Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Lodger
- Chapter 2 Oedipus Express
- Chapter 3 Railway Reading
- Chapter 4 ‘From Autumn to Spring, Aesthetics Change’
- Chapter 5 ‘A Hymn to Movement’
- Chapter 6 Staging the ‘Private Theatre’
- Chapter 7 The Newness of the ‘New Biography’
- Chapter 8 European Witness
- Chapter 9 Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness
- Chapter 10 Directed Dreaming
- Chapter 11 ‘In the Circle of the Lens’
- Chapter 12 Virginia Woolf and the Art of the Novel
- Index
- References
Chapter 9 - Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Lodger
- Chapter 2 Oedipus Express
- Chapter 3 Railway Reading
- Chapter 4 ‘From Autumn to Spring, Aesthetics Change’
- Chapter 5 ‘A Hymn to Movement’
- Chapter 6 Staging the ‘Private Theatre’
- Chapter 7 The Newness of the ‘New Biography’
- Chapter 8 European Witness
- Chapter 9 Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness
- Chapter 10 Directed Dreaming
- Chapter 11 ‘In the Circle of the Lens’
- Chapter 12 Virginia Woolf and the Art of the Novel
- Index
- References
Summary
The year 1895 was a key year in the histories of both psychoanalysis and cinema. On 24 July 1895, Freud dreamed the ‘Dream of Irma’s Injection’, the Specimen Dream of The Interpretation of Dreams. ‘Do you suppose’, Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess in a letter describing a later visit to Bellevue, the house where he had had the dream, ‘that someday one will read on a marble tablet on this house’:
Here, on July 24th, 1895
the secret of dreams
revealed itself to Dr. Sigm Freud.
During September and October 1895, Freud wrote the uncompleted Project for a Scientific Psychology, which, as James Strachey noted in his editorial introduction to The Interpretation of Dreams, contains sections constituting a first approach to a coherent theory of dreams. The Interpretation of Dreams was, Freud himself claimed, ‘finished in all essentials at the beginning of 1896’.
The Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe gave its first public presentation (to the Société d’Encouragement de l’Industrie Nationale in Paris) on 22 March 1895, exhibiting their film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory as an example of the progress being made in photography. Its immediate success was unexpected. The film is both the most unmediated of early actualité films, and a complex act of historical reflexivity: the workers at Lumière père’s photographic plate factory look into the camera, which would transform the very act of looking and turn still into moving images. George Méliès’s trick-films, which directly exploited the relationship between dream and film, followed soon after.
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- Dreams of ModernityPsychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema, pp. 178 - 200Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014