Purposes
Commonly, dream sequences appear in many films to shed light on the psychical process of the dreaming character or give the audience a glimpse into the character's past. For instance in Pee-wee's Big Adventure, the purpose of Pee-wee's dreams is to inform the audience of his anxieties and fears after losing his bike. Other times major action takes place in dreams, allowing the filmmaker to explore infinite possibilities, as Michel Gondry demonstrates in The Science of Sleep. Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett points out in the book The Committee of Sleep that, while the main content of dream sequences is determined by the film's overall plot, visual details often reflect the individual dream experience of the screenwriter or director. For Hitchcock's Spellbound, Salvador Dali designed sharply angled sets inspired by his own dream space. Ingmar Bergman lit dream sequences in several films with a harsh glare of light which he says reflects his own nightmares (though most people's have dim light), and Orson Welles designed a scene of the trial to reflect the manner in which architecture constantly changed in his dreams.
Films normally present dreams as a visually accessible or objectively observed space, a discrete environment in which characters exist and interact as they do in the world rather than restricting themselves to the subjective point of view a dream is normally experienced from in real life. In this way films succeed in presenting a coherent dreamed world alongside the diegetic reality of the film. Via transition from one to the next, a film establishes not only the boundaries but resonances between the two worlds. These resonances can reveal a character's subjective observations or desires without breaking away from the objective viewpoint of the narrator, camera, or director with which some theorist, such as Christian Metz, believe the viewer identifies.
Read more about this topic: Dream Sequence
Famous quotes containing the word purposes:
“So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on th’inventors’ heads.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“O, I am smitten with a hatchet’s jaw;
And that in deed and not in word alone.
chorus: I thought I heard a sound within the house
Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy.
He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,
Once more: he purposes to kill me dead”
—A.E. (Alfred Edward)
“A material resurrection seems strange and even absurd except for purposes of punishment, and all punishment which is to revenge rather than correct must be morally wrong, and when the World is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer?”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)