Film and Dream Analysis

Film and Dream: The Knowledge of the Subject

True illusion exclusively belongs to dreams, while cinema provides a certain impression of reality. Affective participation in cinema can blur the consciousness of the filmic situation.

Spectators actively engaging with the film's narrative through motor activity (shouting, gesticulating) signifies an ambivalent behavior, simultaneously indicating confusion between film and reality, and dissipating this confusion by affirming their role as spectators.

The enthusiastic audience shares similarities with somnambulism in its initial stages but, unlike somnambulists, they are awakened by their actions.

Adult spectators may experience brief moments of mental seesawing, approaching true illusion, especially when fatigued or emotionally vulnerable. This state is akin to a brief psychical giddiness, a feeling of waking up from a dream.

Immobile and silent spectators push perceptual transference further due to the lack of motor outbursts. This hypercathexis can trigger a paradoxical hallucination, where the subject hallucinates what is actually perceived in the film.

Dreamers may know they are dreaming in intermediary states between sleep and waking, integrating this awareness into the dream itself.

The ego's wakefulness during sleep, driven by censorship, can interrupt sleep if a dream becomes too frightening or pleasurable. Lesser degrees of internal conflict can result in the subject knowing they are dreaming, akin to a filmic situation.

Deep dreaming and total illusion require deep sleep, with the degree of illusion inversely proportional to wakefulness. Traditional fiction films induce a tendency to lower wakefulness, encouraging narcissistic withdrawal and fantasy indulgence.

The filmic state involves a diminution of wakefulness, with the impression of reality marking its beginning. Special regimes of filmic perception move further towards genuine illusion during psychical giddiness.

Film and Dream: Perception and Hallucination

Filmic perception is a real perception, involving external images and sounds, unlike the dream flux, which is internal. The "delusion coefficient" is higher in dreams.

Novelistic films provide supplementary material for phantasy flux, offering behavioral schemes and libidinal prototypes. Film narratives can also induce affective irritation or phantasmic allergy, with spectators maintaining object relations with films they either 'like' or 'don't like'.

Filmic unpleasure can arise from insufficient instinctual satisfaction (films seeming 'dull') or from the super-ego reacting to excessive id satisfaction (films considered 'in bad taste').

For a film to be 'liked', its diegesis must please the spectator's phantasies within acceptable limits, integrating with their defenses. Disappointment can occur when film adaptations of novels do not align with the reader's imagined images.

Fiction film is less certain than dreams due to its reliance on external perceptions. Dreams respond to wishes with greater precision, avoiding collisions with reality.

The dream belongs to the "hallucinatory psychoses of desire," ensuring it cannot give unpleasure in itself. Diegetic film, belonging to both phantasy and reality, can please or displease.

The hallucinatory process requires the economic conditions of sleep. Waking states follow a 'progressive path' from the external world to memory, while dreams follow a 'regressive path' from the unconscious to the illusion of perception.

Filmic state allows for beginnings of regression despite wakefulness and counter-flux by offering rich nourishment to perception. The filmic situation inhibits motor activity.

The hallucinatory process can establish itself, in the normal regime, only in the economic conditions of sleep. In the waking situtation, and therefore in the
cinematic situation, the most common path of the psychical exci- tations traces out a one-way line, a directed line which is Freud's 'progressive path'.

Film and Dream: Degrees of Secondarisation

Diegetic film is more logical than dreams, often adhering to genre logic. Dreams possess a true absurdity due to internal obscurity and incoherence.

Freud's secondary revision puts a logical facade over the illogical productions of the primary process. Dream logic is alien, with objects transforming without causing astonishment.

The primary process aims at maximal discharge of psychical excitations, while the secondary process fixes paths of thought, preventing discharge by other routes.

For primary logic to produce conscious outputs, dream conditions and sleep are necessary.

The cinema analyst sees secondary revision as the dominant force in film production/perception.

An unconscious production, largely dominated by the primary process, must be directly presented to the conscious apperception to experience true absurdity.

Filmic flux, received in lessened wakefulness, shares affinity with dream signifiers through imaged expression. The image withstands being swallowed up whole in logical assemblages and unconscious neither thinks nor discourses; it figures itself forth in images.

Film stories unfold clearly, implying narration, while dream stories emerge without narration. Figures of cinematic expression, like superimposition and lap-dissolves, retain primary-order unbinding.

The fiction film consoles us for things we cannot do.

Film and Dream: Film and Phantasy

Diegetic film is linked to daydreaming, sharing similar degrees of logical coherence. The "petit roman" is the conscious phantasy. The relation of forces between the secondary revision and the various primary operations is pretty much the same in both cases.

Films are logical constructions due to the conscious and preconscious operations of filmmakers and spectators. These operations constitute the psychical agency. Conscious phantasy or rather, simply the phantasy in its different conscious and unconscious versions, inseparable from
each other and grouped in 'families' – is rooted in the unconscious in a fashion that is more direct and that follows a shorter circuit.

Filmic flux is more explicit than daydreaming because film fabrication requires choosing each element in detail.
Daydreams can have intentional intervention.

Filmic state and conscious phantasy both have similar degrees of wakefulness, established at levels between minimal wakefulness (sleep/dream) and maximal wakefulness (active tasks).

There is temporary change in economy by which the subject suspends his object cathexes or at least
renounces opening a real outlet for them, and withdraws for a time to a more narcissistic base.

Materialization further separates the film and the daydream. Filmic images have an alien origin. Thus there are social life fiction film enters into functional
competition with daydream, a competition in which it is sometimes victorious.

The Filmic Visée

The film analysis proposed suits the frames of mind in Western countries, the cinema, insofar as it is a social
fact, and therefore also the psychological state of the ordinary
spectator, can take on appearances very different from those to
which we are accustomed.

Focusing was on narrative (or fictional, or diegetic, or novelistic, or representational, or traditional, or classical, etc.) because they tell a story.

The study relies on what the impression of reality results partly
from the physical (perceptual) nature of the cinematic signifier.