Connecting Dreams to the Cinema: Story and Discourse

The artistic medium of film has only existed as we know it for roughly a century, as until then the technology to produce such capabilities were not available to potential cinematic artists. However, despite the fact that the cinema as we know it has only existed for a brief period in the scope of mankind's reign, the basic conceptual platform for which we understand movies has long since influenced both the individual and all of society. This platform, however, was not derived from art or a conscious creation of man: instead, it existed in the unconscious of the true great frontier - the human mind. In comparing Freud's interpretations of dreams (On Dreams) and Metz's theories on story and discourse in film ("Story/Discourse"), we find a unique and undeniable link between the unconscious functions of the brain and the platform for ingesting meaning in film.

As Metz explains, the power of the filmmaker is his ability to influence society through the film's discourse, but in so much as "the very principle of its effectiveness as discourse, is precisely that it obliterates all traces of the enunciation and masquerades as a story"(544). He further explains the separation between the theater and film. Within the theater there is a much greater sense of a group understanding, as the viewer is acutely aware of the rest of the audience, and the actors are clearly aware of the eyes watching their performance: "the theater still retains... something of its Greek origins... when a whole population put itself on display for its own environment"(546). Within film, the gaze its much more individualized and voyeuristic. The character in film (referred to as the "exhibited partner") "knows that he is being looked at, wants this to happen, and identifies with the voyeur whose object he is but who also constitutes him as subject"(546). To sum up, Metz argues that "film is not exhibitionism. I watch it, but it doesn't watch me watching it. Nevertheless, it knows I am watching it. But it doesn't want to know." The satisfaction for this voyeurism relies on the viewer's awareness that "the object [he is] watching is unaware of being watched"(547). 

Thus, Metz paints of picture of the fundamental structure of film not too far off from our perspective of dreams - where a being (the sleeper) essentially views a complex story camouflaging a deeper meaning (similar to cinematic discourse), and while the lucent dreamer is quite aware of the story taking place in his mind, the "characters" acting out in this story are wholly unaware of being watched and surveyed. Metz goes on to strengthen this discourse/dream relationship by establishing a deeper connection between the audience member and a dreamer: "the institution of the cinema requires a silent, motionless spectator (a vacant spectator) constantly in a sub-motor and hyper-perceptive state"(548). He further adds that "insofar as it abolishes all traces of the subject of enunciation , the traditional film succeeds in giving the impression that he is himself the subject"(548). Given these descriptions, it appears as if Metz likens the film spectator very much to a conscious dream observer, one who allows the story of a dream to unfold while remaining distinctly aware of the deeper meanings rooted in the characters and actions of the dream's "discourse." 

In his study of dream manifestations in the subconscious, Freud examines how dreams increase in complexity with age. While young children appear to dream mainly in a genre he names "wish fulfillments" - which are essentially simply straightforward dreams to satisfy the subconscious desires, such as eating candy that may be off limits in real life - adults tend to manifest their thoughts in deeply, seemingly unintelligible (at first glance, anyway) reflections. Freud explains that "the material employed in dream representation consists principally, though not exclusively, of situations and of sensory images, mostly of a visual character"(24) - thereby comparing the participants of a dream to the actors of a film portraying characters for an audience of which by definition they are unaware. Freud determines that dreams, as Metz says of film, convey "a thought expressed in the optative that has been replaced by a representation in the present tense"(25). 

Freud further touches on the presence of a "language" of dreams, similar to the language of film we have studied (for example: a genre such as Film Noir comes complete with its own coded language for understanding through the use of lighting/shade, cigarettes and smooth-talking detectives). In Freud's concept of dreams, "a large part of dream work consists in the creation of intermediate thoughts of this kind which are highly ingenious... these then form a link between the common representation in the manifest content of the dream and the dream thoughts"(29). He discusses various examples of this presence of a common language linking ideas in dreams such as "the combination of different persons into a single representative in the content of the dream"(30). He explains this dream language to be made up of "collective" and "composite figures." This language within dreams, like that of film, presents us with seemingly infinite possibilities of discourse: "in dreams fresh composite forms are being perpetually constructed in an inexhaustible variety," adding later "we are all of us familiar with such structures from our own dreams"(30). 

Freud argues that the key to unlocking meaning in dreams is through "condensation" and "transformation of thoughts into situations" which he refers to as "dramatization." These forms of deriving meaning from distinct language of dreams is nearly identical to Metz's concept of discovering discourse through film's story using knowledge of cinematic language. Thus, through these comparisons, we are able to understand the latent connection between dreams and film. The art of dreaming is therefore inexorably linked to the concepts and basis of the cinema.