Sunday, May 29, 2011
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Secrets of a Soul Geheimnisse einer Seele 1926 1 6
Secrets of a Soul--G. W. Pabst's 1926 film about psychoanalytic treatment--is now available on YouTube in a really excellent print.
Sigmund Freud Documentary Pt. 1 of 3
There are several reasonably good biographical accounts of Freud available online. Here's one--first of three parts.
Much against his better judgment, Bernard ventures comments on the dreams of complete strangers
Seriously, I know what I'm doing--kind of. Total strangers allow me to interpret their dreams.
The Washington Post solicited readers' dreams for this feature a few years back:
Four Experts try to Get Inside Readers' Heads, The Washington Post, October 29, 2006
During the 2008 presidential election campaign, I was asked to comment on random strangers' dreams about candidates. Other dream experts went for the dreams about Hilary and Barack. I chose the McCain dreams because I figured they'd be crazier:
I Dream of John McCain - May 18 2008
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
McCay - The Flying House 1921
Another of McCay's Rarebit Fiend films, this was one of the most elaborate animated cartoons of its period.
From "Winsor McCay and His Moving Pictures," 1906
McCay took an early interest in the capacity of the new medium of film to animate his cartoons--according to legend, when he observed his young son delighted by the moving pictures in a flipbook. But the creation of animated pictures was dauntingly labor-intensive--each frame had to be drawn separately, with incredible precision.
The mind-blowing volume of work required to create an animated cartoon, treated comically, became itself the subject of McCay's first extended foray into the form. Here we see only the short moving picture that was the product of McCay's labors. It's still amazingly inventive, skilled work.
Edwin S. Porter - Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, 1903 (Edison Studios)
One of the first American films to exploit extensively the new medium's capacity for the creation of fantasy was Edwin S. Porter's adaptation of Winsor McCay's popular comic strip, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in 1903, for Edison Studios.
Porter was inspired by the films of Georges Méliès in France, who effectively invented fantasy film. Like Méliès, Porter explored special effects inherent in the nature of cameras and film to create fantastic scenes; like Melies, he naturally turned to the representation of dream states to justify the fantasy.
Winsor McCay: An American Artist in Slumberland
The American cartoonist Winsor McCay (1867-1934) returned to dreams as subject matter through most of his career.
The Adventures of Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1914) may be the most admired and cited comic of all time among connoisseurs and cartoon artists.
Each installment of Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend (1904-1913) depicts a nightmare dreamed by someone who has eaten Welsh rarebit (or rabbit) before sleep. There are no continuing characters; the genius of the strip is in the imaginative variations on common dream themes, McCay’s amazing draughtsmanship, and the control of narrative pace in laying out extraordinarily bizarre scenes.
The cartoon below is a relatively innocuous example, but shows how McCay drew upon real dream-themes. Dream images may be built on puns: a dream may turn the “corn” on a toe into a corn plant. But sudden and catastrophic change to the body is a more disturbing theme often encountered in nightmares. (You'll need to click on this and the other comic strips to see an enlarged image and read the text.)
At times it is difficult to believe that The Rarebit Fiend ran in an ordinary newspaper. It anticipates both psychoanalysis and surrealism.
You might consider:
-What are the prominent images you’d think about?
-Do any of the images suggest associations or ideas to you?
-Does the strip seem to express a central concern or anxiety?
-Are any of the images especially provocative?
-How would our accounts of dreaming change if we took our lead from the work of artists rather than from psychological theorists?
-What happens when we focus on the details of the experience of the dream rather than on trying to explain them away, or develop a theory?
-What happens when we consider visual rather than verbal representations of dreams? (Almost all theoretical approaches reduce the dream to a verbal account; the connection between dreaming and oral and written narrative has been treated to a much greater extent than visual representations.)
The essential biography of Winsor McCay is John Canemaker’s Winsor McCay: His Life and Art (Harry N. Abrams, 2005). The most accessible edition of the Little Nemo strips is the full-color Little Nemo 1905-1914, by Winsor McCay, Evergreen, 2000. The Complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend assembled by Ulrich Merkl is practically unobtainable, but selections can be found in various volumes available online. McCay’s animated cartoons are collected in Winsor McCay: The Master Edition (Image Entertainment, 2003), which includes commentary by animator and McCay biographer John Canemaker and an interesting short documentary.
The Pains of Sleep - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1816)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
THE PAINS OF SLEEP
Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation
No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
Only a sense of supplication;
A sense o'er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since in me, round me, every where
Eternal strength and Wisdom are.
But yester-night I prayed aloud
In anguish and in agony,
Up-starting from the fiendish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
And shame and terror over all!
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which all confused I could not know
Whether I suffered, or I did:
For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe,
My own or others still the same
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.
So two nights passed: the night's dismay
Saddened and stunned the coming day.
Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me
Distemper's worst calamity.
The third night, when my own loud scream
Had waked me from the fiendish dream,
O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild,
I wept as I had been a child;
And having thus by tears subdued
My anguish to a milder mood,
Such punishments, I said, were due
To natures deepliest stained with sin,--
For aye entempesting anew
The unfathomable hell within,
The horror of their deeds to view,
To know and loathe, yet wish and do!
Such griefs with such men well agree,
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
To be beloved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.
1816
Coleridge epitomizes the Romantic era in:
-addressing dreams as a topic
-offering his poem as a confession to troubled feelings and a window into his soul
-trying to resolve ambivalent feelings through the practice of art.
-trying to resolve ambivalent feelings through the practice of art.
How does this account of his dreams look now, two hundred years later?
Do the scenes and themes of his dreams sound familiar?
Are his protests believable?
Ever since the first appearance of motion pictures, the dominant mode of cinema has been realism--the set of conventions that presents a movie as a window on the shared world of our waking lives. Accordingly, the medium’s amazing capacity to replicate the hallucinatory experience of dreaming has been treated as a mere eccentric curiosity. Recently, the paradigm has been shifting: films that explore the interior space of the mind and portray imaginary worlds have become popular and critical successes. This experimental course investigates an analogy that is often casually invoked in discussions of contemporary cinema: Are films actually like dreams, and vice-versa?
To explore this question, we’ll look for primary evidence in the representation of dreams in narrative films, where they’re used either as a framing device for the whole of the film’s fictional world, or as one means among others to illuminate plot and character. We will also look beyond the use of dream as a convention or plot device to the “dream-like” genres of fantasy, mystery and horror, as well as to surrealist and experimental approaches to cinema.
Participants in the course keep a dream journal and explore for themselves the boundary between the private world of the dream and the public sphere of artistic expression.
Course Objectives:
Dreams and Cinema offers an introduction to:
- The topic of dreams and dreaming, adopting perspectives from psychology, philosophy, and cultural history
- The theories of Freud, Jung, and other psychologists as a basis for understanding dreams, the unconscious mind, and the arts, especially cinema
- Critical examination of the dominance of the realist paradigm in film theory and criticism, as well as the reception of movies as a popular art form
- Consideration of film genres, including experimental film, as authentic popular responses to problems in psychology and philosophy
- Critical analysis of films from a personal perspective and the writing of critical and interpretative essays in response to films
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