FILM 6320 - Graduate Film, Dream and Memory

The birth of the cinema and of Freud's theory of dreams took place within a few years of each other, a century ago. The magical, dream-like potential of the cinema was recognized early, and films have long been concerned with the presentation of the unreal or subconscious. In addition, the recording of remembered events has become the standard way of giving characters a past and their lives the kind of realist coherence we have come to expect in narrative film. This course explores the depiction of these phenomena at specific moments in the history of the cinema.