As you know, we sometimes address non-political questions on the weekend. Today's topic may strike many of you as particularly silly -- but perhaps it isn't.
I've long been curious about the ways in which the medium of film has impacted our dreams.
First, let's be clear: I'm not talking about subject matter. We've all had dreams based on movies or television shows, and we're always a little embarrassed when our unconscious minds fixate on something low or trashy -- Gilligan's Island as opposed to The Seventh Seal.
Subject matter is a discussion for another time. Right now, what I'm wondering about is style.
Some of us dream in black and white; some dream in color. A few people dream in text, as if reading a book. (A childhood acquaintance did so regularly, or so he told me. I thought he was pulling my leg until, many years later, I had a few such dreams myself.) But for most of us, the dream world resembles the movie screen.
Dreams speak the language of cinema: Close ups, two-shots, overhead shots, low angles, long shots, tracking shots and so forth. Sometimes dreams include rapid editing (think Bourne Ultimatum) or jarring "smash cuts" (like the bone/spaceship bit in 2001). Some dreams even have soundtrack music. My own dreams tend to include a lot of shaky first-person POV shots, a la The Blair Witch Project.
My question is this: Did our dreaming minds pick up the "visual language" of cinema from a lifetime of watching movies and television shows?
Or did the pioneers of the film medium -- people like D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein and King Vidor and Abel Gance -- create film language as a way of approximating the way dreams have always looked from the beginning of the human race?
I'm not sure how many people alive today did not grow up watching films and television shows. Perhaps in some very remote areas of the world, you can still find human beings who have never seen a movie. Perhaps the "look" of their dreams does not resemble the way you and I dream. Perhaps those dreams use a different visual language.
When I was young, I had -- and missed -- my chance to discuss this question with people who were born before the invention of film. For example, how did Charlie Chaplin dream when he was a boy in England? Did those dreams include close-ups, overhead shots, tracking shots, jump cuts and all the other components of film grammar?
Stylistically, do movies imitate dreams, or do dreams imitate movies?
24 comments:
I once read a literary essay that analyzed passages from 18th and 19th century fiction, noting some strikingly "cinematic" passages in these books, written by people who never saw a movie. This suggests to me that dreams may have always been somewhat cinematic, though I'm sure movies have influenced our modern-day dreams.
Dogs dream. What are they experiencing?
Harry
This is an absolutely fascinating subject, and I've reflected on the same subject, but I had never had the idea that early filmmakers had used the editing process to try to approximate dreams. I would think their editing techniques were the same as editors of novels - trim the fat, remove superfluous scenes and break the story down to it's necessity as a story-telling / narrative device.
The idea has a very solid question, though. It would be an interesting analysis to review the writings and interviews of the early filmmakers for any indications of this. I would exepect that a particularly useful example would be Sergei Eisenstein, who is widely credited with the 'montage' technique in film (see Battleship Potemkin, 1914(?)), and who wrote several books on filmmaking technique and editing.
I would think that one of the strongest links between dream imagery and film would be found in avant-garde films of the early film era, such as Luis Bunuel (The Andulusyan Dog, Land Without Bread). The absurdist, un-relatedness of the narratives of dreams (in my experience) most closely resembles films which make no coherent, narrative sense while still always, even indirectly, reflect a particular psychological predicament. Personally, my dreams seem to have no narrative continuity, but whatever subconscious, psychological activity is running rampant in my subconscious seems to be manifested in all the disparate elements of my dreams.
In the end, I suspect that as the 'grammar' of filmmaking has become more sophisticated (kudos to the 2001 reference), they have also invaded our dreams. I've also learned from conversations with many different people that we all have significant differences in the nature of our dreams - some dream vividly, others at times lucidly, some rarely and disjointedly, and some not at all (at least that they can remember).
Another point is... let's say we could interview people from the 19th or 18th century, as Perry Logan referenced in his post (it sounds like an interesting book). By that time, I would think many techniques used in film 'grammar' were being used in novels. I would expect - I have no formal education in film history, only exposure and self-education - that many early film-makers looked to novels, or even classical texts (DeMille's first "Ten Commandments"?) as a format to be adapted to film. The story-telling elements in these probably provided inspiration in the editing of the films.
But, if we were to talk to people from 1000+ years ago, who were illiterate, what would their dreams be like? First-person? Would there be continuity, or "jump-cutting"? Would the dreams of a peasant farmer in 1000 AD be, let's say, a dream of harvesting crops in Autumn and encountering a supernatural (superstitious) being (as a representation of his powerlessness over his fate)? Or purely drab, maybe a dream of shoeing a horse or churning butter? The real question here is, I think, how do dreams transisition between the ordinary and the psychological manifestation of subconscious thought.
To break it down to the simplest: Yes, I believe that cinema has re-programmed our collective brains in some ways, and I believe we DO dream in narrative techniques which we've learned from television and cinema. The truly difficult question is, is this a positive or negative thing?
My apologies to anyone reading this: I rambled on far too long. So Sorry, Charlie.
It would not surprise me if the people who make movies, and especially those who developed the motion picture technology, were visual thinkers. To a visual thinker, images, movement,and language are intertwined.
Does this mean people who watch "South Park" have dreams that totally suck?
I suspect the form of dreams was always what we now recognize as cinematic. Just as we knew what it was like to fly long before we could do it.
I have pop zooms in my dreams - a lot of them. I suspect they did come from watching film.
Here's another poser. If we concede, for the sake of argument, that film grammar has impacted "dream" grammar -- then what about the computer age? Will the next generation dream in HTML? Will their dreams routinely include cursors and mouse clicks?
Wow, great questions. I've given some that as well to the interplay between dreams and moving images. I love your follow up about html, Joseph, but I wonder if it'll be in video-game images? Anime? My 14 yeard old daughter practically thinks in cartoon terms now, so I often wonder what her dreams are like.
For myself, I generally dream in muted color, a lot of time with some kind of filmy lens, like I really don't want to know or something. Watery, foggy, filmy, you get the idea. Usually that falls away towards the end. I have been exposed my whole life to moving images, so I expect that I've been influenced by that reality.
Since the capacity to imagine, wonder, conceptualize and even rationalize has always driven literature (and in my opinion, perhaps caused it to be invented) it seems logical to me that humans have always dreamed in story form. The challenge for writers, filmmakers, TV producers, etc. is the same one faced by all artists throughout history, how do you capture and share a dream?
I think the brand-new cinema devastated Franz Kafka, who had written to his fiancée: "I am literature". His story "The Metamorphosis", which begins with Gregor Samsa waking after troubling dreams to find himself transformed into a giant 'vermin' or dung beetle, is arguably the most 'realistic' story ever written, for its explicit style, and yet the novella can exist only as text. The German title is "Die Verwandlung", which means something like 'scene change', as in the theater.
Reading the story, you know you're reading a third-person narration, but you sense and feel it as though it's in first-person.
Abbey
While imagery might be precognitive or collective unconsciousy stuff, I like this question on the form (Form Vs. Content, you sure this has nothing to do with the VP Debate?) And I do suspect that our dream literacy is affected by our day to day visual language, so sure, kids today can probably hyperlink in their dreams... Maybe we all can, do you lucid dream at all?
I recently dreamed I was dead. And while I was stuck in some bardot type place (i wish-- ok, bardo) someone, a guide perhaps, was explaining to me about my new state of non-being, and at one point he cut off my head, and I was seeing around the room as a shaky POV shot through my separated head (which i was holding).
I'm not sure what the guide was trying to tell me, but when I awoke I was dismayed that the dream was not influenced by my readings of Besant or Leadbetter (ages ago) but influenced by the recent film "Doomsday" in which a woman who lost an eye as a child can pop her prothetic eye out and toss it on the floor then use it as a CCTV (shot in POV) as well as by Tim Burton's Beetlejuice. I wish they could be influenced by better films. And will now have to look more closely to see if there are formal techniques piqued from Godard or Felini or the unsung genius Arthur Lipsett (who was known to say; "oh my films... they're just Eisenstein on speed") or the collage-montage of Craig Baldwin.
As for "pop zooms" --I just hope you don't have any of those dollying-in while zooming out shots, like the last few seconds before Sugar Ray Robinson throws his final Jake LaMotta-destroying punch in Raging Bull: those are disquieting.
...And speaking of raging bull --do many people in Alaska speak with Southern/Midland accents? See, I rekon that 'ol sourdoughs --those used to dip netting an all-- are known to pronouncing their g's, know nothing about friedcakes nor doorknobs, but can tell the difference between bullchitna and Moose Nuggets. Can anyone in the lower 57 tell the dif?]
My dreams aren't very close to what the movies or tv look like. They're mostly realistic looking: color, everything looks 3D, etc. They do sometimes cut to another dream fairly quickly, or sometimes they blend weirdly, but for the most part, it resembles what I see in life (style not content... the content's a whole other thing). I do have the occasional dream that plays like cinema, though, and I remember having the random cartoon like dream when I was a pretty young child.
There's a great radio show (on NPR-go figure) called Radiolab. They did a show on sleep, and a segment of that episode was on dreams. Here's the link: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/05/25
They've got the individual segments available to listen to on the page, or you can download the entire episode. If you like that episode, I recommend my favorite, the "Musical Language" episode from season 2.
Kyre
In this regard - if you haven't yet watched any movies by the director Andrei Tarkovsky, I would suggest doing so.
As far as the HTML question goes, my suspicion is that we would not dream in mouse-clicks, mostly because the clicks we follow are not the central psychological point of our internet view-ship. I think the "waiting-ness" of the mouse-click is more likely to show up in our dreams - the experience of choosing a link vs. the loading time for the gratification of the following of the link. The process of clicking on the link is not the psychologically important part - the result (fulfilment of the page loading?) is the central element.
Anna Belle's post also makes me wonder: Let's hypothesize that the filming of people was impossible, and that cartoons turned out to be the only form of "moving pictures" - what kind of cartoonish quality would have affected our dreams? Let's say that all of the video media we watch is animated, due to technical limitations... would animation seep into our dreams, perhaps at key narrative points? Would they take on a kind of absurdist reality at times, like a Tom & Jerry or Roadrunner & Wile-E Coyote cartoon? Interestly enough, there was no such thing as a "flash-back" within the "grammar" of cinema prior to Citizen Kane - was Welles committing to film a technique learned from dreams, or was he introducing an entirely new method of story-telling? I am not sufficiently familiar with classical literature to say whether or not the narrative device of a "flash-back" had been used in a novel prior to this example. Anyone else? Were flash-backs used in literature before Welles cinematic introduction? If not, it's even more of a indication of genius.. to introduce an entirely new story-telling method after thousands of years of telling stories.
Just on an odd note: The whole reason dreams are considered via cinema is the transitions - dreams shift gears (apparently) on a whim - the only form of media which uses this story-telling technique is film, or, at times literature; such is the nature of our discussion.
Perhaps our discussion should revolve around the modern vs. the pre-literate, rather than the pre-cinematic.
Tarkovsky is an old pal. I saw a gorgeous print of Solaris in its first U.S. screening many years ago; most subsequently made subtitled prints look terrible. I had mixed feelings about "Andrei Rublev" when I first saw it. Maybe I was being too literal minded -- I came out of the theater telling people "But the hot air balloon was NOT invented in Russia in the middle ages!"
I still can't make heads or tails of "Mirror." But you just can't take your eyes off of it, can you?
What's odd, though, is that no-one dreams that he's in a Tarkovsky movie, even though his imagery is very dream-like. And no-one dreams that he's in a Bunuel film or a Fellini movie or a David Lynch movie.
But just about every American of my generation has had at least one dream that he was on Gilligan's Island.
The unconscious mind has the most appalling taste.
Sorry Hoarseface but literary flashbacks came way before 1941. One of the earlier (western) novels with flashbacks would be Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier" (In the US the film version, starring Jeremy Brett [best Sherlock Holmes ever] played on Masterpiece Theater). Good Soldier, from 1915 --and available on Project Gutenberg, flashes back many times as the protagonist (and narrator) comes to realize that many things he held as true were actually false... Then again of you were to look for non-western literary flashbacks, you can look to Veda Vyas and his epic The Mahabarata (also made into a great film by Peter Brooke in the early 80s). It's around 5,000 years old.
I think when you start to lucid dream you can get into more Felliniesque or Lynchian style in your dreams (the few times I have taken control in my dreams they've gotten much more 'dreamlike')... but if you are a passive observer then they're more like Gilligan (maybe that's because the show went from B&W to colour after its first season? or maybe it's just because of Tina Louise??)
Have you ever seen "Waking Life" by Richard Linklater? (and please don't dismiss it because of the Alex J cameo), thats pretty close to the lucid dream form.
The flash-back in literature is as old as literature. The Iliad's narrative begins 'in medias res' - in the middle of things -, and later brings us up to date, only to digress again to an earlier time. Indeed it was a feature of oral storytelling, what we once called 'recursive' and now call blogging.
Abbey
Interesting! Off topic but some of us think in pictures rather than words in the first place. That is to say for example, when reading we have to translate to pitcures, analyse, then translate back in order to speak or write. You can tell a visual-spatial because it takes a bit more time for them to respond. Being one of those, my dreams have always been vivid pictures and color. However, FWIW, when I had an email relationship with someone once, I did have a few visual dreams of the typewritten page.
Miss P.
Dream Changes
We ran with them, our stubby necks
contracting under the art of their
swaying -saurus. And when at last
rubbing that first spark, we had
time to remember flying dreams
something soon-to-be-eagle bound
for a place on high. In olden times
the shaman never asked style
questions. We accepted his paint
face, swallowed bitter herbs. Fire
balls behind our lids, behind clouds
caught us sleeping. You read this
like I dream, an observer third
row center. Waking we speak
of flying rather, as feathers
fade from our hands. These days
dreams have red velvet curtains.
We were never birds.
K
Abbey said about Kafka, "waking after troubling dreams to find himself transformed into a giant 'vermin' or dung beetle..
Cannon how odd that is precisely what happened to you, Was Kafka foretelling? Sometimes "some" dreams are prophetic in nature and are warnings as well. Some dreams are like some movies depending, of course, on the dreamer.
Joel Chapter 2; 28-30
"After this I will pour out my spirit on all flesh,
Your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions
Even on the slaves, men and women,
I will display portents in heaven and on earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke.
So our "dream machines" will soon be taxed to the max, since "the great and terrible day of the Lord is fast approaching"
Hear the hoof beats?
Joe:
I remember as a "young man, talking with my Grandfather about dreams.
I was taking part in a Native American "Vision Quest" and after spending 4 days in the desert without food and water, I was sitting in a "Sweat Lodge" relating to my "Elders" what I had seen.
My Grandfather, I remember, told me about his "Visions" and went into detail about them. We, meaning my family, are what my people call---"Medicine Root", or "Medicine Men" as the movies have tended to call us.
My Grandfathers dreams..as mine and the many generations before me...are bizarre and beautiful in the same sense. They have served me well and I take wisdom from them as did my people before me.
Maybe, In this day and age..My dreams are influenced by movies I watch. I know there have been times they seem that way. Nothing can stop the unconscious from attaching itself to what we hear and see on a daily basis.
For me...I try to remember what I was taught as a child...
Dreams can be both a blessing and as curse. it is how you interpret them that is the tricky part...
Yaa-Ta--he Brother!
Speaking of dreams..here is a dream ticket
http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/palin-hillary-open/656281/
Dream on
I think Sherwood Schwartz was a genius. He knew that as Freud said, the dream is the father of the wish. There's a bit of Gilligan in all us. Whether we embrace this or whether we loathe it depends soley upon the dreamer.
Kim in PA
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