience them in their seats as they might experience, in their beds, strange adventures for which they are not responsible.
While neither of these two films appear to be a reification of a dream, they both develop a seemingly oneiric nature about them, their image sequences a “fragmentary rebus”, comparable to dreams.
Films may also create ‘sites of memory’, as “a recollected image may serve as the catalyst that prompts remembrance.” Through the attempt to communicate ‘real events’ through cinema, separate “from the language of literature and theatre,” the city symphony creates a memorialisation of the phenomenon of the modern metropolis. According to Pierre Nora, such archiving is necessary, as “modern societies need to create ‘sites of memory’ because without them the events commemorated might be effaced from recollection.” Furthermore, as “‘there is no spontaneous memory, …we must deliberately create archives... because such activities no longer occur naturally.’” Films such as Berlin and Man with a Movie Camera not only communicate to their audiences a ‘strange adventure’, for which ‘[the spectators] are not responsible’, but also create for us an archive of the modern metropolis of the early 19th century. In the kaleidoscopic representation of urban modernity of both Vertov and Ruttmann, “the connective tissue of narrative must be supplied by the spectator.” Therefore, ‘chains of association’ must be established, as the spectator engages in a dialogue between the conscious, preconscious and unconscious. This notion reiterates Burgin’s claim that “a recollected image may serve as the catalyst that prompts remembrance.”
Buildings especially may be used as a ‘site of memory’. In Manhatta, for example, shots of the skyline evoke memories of trips to New York, or other familiar representations of the famous urban environment, such as Sex and The City or Law and Order, or even King Kong. As Nora asserts, “although such lieux de mémorie are in a broad sense ‘shared’, their meanings may nevertheless vary widely according to the particularities of individual lives.” Films therefore are a perspective, an idea which is embodied by the character of ‘the Cameraman’ in Man with a Movie Camera. Furthermore, like dreams, the significance of a film generally emerges “only when situated in a specific individual context.” While the spectator has no control over the content of a film, or its direction, through engaging with the film, the spectator is able to create their own, individual experience of the work, ‘as if they were experiencing it in their beds.’
Films lead us on a strange adventure, presenting to their audiences places and ideas the spectators would not have ‘imagined for themselves.’ A strange adventure, however, does not assume the reification of a dream, but a reification of the “magnificent absurdity of dreams.” A film itself is a mimetic dream, ‘dreamt’ by the director and experienced by her audience. Cinema therefore encourages participation, as the spectator must be simultaneously involved within the world of the film, as well as remaining outside the film, connecting the narrative and identifying and analysing the symbolic. This is especially necessary in Cocteau’s Blood of the Poet, as the spectator is drawn into the oneiric environment of the film, yet must retain a distance to the film in order to glean an understanding of Cocteau’s themes and use of symbolism. A ‘successful’ work of mimetic art therefore “makes us know we are undergoing an experience, at the same time that we know we are sitting in a theatre.” Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., explicitly manifests this dual existence of the spectator in the cinematic experience, as Keaton’s character is physically absorbed into the film on the screen. More subtly however, Vertov and Ruttmann’s respective explorations of modernity in the metropolis draw their audience into their strange urban adventure, while the disjointed, kaleidoscopic nature of their respective representations maintain a distance between audience and heterotopic space. Both films and dreams “freely [leap] from one place or situation, or one position in a place or situation, to another,” as the “spatio-temporal discontinuities [of dreams]… are very like cuts in a film.” The image sequence therefore resembles a “kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness,” as film navigates its audience through ‘spatio-temporal discontinuities,’ on a strange adventure, “for which [the spectators] are not responsible.”
Curry continues, “If one is asked to describe a dream, the first pronoun occurring will almost always be ‘I.’ In contrast, we describe films by using ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘they.’”
Richard Curry, ‘Films and Dreams’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Autumn, 1974), p85 [own emphasis].
Jean Cocteau, The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin Buss, London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001, p. 40.
Victor Burgin, ‘Brecciated Time’, In/different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture, Berkley: University of California Press, 1996, p212.
Victor Burgin, ‘Introduction: The noise of the marketplace,’ The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2004, p22.
Burgin 1996, p205.
Curry, p83.
Jean Cocteau, ‘On Dreams’, The difficulty of being, trans. Elizabeth Sprigge, New York: Da Capo Press, 1995, p56-7.
Both terms come from Victor Burgin’s Introduction to The Remembered Film.
Burgin 2004, pp14-28.
Burgin 2004, p16.
Burgin 2004, p21.
Burgin 2004, p23.
Burgin 2004, p14.
Burgin 2004, p26.
Burgin 2004, p16.
Burgin 2004, p16.
Cocteau 2001, p40.
Richard Allen, ‘The Cinema, Mimesis and Modernity’, Representation, Meaning and Experience in the Cinema, PhD thesis, University Of California, 1989, p264.
Gerald Mast, ‘Kinesis and Mimesis’, Film/Cinema/Movie: A theory of experience, New York: Harper and Row, 1977, p45.
Cocteau 2001, p40.
Mast, p39.
Mast, p42.
Curry, p85 [own emphasis].
Burgin 1996, p239.
Cocteau 2001, p40.
F.E Sparshott, in Curry, p84 [own emphasis].
Curry, p83.
Ibid.
Cocteau 1995, p56.
Burgin 2004, p12.
Curry, p86.
The original line reads, “in speaking of a dreamer's sense of bi-presence… the dreamer has a sense of being in the dream and at the same time being a kind of spectator of the dream.” Curry highlights the interchangeability of the sentence between ‘dream’ and ‘film’, as he claims “a film tends to induce a self-forgetful involvement very like the involvement of a dreamer in his dream-and this despite the fact that a film world is but a two-dimensional world.” (p89).
Mast, p46.
Mast, p46 [existing emphasis].
Mast, p47.
Referring to Tzvetan Torodov’s notion of ‘verisimilitude’, in Mast, p46 – “that which feels real to the reader despite the fact it is obviously not.” [existing emphasis]
Curry, p85.
Mast, p41.
Mast, pp40, 44.
Curry, p86.
Allen, p260.
Burgin 1996, p205.
Burgin 1996, p205.
Stanley Cavell, in Mast, p41.
Burgin 1996, p205.
Burgin 2004, p11.
Burgin 1996, p239-240.
Burgin 2004, p10.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Burgin 2004, p10.
Charles Baudelaire, in Burgin 1996, p192 [existing emphasis].
Billy Stevenson, ‘Berlin: Symphony of a city’, University of Sydney, 24th March 2009.
Jacques Lacan, in Burgin 1996, p192 [existing emphasis].
Borrowing here from Paul Virilio, who explains, “seeing that which is not really seen becomes an activity that exists for itself. This activity is not exotic but endotic, because it renews the very conditions of perception.”
Paul Virilio, in Burgin 1996, p185 [own emphasis].
Burgin 2004, p11 [existing emphasis].
Leonardo Cremonini, in Burgin 1996, p200 [existing emphasis].
Stevenson, ‘Berlin: Symphony of a city.’
Ibid.
D.W. Winnicott, in Burgin 1996, p185 [existing emphasis].
Ibid.
Stevenson, ‘Berlin: Symphony of a city.’
Man with a Movie Camera, dir. Dziga Vertov, writ. Dziga Vertov, perf. Mikhail Kaufman, DVD, VUFKU, 1929.
Ibid.
Burgin 2004, p10.
Cocteau 2001, p40.
Burgin 2004, p14.
Burgin 2004, p22.
Man with a Movie Camera, 1929.
Burgin 2004, p21-2.
Pierre Nora, in Burgin 2004, p22.
Burgin 2004, p12.
Freud has claimed, “What in everyday speech is called ‘memory’ is located in the preconscious,” as “memory itself cannot be a conscious phenomenon… All memory then is unconscious in the ‘descriptive’ sense.”
Burgin 1996, p217.
Burgin 2004, p22.
Nora, in Burgin 2004, p22.
Burgin 1996, p206.
Cocteau 2001, p40.
Mast, p46 [existing emphasis].
Curry, p83.
Curry, p83.
Burgin 2004, p10.
Cocteau 2001, p40.
Bibliography:
Allen, Richard. ‘The Cinema, Mimesis and Modernity.’ Representation, Meaning and Experience in the Cinema. PhD thesis. University Of California, 1989. p252-276.
Burgin, Victor. ‘Introduction: The noise of the marketplace.’ The Remembered Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2004. pp7-28.
Burgin, Victor. ‘Brecciated Time.’ In/different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture. Berkley: University of California Press, 1996. Pp179-278.
Cocteau, Jean. ‘On Dreams.’ The difficulty of being. Trans. Elizabeth Sprigge. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995. p55-8.
Cocteau, Jean (dir.). Le Sang d’un Poète. DVD. Vicomte de Noailles. 1930.
Cornell, Joseph (dir.). Rose Hobart. 1936, accessed 5th June 2009
