Film And The Dream Screen

Robert T. Eberwein uses a hypothesis from psychoanalytic theory to explore the frequently noticed similarity between dreaming and watching a film. His comprehensive study of the relationship between films and dreams explains the film screen as a psychic structure. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The four volumes of Film Study include a fresh approach to each of the basic categories in the original edition. Volume one examines the film as film; volume two focuses on the thematic approach to film; volume three draws on the history of film; and volume four contains extensive appendices listing film distributors, sources, and historical information as well as an index of authors, titles, and film personalities.

The original edition of Planks of Reason was the first academic critical anthology on horror. In retrospect, it appeared as a kind of homage to the "golden age" of the American horror film, as this genre played an increasing role in film culture and American life. This revised edition retains the spirit of the original, but also offers new takes on rediscovered classics and recent developments in the genre.

​This book demonstrates how social distress or anxiety is reflected, modified, and evolves through the medium of the motion picture. Tracing cinema from its earliest forms, the authors show how film is a perfect medium for generating and projecting dreams, fantasies, and nightmares, on the individual as well as the societal level. Arising at the same time as Freud’s influential ideas, cinema has been intertwined with the wishes and fears of the greater culture and has served as a means of experiencing those feelings in a communal and taming environment. From Munsterberg’s original pronouncements in the early 20th century about the psychology of cinema, through the pioneering films of Melies, the works of the German expressionists, to James Bond and today’s superheroes this book weaves a narrative highlighting the importance of the social dream. It develops the idea that no art form goes beyond the ordinary process of consciousness in the same way as film, reflecting, as it does, the cognitive, emotional, and volitional aspects of human nature.​

An interrogation of the notion of space in Surrealist theory and philosophy, this study analyzes the manifestations of space in the paintings and writings done in the framework of the Surrealist Movement. Haim Finkelstein introduces the 'screen' as an important spatial paradigm that clarifies and extends the understanding of Surrealism as it unfolds in the 1920s, exploring the screen and layered depth as fundamental structuring principles associated with the representation of the mental space and of the internal processes that eventually came to be linked with the Surrealist concept of psychic automatism. Extending the discussion of the concepts at stake for Surrealist visual art into the context of film, literature and criticism, this study sheds new light on the way 'film thinking' permeates Surrealist thought and aesthetics. In early chapters, Finkelstein looks at the concept of the screen as emblematic of a strand of spatial apprehension that informs the work of young writers in the 1920s, such as Robert Desnos and Louis Aragon. He goes on to explore the way the spatial character of the serial films of Louis Feuillade intimated to the Surrealists a related mode of vision, associated with perception of the mystery and the Marvelous lurking behind the surfaces of quotidian reality. The dialectics informing Surrealist thought with regard to the surfaces of the real (with walls, doors and windows as controlling images), are shown to be at the basis of Andr?reton's notion of the picture as a window. Contrary to the traditional sense of this metaphor, Breton's 'window' is informed by the screen paradigm, with its surface serving as a locus of a dialectics of transparency and opacity, permeability and reflectivity. The main aesthetic and conceptual issues that come up in the consideration of Breton's window metaphor lay the groundwork for an analysis of the work of Giorgio de Chirico, Ren?agritte, Max Ernst, Andr?asson, and Joan Mir?he concluding chapter consi

"Written to commemorate the centenary of Freud's classic work, this illustrated book examines the shifting roles that dreams have played in twentieth century art and science."--BOOK JACKET.

In Bion in Film Theory and Analysis: The Retreat in Film, Carla Ambrósio Garcia introduces the rich potential of the thinking of British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion for film theory. By so doing, she rethinks the space of the cinema as a space of retreat, and brings new insights into the representation of retreat in film. Presented in two parts, the book seeks to deepen our understanding of the film experience and psychical growth. Part I places Bion’s view on the importance of the epistemophilic instinct at the heart of a critique of the pleasure-centred theories of the cinematic apparatus of Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz and Gaylyn Studlar, proposing an idea of cinema as ‘thoughts in search of a thinker’. Garcia then moves from Bion’s epistemological period to his later work, which draws on mysticism, in order to posit an emotional experience in the cinema through which the subject can be or become real (or at one with ‘O’). Part II examines representations of retreat in four European films, directed by Ingmar Bergman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Georges Perec and Bernard Queysanne, and Manoel de Oliveira, showing them to articulate a gesture of retreat as an emotionally turbulent transitional stage in the development of the psyche – what Bion conceptualizes as caesura. Through its investigation of the retreat in cinema, the book challenges common understandings of retreat as a regressive movement by presenting it as a gesture and space that can also be future-oriented. Bion in Film Theory and Analysis will be of significant interest to academics and students of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and film and media studies, as well as psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.