The second in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin.
The one thing that defines the world of dreams, the spaces and the places, the people and the creatures and the objects we find there, is that we experience them as "real" -- as having the substance and coherence of the physical world we inhabit when awake.
It is only upon reflection after we awake that we realize how "unreal" the dream world was we just experienced. We met the dead there, perhaps, still alive, we discovered a new wing of the house we had not known existed, we jumped and sprang twenty feet into the air.
We remake the waking world in our dreams in order to press it into the service of emotional needs, but those needs would not be served if we couldn't believe in the reality of the dream world. We may for example feel, psychologically, in our waking life as though we are being pursued by demons -- activating primal fears of pursuit by animals or persons intent on doing us harm. But we cannot see those demons, which is disorienting. In dreams we give the demons shapes, the shapes of real creatures, and thus ground ourselves in the familiar. Of course we feel terrified by those tigers chasing us through dream streets -- they're tigers, for God's sake, with claws and fangs. So much more reassuring, paradoxically, than the unseen, undefined forces in waking life that seem to be dogging our heels, bent on devouring us.
In dreams we reconcile the complexities of psychology with the simplicities of the physical world. Dreams are a kind of rear-guard action against advanced ratiocination, which takes us into realms we cannot always comprehend fully or navigate.
This is not entirely a retrogressive process, since dreams re-orient us towards the dynamics of the physical world, even if those dynamics as they operate in dreams are not precisely aligned with the dynamics of the physical world. There is a twofold consolation, a twofold wisdom, in imagining psychological fears as physical threats within the precinct of dreams. We are, first, reminded that we live in a world of physical threats, against which we must take precautions -- emotional distress does not obviate the need to avoid stepping in front of moving cars. At the same time we encourage ourselves to believe that psychological fears can be dealt with as physical threats are dealt with -- by fight or flight.
André Bazin believed that the "ontology of cinema" was rooted in the absolute connection between the photographic image and its subject -- a connection similar to the connection between a death mask and the face of a corpse, or a footprint and the foot that left it. This may be an inescapable quality of the traditional still photograph, but the source of the enchantment of cinema lies elsewhere -- which is why hand-drawn or computer-generated animation can be just as cinematic as a photographically-based movie.
As long as a movie constructs a substantial and coherent alternate reality it has the power to express and manipulate our emotions. As long as it delivers the illusion of a world that is convincingly real while we are inside it a film can mimic the process of dreaming. Cinema is not about, or not only about, the mummification of reality -- it is about the translation of psychology into the realm of oneiric reality, and the essential quality of oneiric reality is that it feels absolutely real.
Jean Renoir said that he saw Erich Von Stroheim's Foolish Wives at least ten times and that it was the film which inspired him to dedicate his life to filmmaking. Renoir said it impressed him with "the possibility of creating within a film a world that might differ greatly from reality but still would be experienced as having a wholeness and coherence like that of the world we live in." What else is Renoir describing but the world of dreams?