Dreams in Films and Films As Dreams: Surrealism and Popular American Cinema

DREAMS IN FILMS AND FILMS AS DREAMS: SURREALISM AND POPULAR AMERICAN CINEMA

STEPHEN SHAROT

Résumé : Les films ayant recours à des séquences de rêves étaient particulière- ment nombreux au cours de la période transitoire. Dès 1915, ces films connurent une baisse de régime considérable avant de redevenir plus nombreux à partir de la fin des années 1930, et ce, grâce à la popularisation de la psychanalyse. Dans le cinéma classique hollywoodien, les composantes du langage cinématographique furent mises en avant dans le but de rendre compte de l’étrangeté des rêves et leurs écarts par rapport à la « réalité » de la diégèse des films. Les surréalistes subvertis- saient le style réaliste classique en faisant des rêves le modèle de leur « réalité », et cette subversion fut mise en pratique dans les quelques films qu’ils avaient réalisés. Surréalistes et classiques hollywoodiens s’approprièrent la psychanalyse freudienne dans leurs approches des rêves ; cependant ces appropriations divergeaient radicale- ment. Un examen des séquences oniriques dans des comédies musicales permettra d’éclairer le débat sur la distinction entre les rêves dans les films et les films oniriques.

Dreams have frequently been associated with films and the experience of the spectator in the cinema. One common association is that films provide a pleasurable escape from the everyday world; frequent names for nickelodeons or cinemas from the earliest days were Dream Theatre, Dreamland Theatre and Bijou Dream, and the major center of popular film production, Hollywood, became known as the dream factory. Analogies made between dreams and films, such as their spatio-temporal discontinuity, and between dreamers and spectators, both relatively passive and immobile, have been noted by many theoreticians of film, especially those influenced by psychoanalysis.1 Some authors have countered the analogies by emphasizing the differences between films and dreams and have questioned whether the purported similarities provide us with significant insights into films and spectatorship.2 The focus in this paper is not with the analogies proposed by film theorists but with the representation or appropriation of dreams by filmmakers and would-be filmmakers. Two approaches are distinguished and compared. Firstly, the insertion of dreams as circumscribed sequences within films made in accord with the norms of cinematic realism or the “classical Hollywood style.” Secondly, the “dream film” that was advocated and produced in the 1920s and early 1930s by

66 canadian journal of film studies / Revue canadienne d’études cinématographiques Volume 24 no. 1 | spring | printemps 2015 | pp 66–89 the French and Spanish Surrealists who appropriated the dream state in order to achieve their goal of “surreality.” These approaches were based on radically different assumptions with regard to the relationship of dreams and “reality,” but it is possible to trace interactions between them whereby, in one development, Hollywood incorporated elements of dream Surrealism within a realist frame that remained basically intact, and, in another development, the dream- reality distinction broke down in certain Hollywood films and genres such as the musical, which will be examined below. Both the Surrealists and Hollywood appropriated Freudian psychoanalysis in their approaches to dreams, but these appropriations diverged radically.

DREAMS IN POPULAR CINEMA

Dreams were a popular subject in early cinema, both in the “cinema of attractions” and during the “transitional period.” When films were very short the dream would take up almost their entire length and provided the “attractions” of fantasy and illusion through special effects and visual devices. The cavalier’s table in The Cavalier’s Dream (Edison, 1898) is suddenly spread with a sumptuous feast and an old witch is transformed into a beautiful young girl.3 In The Artist’s Dream (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1899) a beautiful ballet dancer turns into a stern landlady who, when the artist awakes, is standing before him demanding her rent.4 A few years later in The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (Edison, Edwin S. Porter, 1906) an elemental cause of a dream is shown prior to its humorous portrayal. Overeating and drinking lead to a wildly animated dream provided by special effects such as stop motion, split screen, and superimposition (fig. 1).5

Fig. 1: An example of special effects to convey the dream in The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend.

DREAMS IN FILMS AND FILMS AS DREAMS: 67 SURREALISM AND POPULAR AMERICAN CINEMA The dreams depicted in the cinema of attractions took the same form as other films of the period, such as the “magician” films, which used the same special effects. As we enter the “transitional period” dreams began to occupy a discrete place within the narrative and were used to reveal the subjectivity of a protagonist rather than as an opportunity for special effects. What is particular to the transitional period, in comparison with what came before and what came afterwards, is the sheer number of films with dream sequences. A perusal of the trade journal Moving Picture World over the first six months of 1909 finds some thirty films released with dream scenes, and more than half of these were made in America. A few continued the tendency of the “cinema of attractions” to use the dream as an appropriate context for the portrayal of fantastic visions as in The Silver Dollar (Lubin) in which a bad dream is caused by overeating.6 However, many dreams in films were now depicted without special effects. These included premonition dreams as in A Telegraphic Warning (Vitagraph) in which a soldier dreams that his daughter warns him of an enemy attack,7 and in Saved By His Sweetheart (Lubin) a girl’s dream that her boyfriend is being attacked enables her to save him from drowning.8 The widespread view that a dream contains the dreamer’s memories was found in films such asOle Sweethearts of Mine (Vitagraph) in which a married man dreams of his previous romantic affairs.9 There were dreams that taught the dreamer a lesson and reformed him; the husband in The Tyrant’s Dream (Selig) ceases to tyrannize his wife and mother- in-law after he dreams that they pursue and punish him.10 Dreams of anxiety included After the Bachelor’s Ball (Lubin) in which the bachelor dreams he is pursued by objectionable women who wish to be his housekeeper.11 Dreams portraying wish-fulfillments includedThe Suffragette’s Dream (Pathé), in which the suffragette dreams that gender roles are reversed,12 and The Saleslady’s Matinee Idol (Edison) in which the saleslady dreams that she is married to the matinee idol. The dream in The Saleslady’s Matinee Idol is an early example of the insertion of a dream that explains a character’s state of mind and subsequent actions within a much wider narrative frame.13 Toward the end of the transitional period dreams in films became even more frequent. Charlie Keil notes a large number of films with dream sequences released in 1912,14 and dreams appeared in thirty-three of the films reviewed in Motion Picture World over a three month period (June-August) in 1915. Dreams appeared in cartoons, comedies and dramas, from one-reelers to five-reel films, with motifs similar to those of previous years. A common theme of dreams in comedies was the comic’s great achievements and bravery; in Billie Joins the Navy (Lubin) the sailor dreams of being an admiral,15 in the five-reelMy Best Girl (B.A. Rolfe) the soldier dreams of performing heroic acts,16 and in The Bank (Essanay) Charlie Chaplin’s character thwarts a robbery.17 Some of the dreams in dramas provided warnings of the consequences of inappropriate behavior; the husband’s dream in When Conscience Sleeps (Edison) induces him to be

68 Stephen sharot faithful to his wife,18 and in Jealousy (Lubin) a plot that includes a killing, a trial, an escape and police pursuit, all occurring within a dream, cures a husband of his jealousy.19 A drama could direct the protagonist in the right direction; in What Might Have Been (Imp) the girl’s dream directs her to choose the appropriate man from her two suitors.20 And a dream could show what might have been long after the protagonist had made her choice; inThe Market Price of Love (Essanay) the girl dreams of the happiness she might have had if she had married the man she had loved rather than for money.21 From 1915, as feature-length films became standard, the number of films with dream sequences declined substantially. Cultural changes were not congenial to unsophisticated comic dreams, at least in features, or to dreams that had taught morality in the dramas of previous years. There were few feature films that included dreams in the 1920s22 and early 1930s, and it is with the popularization of psychoanalysis from the late 1930s that dreams in films became more frequent and contextualized in the framework of a more complex psychology of the protagonists’ waking life. Some of the dreams portrayed in the cinema of attractions and the transition period had been informed by pre-Freudian psychologies of dreams including the somatic model, biographical models, and simple wish-fulfillment.23 During the classical Hollywood period, popularized Freudian notions of the relationship between dreams and the unconscious were incorporated as part of the more complex psychology of protagonists. The distinction between the “subjectivity” of the dream and the “objectivity” of the rest of the film was common in films prior to the diffusion of Freudian ideas among American film-makers, but insofar as Freud’s ideas influenced the portrayal of dreams in popular films, they tended to reinforce the distinction between the “reality” of the waking life and dreams. Most dreams in classical Hollywood films were clearly signaled as dreams of one of the characters portrayed in the film. Visual cues, such as ripple dissolves, and aural cues, such as garbled sounds or discordant music, were used to separate the dream sequence from the rest of the film. The effects alerted the audience that they should not interpret what was to follow as a reality state. Although dreams in classical Hollywood films were unlike the dream spectacles of the cinema of attractions, once the dream began the components of film language (cinematography, editing, sound, mise-en-scène) were put to use to convey the strangeness of the dream, its deviation from the reality of the everyday world. The cinematographic effects included the use of special lenses or optics that provided distortions, such as the stretching of characters, filming out of focus, positioning the camera at oblique angles, and processes such as dissolves, multiple exposures, and flickering. Lighting for dream scenes has exaggerated contrasts and produced bizarre appearances. Color has been made to appear “unrealistic” by adding or deleting elements of the spectrum, or moving from color to monochrome. Among the editing techniques that have been found

DREAMS IN FILMS AND FILMS AS DREAMS: 69 SURREALISM AND POPULAR AMERICAN CINEMA appropriate to dreams are series of rapid shots and jump-cuts that dissolve spatial and temporal continuity. Distorted voice and music have been a frequent device in the portrayal of dreams, and under the category of mise-en-scène we can include distorted sets, unusual clothing, strange arrangements of characters and objects, and grotesque performances.

SURREALISTS AND DREAM FILMS

In its representation of dreams, the classical style assumed the commonly accepted distinctions between reality and dream, the objective and the subjective, the unconscious and the conscious. It was precisely these distinctions that the Surrealists sought to break down or to overcome, and whereas in popular films it was the task of the “real world” to make sense of the dreams, the Surrealists proposed that dreams provided the model for their “super-reality.” André Breton pronounced, in his Premier manifeste du surréalisme in 1924, that Surrealism was a means of uniting the unconscious to the conscious and dreams to the everyday world in order to create “an absolute reality, a surreality.” 24 Rationalism and daily life had to be revised and refashioned in ways that followed the “trajectory of the dream.” The free association of thoughts and images that were believed to characterize the dream provided a model for the “pure psychic automatism” proposed by Breton. Writings and artistic endeavors should be automatic, unhindered by reason, and uninfluenced by aesthetic or moral considerations. This produced, as in dreams, a “surreal” association or juxtaposition of worlds or images displaced from their normal or regular contexts.25 Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto included praise for Freud’s work on dreams, and Freud’s influence is evident in most accounts of dreams published by Surrealist writers and artists.26 The Surrealists valued Freud for showing how dreams revealed the workings and desires of the unconscious and for his emphasis on the centrality of visual images in dreams. Freud’s influence on early Surrealism should not, however, be exaggerated, and it is appropriate to note their fundamental differences. Freud emphasized the distinction between reality-based thinking and non-rational phenomena, such as dreams, which are dominated by unconscious process. The psychoanalyst assumed such a distinction when he sought to uncover and undo the dream-work that had distorted and transformed the thoughts of the latent dream into the images of the manifest dream. By working back from the manifest dream and decoding its symbolic language the analyst was able to discover the motive for the latent dream, the repressed, unconscious infantile wish.27 Such a goal was remote from the Sur- realists’ desire to fuse dream and the exterior world and arrive at a surreality. Breton would later criticize Freud for his remark that psychic reality should not be confused with material reality and for his failure to appreciate that he had discovered the principle of the reconciliation of opposites. Freud, on his part,

70 Stephen sharot admitted that he found Surrealism incomprehensible and was far from pleased that the Surrealists, whom he was inclined to regard as “complete fools,” had adopted him as their “patron saint.”28 The Surrealists valued dreams because they represented freedom from the constraints of rationalism and the limitations imposed by bourgeois society, and they valued the cinema because they believed that films had dreamlike qualities. The members of the formative Surrealist movement in the 1920s were primarily writers and painters, but they appreciated the importance of films whose dreamlike characteristics could inspire their creativity in poetry and painting. Robert Desnos and Philippe Soupault, prominent early Surrealists, emphasized the association of dreams and film. Desnos compared the darkness of the cinema to that of the bedroom before we went to sleep, and he wrote that the screen might be “equal to our dreams.”29 Films should project the “essential characteristics of the dreams, sensuality, absolute liberty....”30 Soupault wrote that Surreal- ists thought of the film as “a marvelous mode of expression for the dream state,” and that, from the birth of Surrealism, they had “sought to discover, thanks to the cinema, the meaning of expressing the immense power of the dream.”31 Although it was not always clear in Surrealist writings if their argument was that all films were like dreams or whether they believed that ideally films should be like dreams, Desnos wrote that only rarely did films offer an experience comparable to that of dreams: most filmmakers “disregarded the essential characteristic of dream, its sensuality, its absolute liberty....”32 In promoting their view that films should be like dreams, the Surrealists supported the subversion of the classical realist style, and this subversion was put into practice when they wrote film scenarios and, in a few cases, actually made films. They favored, if not the complete absence of a narrative, at least a non-coherent one, as well as discontinuous editing and a non-unified and non-linear space and time. Events were not, for the most part, to be understood as motivated, and they were not to follow sequences of causes and effects. In some respects, however, and especially with regard to the positioning of the spectator, there was a convergence of Surrealist views and the classical Hollywood style. This convergence was implied in an article written in 1925 by Jean Goudal, a writer who was not a Surrealist, on the importance of dreams and the cinema for Surrealists. Goudal wrote that, just as in the dream our imagination is not constrained by the real, the darkness of the cinema hall “destroys the rivalry of real images that would contradict the ones on the screen.”33 This, in fact, is the object of the classical style: to segregate the time and space of the film from the actual time and space of the spectator. Goudal could be espousing the classical style when he wrote that, “in the cinema, as in the dream, the fact is complete master,” but he diverges from such an exposition when he writes that, “no explanation is needed to justify the heroes’ actions. One event follows another...with such rapidity that we barely have time to mind the logical

DREAMS IN FILMS AND FILMS AS DREAMS: 71 SURREALISM AND POPULAR AMERICAN CINEMA commentary that would explain them or at least connect them.”34 Accounts of the classical style conceive of spectators as accepting what they see on the screen, but this is just because continuity editing enables them to make the linkages. Goudal noted that what was lacking in the cinema (of his time)—sound, color and three-dimensionality—removed it from reality and made it analogous to the process of simplification in dreams. Haim Finkelstein writes that the decline of interest in the cinema among the Surrealists by the early 1930s was a consequence, in part, of the introduction of sound, which had an adverse effect on the cinema as dream discourse. The Surrealists believed that the cinema should not attempt to convince us of the “reality” of its images but that sound had enhanced the impression of that “reality.”35 However, in an article published in 1954, Jacques Brunius wrote that the modern techniques of film enable it to “cross the bridge” in opposite directions: towards objectification or subjecti- fication, toward reality or the dream.36 Following Brunius, Hammond writes that the cinema has remained the least realistic of arts “because of the tension between the ‘fidelity’ of photography and the ‘infidelity’ of montage,” and he adds that sound could add to this antithesis: “Used naturalistically, it fortified photography’s fidelity; used unnaturalistically, dissonantly, it strengthened montage’s infidelity.”37 However, once the proponents of the cinema as dream admitted that the cinema produces an illusion of reality, their accounts would appear to differ only in their emphases from the characterization of the classical realist style. The spanning of time and space by montage means that it does not reproduce reality, but continuity editing, like particular techniques of photography, contribute to the creation of an illusion of reality. Sound, also, even when used “unnaturalistically,” can contribute to that illusion. In proposing films as dreams, the Surrealists faced a dilemma that did not arise for makers of popular films when they included dreams in their films. The dream in the popular film was inserted within a realist frame; it was presented in many cases for the interpretation of wide-awake protagonists in the film’s narrative, and always for the scrutiny of wide-awake spectators. For Surrealists, there was a question of what a film dream should convey: the dreamer’s belief in the dream as real, however strange the dream content, when she or he is asleep and dreaming, or the feeling of the strangeness and non-reality of the dream when the person reflects upon it after waking. On the one hand, to convey the strangeness of the dream by using the techniques similar to those used by popular filmmakers when they inserted dreams in their films was to state that the film was only a dream. This defeated the object of presenting the dream film as a true reality. On the other hand, to forego the use of special techniques and emphasize realism in the film was to present the dream film as no different from a taken-for-granted everyday reality that the Surrealists sought to challenge. The question of what was a true “dream film” entered into the Surrealists rejection of avant-garde film makers with whom they were sometimes identified.

72 Stephen sharot The differences between the Surrealists and the avant-garde became focused on the film-dream analogy when the Surrealists protested against the filmLa Coquille et le Clergyman at its inaugural screening in 1928. The film was directed by the avant-garde filmmaker Germaine Dulac, and it was based on a scenario by the Surrealist Antonin Artaud. It was Artaud who led the protest against the film. Both the scenarist and the director subscribed to the film-dream analogy, but each had a different conception of what this involved. Dulac labeled the film a “dream” in her press release before its screening, and Artaud objected to this. Artaud stated that his scenario could “be related to the mechanism of a dream without actually being a dream itself.”38 Sandy Flitterman-Lewis explains that Dulac’s concern was to render a dream-like effect, to provide an impression of incoherence, a surface irrationality rather than, as Artaud wanted, to recreate the experience of the dream for the spectator. Dulac’s position was based on a Symbolist aesthetic of fusion and synthesis, a poetic evocation of dream-like images with their rhythms and harmonies. Artaud’s intention was to liberate the unconscious of the spectators, to open themselves up to the irrational and the absurd, and to challenge accepted institutions and values through expressions of disjunction, incongruity, and violence.39 Although La Coquille et le Clergyman is one of only three films that some historians believe are unanimously recognized as surrealist,40 it is the other two films on this exclusive list that were in accord with Artaud’s intention: Un Chien andalou (1929) and L’Age d’or (1930) by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.41 Linda Williams states that these two films are the only “pure” examples of Surrealist film.42 One of Artaud’s objections to Dulac’s interpretation of his scenario was that the director’s use of technical devices or tricks to enhance a dream-like quality had detracted from the film having a radical effect.43 Although Buñuel’s first two films were not entirely bereft of special cinematic techniques (slow motion for example), they are relatively free of photographic distortions compared with other purported Surrealist films. Strangeness is conveyed almost entirely by the non-logical and paradoxical combinations of characters, objects, and settings while, at the same time, preserving the vivid representation of the photographed world.44 Buñuel wrote in his autobiography that he loved dreams, and this love was “the single most important thing” that he shared with the Surrealists. He wrote that Un Chien andalou was born of an encounter between a dream of his and a dream of Dalí. Buñuel had dreamt of a long tapering cloud slicing the moon in half. We see this image near the beginning of the film, and it is followed by the famous shot of the apparent slicing of a woman’s eye by a razor. Dalí’s dream was of a hand crawling with ants, and this was also incorporated in the film.45 Buñuel insisted, however, that he and Dalí had not attempted to reconstruct a dream but to profit from a “mechanism analogous to that of dreams,”46 a phrase that Artaud had also used to describe his scenario for La Coquille et le Clergyman.

DREAMS IN FILMS AND FILMS AS DREAMS: 73 SURREALISM AND POPULAR AMERICAN CINEMA Fig. 2: Finding a cow lying placidly in her bed in L’Age d’or...

Buñuel did not spell out what he meant by the mechanism of a dream, but he wrote that their only rule was that there should be no idea or image “that might lend itself to a rational explanation.”47 Buñuel’s and Dalí’s rejection of rational imagery and associations did not involve putting onto film the visual style of Dalí with its distortions of objects, persons, and landscapes. Their object was to present dislocation and disruptions of space and of narrative continuity in a matter-of-fact and natural fashion, “as if requiring no further validation.”48 Likewise, behaviors of some of the protagonists that would ordinarily be regarded as grotesque or as indications of madness are accepted unquestionably by other “normal” characters. Buñuel later stated that he and Dalí wished to keep all those images that surprised them without trying to explain them,49 and that “nothing in the film symbolizes anything.”50 Buñuel’s anti-interpretative stance was in accord with his insistence that the film was not intended as a representation of a dream. The film’s images were not like those of the “manifest content” of a dream that could be traced back to rationally understood latent meanings, but Buñuel later admitted that he had not succeeded in preventing spectators from treating his film as an attempt to com- municate the illogicality of dreams.51 L’Age d’or, even more than Un Chien andalou, conveys our matter-of-fact acceptance when we dream of images and associations that, after waking, we regard as strange and unreal (figs. 2 and 3). Strangeness is conveyed without artistic flourishes and special cinematographic techniques, such as peculiar angles, slow motion, and the alternation of long-shots and close-ups, that were used in Un Chien andalou. The camera scarcely moves inL’Age d’or, long and medium shots predominate, and editing is limited. Although there are extreme deviations from narrative cinema, especially at the beginning and end of the film, a narrative thread is evident for most of the film. It is the frustration and betrayal of desire, the impossibility of the would-be lovers ever becoming one,

74 Stephen sharot Fig. 3: ...Lya Lys is somewhat irritated but basically unfazed.

that governs most of the film. In this sense the film conforms to Buñuel’s own dreams that, by his own account, “are always full of the same familiar obstacles.”52 As the man in L’Age d’or is led through the streets, billboards displaying beautiful women stimulate an erotic daydream in which his would-be lover replaces the billboard woman, but for the most part the film, likeUn Chien andalou, is not represented as the dream or dreams of its particular characters. Breton praised both films as bringing “about the state where the distinction between the subjective and the objective loses its necessity and value.”53 In Buñuel’s later films, dreams are understood to be those of particular characters, but there is a difference between earlier films, such asLos Olvidados (1950) and Robinson Crusoe (1952) in which the dreams are short segments, are well-cued and include special techniques such as slow motion, and later films, particularly Belle de jour (1967) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) in which distinctions between reality and dreams are made problematic.54 If the Surrealists succeeded in making very few films that were truly Surrealist dream films in accordance with their own criteria, the possibility of such films being made within popular cinema would appear to be remote. The Surrealists believed, however, that approximations to dream films were to be found in certain genres of popular cinema.

THE SURREALISTS AND POPULAR CINEMA

Many of Buñuel’s films may be characterized by playfulness with respect to the distinction between reality and dreams. The popular cinema acclaimed by the Surrealists appeared, in a less conscious fashion than Buñuel, to blur the distinction between reality and dreams. This was a popular cinema that was the least in accord with the principles of the classical Hollywood style: the serials, both French (Feuillade’s Fantômas and Les Vampires) and American (The Perils

DREAMS IN FILMS AND FILMS AS DREAMS: 75 SURREALISM AND POPULAR AMERICAN CINEMA of Pauline, The Exploits of Elaine), and the comedies of Sennett, Chaplin, Keaton, and Langton. When sound came, the Surrealists admired the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields, as well as horror films, westerns and Tarzan films. Films that were scorned by conventional critics as infantile and idiotic were adopted and praised by the Surrealists as equivalent to their own endeavors in the absurd. Serials and comedies challenged logic and reason, and the comedies in particular made fun of social customs, bourgeois conventions, and repressive authorities.55 The Surrealists did not normally single out films for praise in which dream sequences were set apart from the rest of the film. An exception was made for Peter Ibbetson (1935) that, according to Breton, was the only film, besidesL’Age d’or, to express the Surrealist faith in l’amour fou.56 Peter Ibbetson, adapted from a novel by George Du Maurier and previously made as a silent film under the title Forever (1921), was an atypical film for Hollywood and for its director, Henry Hathaway, who made mostly adventure films. What attracted the Surrealists to the film was its lengthy final section in which the lovers overcome their forced separation through their shared dreams. The film begins with Peter and Mary as close childhood friends who are parted by the death of the boy’s mother. Twenty years later, Peter (Cary Cooper), an architect, is employed by Mary (Ann Harding), now married to a Duke, to design and supervise the building of new stables at her home. They do not at first recognize each other, but their feelings toward each other come out into the open after they discover that they have shared a dream. The Duke, rec- ognizing their shared love, threatens Peter who accidentally kills the Duke and receives a life sentence. Peter’s spine is broken by a jailor, and he is near to death when Mary appears in his cell, telling him that he is free and to take her hand. Peter realizes he is dreaming when Mary moves unhindered through the bars of his cell, but she tells him that they are dreaming together: “We’re dreaming true. A dream that is more than a dream.” In order to persuade Peter of the reality of their dreams and that he should continue to live, she shows him a ring and says that he will receive it the next day. Peter receives the ring when Mary persuades the prison doctor, who believes that Peter has already died, to take it to his cell. The proof of the ring begins a life of shared dreams that continues for many years and during which Peter and Mary stay as young as when they first recognized each other. When Mary dies, she calls down from Heaven for Peter who dies to join her for eternity (fig. 4). The photography ofPeter Ibbetson is evenly sharp in the film’s earlier sequences, but in the sequences of shared dreams it includes shots of shards of hazy light that stream into Peter’s cell, Mary’s bedroom, and the forest in which they meet. The editing also changes somewhat to include long dissolves from Peter’s cell to the world of the lovers’ dreams. These techniques do not, however, convey a sense of the dreams as illusions but rather contribute to the seamlessness between dreams and reality in the film. This seamlessness was, for the Sur-

76 Stephen sharot Fig. 4: Mary (Ann Harding) beckons to Peter (Gary Cooper) to leave his prison cell and join her in their shared dream in Peter Ibbetson. realists at least, an exception among Hollywood films of drama as most dreams in the popular films of the classical Hollywood period were differentiated clearly from the “real” world of the films’ diegesis. This distinction was upheld when Hollywood appropriated Surrealism by inviting Salvador Dalí to design dream sequences for its films.

THE DALI DREAM SEQUENCES

Apart from his designs for the dream sequences in Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945) and Father of the Bride (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), Dalí wrote a number of film scripts, from full scenarios to unorganized notes, that were either unrealized or were realized by others after Dalí’s death.57 Some of Dalí’s unrealized film projects could possibly have become dream films, but when he was invited by Hollywood to design a Surrealist sequence, this almost invariably had to be a dream inserted into an otherwise “realistic” narrative. In 1941 Dalí was approached to design a three-minute nightmare sequence for a film, Moontide, that Fritz Lang was to direct. The idea was to portray the hallucina- tions of the principal character, an alcoholic dockworker, in whose nightmare ordinary persons and objects were to metamorphose into fantastic creatures.

DREAMS IN FILMS AND FILMS AS DREAMS: 77 SURREALISM AND POPULAR AMERICAN CINEMA Dalí’s proposal, which included skulls and bloody shark entrails, was not used in the finished film. Lang was replaced by Archie Mayo who made the sequence less frightening and perverse than that envisaged by Dalí.58 Somewhat more of Dalí was retained in the sequence he designed for Spellbound. The dream sequence inSpellbound has been termed “the heart of the film,” even though it lasts only about two minutes.59 The film in general, and the centrality of the dream in particular, reflects the widespread belief in psychoanalysis in Hollywood, and in American society as a whole, following World War II. Hitchcock appears to have taken a somewhat playful view of the role of psychoanalysis in the film’s plot, and it was Hitchcock who urged Selznick to commission Dalí to design the dream sequence. Hitchcock wanted a hallu- cinatory dream in Dalí’s style that would be entirely different from conventional dream sequences of “swirling smoke, slightly out of focus with all the figures walking through this mist.”60 The symbols that Dalí designed for the manifest dream of Ballantyne (Gregory Peck) include huge eyes painted on drapes that are cut through by giant scissors, metronomes with eyes painted on them, blank playing cards, a misshapen wheel, and giant wings pursuing the hero-dreamer in a twisted landscape. An image that was rejected by Hitchcock and not included in the film had a statue of the heroine cracking with ants crawling out the crevices. Constance (Ingrid Bergman), the heroine-psychiatrist, figures out the meaning of the images that coincide point-by-point with real objects and events. Her interpretation of the dream discovers the reason for the hero’s amnesia; he had witnessed a murdered victim’s plunge over a precipice and this sight had triggered his repressed childhood memory of sliding down a slope and accidentally causing the death of his brother by pushing him onto pointed railings (fig. 5).61

Fig. 5: The beginning of the dream sequence in Hitchcock’s Spellbound evokes the eye slitting shot in Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou.

78 Stephen sharot American popular cinema appropriated psychoanalysis in the 1940s and early 1950s at about the same time as it appropriated Surrealism, and the two came together in Spellbound. Just as Dalí was brought in to design a Surrealist dream framed by classical realism, Hollywood adopted Freudianism to celebrate “normality” and “the triumph of the therapeutic.”62 Constance evokes Freud when discussing amnesia and the film follows Freud’s view that what explained dreams also explained neurotic symptoms, but the traumatic childhood event in the film is remote from the infant’s wishes, often of an incestuous nature, that Freud believed are the cause for most psychological disorders. Andrew Britton dismisses the purported Freudian reading of the dream provided by Constance and suggests that the dream can be read in a way that is closer to Freud. Britton considers the film’s presentation of the relationship between Ballantyne and Constance as a whole in order to support an interpretation of the dream as Oedipal. The man who falls to his death can be read as the father of Ballantyne who flees in his dream from the implication that his desire for his mother can now be consummated. A link between Constance and the forbidden woman (the mother) explains Ballantyne’s simultaneous feelings of desire and denial and his hysterical breakdowns that occur during moments of sexual tension. In this interpretation the symbols of the dream take on a different meaning from those provided by Constance; a misshapen wheel that we are told stands for a gun suggests a vagina.63 If the dream in Spellbound includes some wish-fulfillment (a scantily clothed girl with a resemblance to Bergman who kisses everyone) within the predominant expressions of anxiety, fear, and repressed memories, the dream designed by Dalí for Father of the Bride is exclusively one of anxiety.64 This dream, however, expresses social anxiety rather than a life-and-death issue. The film is a satire on the commodity culture and status insecurities of the middle to upper- middle strata of the post-World War II period. The wedding is an event that has the function of demonstrating status by a display of expensive items, including the bride, and the father of the bride has to worry about how much the display of status is costing him. The night after a chaotic rehearsal, the father dreams that he arrives late at the church for the actual wedding. Huge eyes are superimposed over his attempt to walk down the aisle which is like rubber, springing up and down. In torn clothes he slips, falls and sinks into the aisle, and the faces of the guests expressing horror are superimposed over his attempt to reach the alter (fig. 6). The horrified bride screams, and he wakes up from the nightmare. Unlike the dream in Spellbound, the dream in Father of the Bride includes few symbols and it does not require a psychoanalyst to interpret its meaning. Dalí’s designs for the dreams in Spellbound and Father of the Bride contrib- uted to the clear differentiation made in these films between the “surreality” of dreams and the “reality” of waking life. The dreams in these films express traumatic events (Spellbound) and social anxieties (Father of the Bride), but they

DREAMS IN FILMS AND FILMS AS DREAMS: 79 SURREALISM AND POPULAR AMERICAN CINEMA Fig. 6: The father’s dream inFather of the Bride.

do so, using Freud’s terms, through displacement, condensation, substitution, and symbolic representation. The sharp divide in the films between reality and dreams was in accord with Freud, but not with the Surrealists who, while they appreciated Freud’s work on the unconscious and dreams, were suspicious of his emphasis on the super-ego.65 In the next section I consider how the distinction between dream and reality was made problematic by the characteristics of a popular genre of classical Hollywood: the musical.

THE MUSICAL

More than any other genre, the musical may be said to transform reality into an ideal, dream-world.66 Although entire musicals might be called dream- worlds, the transformation from the real world to the dream world might be said to occur when the characters in musicals break out in song and or dance. The musical has been regarded as a special case within the classical narrative cinema because of its “central contradiction between the discourse of the narrative and the discourse of at least a significant portion of the musical numbers.”67 Many of the numbers are “impossible” from the standpoint of the realistic discourse of the narrative, and Rubin suggests that a possible working definition of the

80 Stephen sharot musical “is a film containing a significant proportion of musical numbers that are ‘impossible’—that is, persistently contradictory in relation to the realistic discourse of the narrative.”68 This “impossibility” is particularly evident in the integrated musicals in which song and dance are blended with the narrative and characters sing and dance in even the most commonplace locations and circumstances. The integrated form is compared with the aggregate form in which songs and dances, filmed as if they were being performed on a stage, function as self-contained highlights that interrupt the narrative. The aggregate form has been associated with the backstage musical, although backstage musicals differ in the extent to which they distinguish or integrate the numbers and the narrative. Even in the integrated musicals, a musical number does not have the same relationship to the surrounding narrative that a scene has in the narrative of a nonmusical film: “The shift in discourse from spoken dialogue to performance that is sung and/or danced... insures that there will always be a certain amount of structural autonomy for a musical number in relation to the narrative.”69 Patricia Mellencamp has argued that it is precisely the “spectacle” (song and dance numbers) in musicals that “awakens” the spectator to an awareness that the events in the fictive narrative are not real. The performers of the musical numbers break the norms of classical realism by acknowledging the presence of the camera as a spectator, and the norms are broken further by the absence of point-of-view shots from the performers’ positions. Mellencamp draws upon Christian Metz’s general analogy between film and dream in order to make a more specific analogy between the musical spectacle and the intermediary state between sleep and waking when the dreamer thinks to himself that he is only dreaming.70 Robert Eberwein proposes that, unlike most spectacles in musical films, dream sequences in musicals might confirm a sense of reality because they locate the source of the musical spectacle in the performer’s mind.71 In other words, the musical number is no longer “impossible” because it is a dream. Dream numbers in musicals are set apart from other numbers, and a consideration of their set-apartness requires prior consideration of the extent to which the numbers in general are set apart from the world of the narrative and the extent to which the film as a whole sets apart a fantasy world from a mundane world. The world of the numbers and the world of the narrative were clearly com- partmentalized in the Warner/Busby Berkeley musicals of the early 1930s, and many of the numbers (not all) present a fantasy world of opulence in contrast to the world of the characters, especially chorus girls, struggling to survive in the Depression. Dream sequences were not a feature of the backstage musicals because the numbers provided a sufficient remove from the “real” world of the narrative. In the RKO/Astaire and Rogers films of the mid- and late-1930s, the greater homogeneity and continuity of the numbers and the narrative involved making the musical numbers more natural and restrained and the world of

DREAMS IN FILMS AND FILMS AS DREAMS: 81 SURREALISM AND POPULAR AMERICAN CINEMA the narrative more artificial and stylized.72 However, although the everyday activities and environments of the Astaire-Rogers films were denaturalized, they were not overtly presented within the films as fantasy worlds, thereby allowing for a dream sequence, as in Carefree (Mark Sandrich, 1938), to be set apart from the other numbers. The set for the dream sequence inCarefree , a fantasy garden with enormous plants and a castle in the clouds, is patently artificial, and the dance moves into slow motion that, unlike the other dances in the film, makes it more like a ballet (fig. 7). Some musicals make a clear distinction between a mundane world and a fantasy world; between rural Kansas and the kingdom of Oz in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), and midtown Manhattan and an out-of-time kingdom in Scotland in Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954). A song can be performed in the real world (“Over the Rainbow”), but most of the numbers, and certainly the most spectacular ones, occur in the fantasy world. The fantasy of Oz might be considered as Dorothy’s dream, but in general there is no place for dream sequences in films in which the fantasy worlds are themselves like dream worlds. It is true that the division of worlds is not complete (the same actors appear in Kansas and Oz), and the opposition between the worlds may collapse at the end (Brigadoon returns to life out of the force of Kelly’s desire),73 but a distinct fantasy world operates for most of the duration of the films. Other musicals, in contrast, sustain a fantasy world throughout (Love Me Tonight, Yolanda and the Thief, The Pirate), narrowing both the division between the narrative and the numbers and between dream numbers and other numbers. A comparison of two musical films in which Rogers and Astaire did not appear together, Lady in the Dark (Mitchell Leisen, 1944) with Rogers and Yolanda and the Thief (Vincente Minnelli, 1945) with Astaire, highlights the difference between a film in which dream spectacles are clearly set apart from the film’s diegetic frame and a film in which it is difficult to distinguish the dream sequence from the “reality” of the rest of the film. In Lady in the Dark, Rogers plays Liza, a fashion magazine editor who dresses in masculine-type suits and reacts aggressively when a male employee, Charley (Ray Milland), challenges her authority. Although at first reluctant, Liza’s concern with her psychological state leads her to sessions with a psychoanalyst who interprets her dreams and traces her problems to her childhood relationships with her parents. All three musical sequences in Lady in the Dark are dreams and are distinguished by their stylized sets, their lavish décor and costumes, the dominance of particular colors, and the inclusion of fantasy figures alongside the transformed appearance of protagonists from Liza’s, the dreamer’s, real world. In her third dream Liza becomes a child who enters a fantasy circus with an audience of potato-shaped heads of various colors and performers that include riders on artificial horses and Munchkin-like people. As a child Liza sees herself as an adult (“How did I get to be like that?”) inside a cage and is accused by the ringmaster, Charley in

82 Stephen sharot Fig. 7: The dream musical sequence in Carefree.

a glittering jacket and top hat, of not being able to make up her mind to marry. Liza accepts her psychoanalyst’s advice that she will only be happy with a man who will dominate her and this turns out to be Charley to whom she offers a partnership in the magazine and ends up kissing. The musical dream-extrava- ganzas are part of the film’s popularized Freudianism that is used to discourage women from placing careers above the traditional female roles. Although Raoul Pene du Bois, the set and costume designer of the film, has been tagged as a “surrealist,”74 the contemporary reviewer who wrote that the film mixed Freud and Disney was closer to the mark. The third dream sequence also evokedThe Wizard of Oz, which served to soften Liza’s painful childhood memories that arise in the dream.75 Vincente Minnelli, the director of Father of the Bride and Yolanda and the Thief, admitted to the influence of Surrealism in his work. For the stage show Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, Minnelli claimed that he had presented the first Surrealist ballet on Broadway, but his most ambitious use of surrealist imagery to convey a character’s feelings and to further the plot is found in the dream sequence in Yolanda and the Thief. Beth Genné writes that the influence of surrealist painters, including Dalí, is evident in Minnelli’s placing of fantastic rock formations and frozen figures within the seemingly limitless space of the “dreamscape.”76 However, not only the dream sequence but the entire film takes place in a fantasy world with surrealist trappings. The fantasy setting of Patria, a country which combines associations of both Latin America and the Swiss Alps, is accentuated by the saturated colors of its landscape and buildings and the bizarre costumes of its inhabitants. In this setting, Johnny (Astaire), a con man from America, masquerades as the guardian angel of Yolanda (Lucille Brenner) and persuades her to sign over her riches to him. The dream sequence, which is only one of the extravagant musical sequences in the film, expresses Johnny’s feelings of confusion between his desire for Yolanda’s wealth and his growing affection

DREAMS IN FILMS AND FILMS AS DREAMS: 83 SURREALISM AND POPULAR AMERICAN CINEMA for her. With its Dalíesque decor, opulent sets, gorgeous costumes, brilliant colors and Astaire’s prowling, deliberate dancing, the dream sequence might be considered to be set apart even within the extraordinary universe of Yolanda and the Thief.77 However, unlike the discrete musical dream sequences in Lady in the Dark, the narrative-number integration and overall surreal fantasy setting of Yolanda function to dissolve the distinction between the dream sequence and the film’s “reality.” As Matthew Tinkcom has noted, the high level of narrative- number integration in musicals of the Arthur Freed unit at MGM resulted in the narrative portion of the films becoming more like the musical numbers, and, by colonizing the films’ narratives, the musical numbers appeared natural.78 As a dream, this particular number in Yolanda might be said to deviate from the narrative-number integration of the rest of the film, but as the dream is hardly less “natural” than the film’s “reality,” it is integrated into a close approximation of a dream film. Perhaps for this reason, and unlikeLady in the Dark, which was a commercial success, Yolanda was a commercial failure. One review warned that Yolanda was “not for realists,” Astaire explained that “the whole idea was too much on the fantasy side,” and Minnelli described it as “a fantasy film that just didn’t properly come off.”79

CONCLUSION

As ideal, analytical types, dreams in films and dream films can be distinguished by three dimensions. Firstly, whereas dreams in films are placed within a classical narrative framework and are subservient to that narrative, the dream films subvert the rules of the classical narrative. Secondly, whereas dreams in films are distinguished from their frameworks by special effects and/or fantasy settings, the dream film is filmed in an optically realistic style in commonplace settings. Thirdly, whereas the dreams in films are represented as the subjectivity of a particular character, the dream films are represented as objective. Both Surrealism and popular American cinema adopted those aspects of Freudian- ism with which they found an elective affinity. Whereas Surrealism adopted Freud’s writings on dreams to celebrate the irrational, the uninhibited unconscious and creative imagination, Hollywood adopted Freud’s writings on dreams to overcome neurosis and to return “maladjusted” protagonists to normality and appropriate gender roles. Surrealism and popular cinema also appropriated each other. The Surreal- ists did not, for the most part, admire popular films with dream sequences Peter( Ibbetson was an exception), but they admired films of popular cinema, particularly serials and comedies, that deviated in some way from classical narrative and whose absurdities were placed in realist settings. But whereas the Surrealist appropriation of popular cinema was for the most part limited to their written discourse and a few paintings,80 Hollywood appropriated Surrealism within its

84 Stephen sharot films made in its realist style. Thus, Dalí’s contribution to dream sequences in Hollywood films reinforced the presentational distinction between dream and reality. Perhaps the closest approximation of Hollywood to Surrealist dream films occurred in the musical genre, particular the number-narrative integration musicals in which the narrative was “colonized” by the musical numbers. In certain fantasy musicals the distinction between a dream sequence and the rest of the film was diffuse. If Surrealism was appropriated by Hollywood, it was appropriated even more so by analysts of classical and post-classical Hollywood. Certain directors of classical Hollywood have been distinguished by their Surrealist “sensibilities”: Michael Richardson finds that the sensibilities of Frank Borzage, Josef von Sternberg, and Tod Browning were in tune with Surrealism,81 and Barbara Creed singles out Alfred Hitchcock as the first popular director to work in the Surrealist mode.82 “Post-classical” directors believed to have been influenced by Surrealism include David Lynch, David Cronenburg, Jim Jarmusch, and the Coen brothers.83 The increase in films of horror, science fiction and fantasy in recent decades has multiplied the number of films labeled as “Surrealist” or believed to be directly or indirectly influenced by Surrealism.84 Much of this popularization of the term “Surrealist” has been conducted without reference to the dream. For the Surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s, the dream was subversive of the polarities of the rational and the irrational, of the real and the illusory. Perhaps the dream has lost its appeal as a model of subversion for a postmodern aesthetic in which these boundaries have collapsed and the motifs of ambiguity and formlessness prevail.

NOTES

1. Charles F. Altman, “Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Discourse,” inMovies and Methods, Volume 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 517-531; Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997 [1960]), 163-166; Susanne K. Langer, “A Note on the Film,” in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, eds., Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Oxford: Blackwell), 79-81; F. E. Sparshott, “Vision and Dream in the Cinema,” in ibid., 82-90; Colin McGinn,The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 108-112, 168-169. 2. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, “Introduction,” in Philosophy of Films and Motion Pictures, 58-60. 3. AFI Catalog of Feature Films, at AFI.com: Edison description.

DREAMS IN FILMS AND FILMS AS DREAMS: 85 SURREALISM AND POPULAR AMERICAN CINEMA 4. AFI Catalog, Biograph description. 5. The film is included on the DVDEdison: The Invention of the Movies (The Museum of Modern Art and King Video). 6. Moving Picture World, 13 February 1909, 178. 7. Moving Picture World, 9 January 1909, 46. 8. Moving Picture World, 26 June 1909, 881. 9. Moving Picture World, 22 May 1909, 687. 10. Moving Picture World, 2 January 1909, 19. 11. Moving Picture World, 10 April 1909, 450. 12. Moving Picture World, 6 March 1909, 269. 13. Moving Picture World, 6 February 1909, 153. 14. Charlie Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907-1913 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 72. 15. Motion Picture World, 21 August 1915, 1362. 16. Motion Picture World, 3 July 1915, 76-77. 17. Motion Picture World, 28 August 1915, 1495, 18. Motion Picture World, 18 September 1915, 2048, 2053. 19. Motion Picture World, 4 September 1716. 20. Motion Picture World, 24 July 1915, 717. 21. Motion Picture World, 28 August 1915, 1538. 22. From going through the issues in 1926 of Film Daily, I found dreams included in two cartoons, six one or two-reel comedies, and two features, A Kiss for Cinderella (Paramount) and Hell 400 (Fox). Perhaps the most famous dream sequences in American films of the 1920s are in Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924) and Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925). 23. Lydia Marinelli, “Screening Wish Theories: Dream Psychologies and Early Cinema,”Science in Context, 19.1 (2006), 87-110. 24. André Breton, Premier manifeste du surréalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1924), 24. 25. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 14, 26. 26. Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 126-128. 27. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1997 [1900]); Laura Marcus, “Introduction: Histories, Representations, Autobiographics,” in Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 1-65; Susan Budd, “The Shark Behind the Sofa: The Psychoanalytic Theory of Dreams,” History Workshop Journal 48 (1999): 133-150. 28. Budd, 136; John Matthews,André Breton: Sketch of an Early Portrait (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1986), 92-102; Clifford Browder,André Breton: Arbiter of Surrealism (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1967), 65, 68, 90-91. 29. Richard Abel, “Exploring the Discursive Field of the Surrealist Scenario Text,” in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1987), 58. 30. J.H. Matthews,Surrealism and Film (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1971), 26.

86 Stephen sharot 31. Matthews, 10. On the 1920s surrealists’ association of dreams and cinema, see also: Ramona Fotiade, “The Split Eye, the Scorpion and the Sign of the Cross: Surrealist Film Theory and Practice Revisited,” Screen 39.2 (1998): 109-123; Wendy Everett, “Screen as Threshold: The Dis- orientating Topographies of Surrealist Film,” Screen 39.2 (1998): 141-152. 32. Quoted by Haim Finkelstein, The Screen in Surrealist Art and Thought (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 26. 33. Jean Goudal, “Surrealism and Cinema,” in The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, ed. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000), 87. 34. Goudal, 88. 35. Finkelstein, 282-283. 36. Jacques Brunius, “Crossing the Bridge,” in Hammond, 100-101. 37. Paul Hammond, “Available Light,” in Hammond, 24. 38. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “The Image and the Spark: Dulac and Artaud Reviewed,” inDada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1987), 118. 39. Flitterman-Lewis, 110-127. Ramona Fotiade presents a different interpretation of Artaud’s position. Fotiade argues that, unlike other Surrealists, Artaud was not committed to the corre- spondence between film and dreams. For Artaud the cinema achieved a direct, immediate access to things and expressed the powerlessness of thought. Ramona Fotiade, “Pictures of the Mind: Artaud and Fondane’s Silent Cinema,” in Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality, ed. Silvano Levy (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 109-124. 40. Raphaëlle Moine, “From Surrealist Cinema to Surrealism in Cinema: Does a Surrealist Genre Exist in Film?” Yale French Studies 109 (2006): 101; Alexander Waters, Discerning a Surrealist Cinema (M.Phil thesis, University of Birmingham, 2011), 14. 41. Buñuel filmedL’Age d’or without Dalí’s involvement but the film has been viewed as a collective effort of the Surrealist group and a manifesto signed by thirteen Surrealists, including Dalí, accom- panied the film’s first screening. Buñuel “resigned” from Surrealism in a letter sent to Breton on 6 May 1932. Michael Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 28-29. The manifesto is translated and reprinted in Hammond, 182-189. 42. Linda Williams, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), xiv. 43. Haim Finkelstein, “Dalí and Un Chien andalou: The Nature of a Collaboration,” in Kuenzli,Dada and Surrealist Film, 130. 44. Williams, 49; Haim Finkelstein, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 119-120. 45. Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Abigail Israel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 92, 103-104; Finkelstein, Salvador Dalí’s Art and Writings, 105. 46. J.H. Matthews, 96. 47. Buñuel, 104. 48. Finkelstein, Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, 119-20. 49. Buñuel, 104. 50. Francisco Aranda, Luis Buñuel; A Critical Biography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976), 64. For similar comments by Dalí see Finkelstein, Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, 121-122.

DREAMS IN FILMS AND FILMS AS DREAMS: 87 SURREALISM AND POPULAR AMERICAN CINEMA 51. J.H. Matthews, 91. 52. Buñuel, 92. 53. Quoted in Robert T. Eberwein, Film and the Dream Screen: A Sleep and a Forgetting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 82. 54. Joan Mellen, “An Overview of Buñuel’s Career,” in The World of Luis Buñuel; Essays in Criticism, ed. Joan Mellen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 5-6; J.H. Matthews, 172-174; Leslie Halpern, Dreams on Film: The Cinematic Struggle Between Art and Science (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2003), 157, 161-162; Eberwein, 170-176, 182, 189; Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, “The Life of the Interior: Dreams in the Films of Luis Buñuel,”Critical Quarterly 27.4 (1985): 5-20. 55. J.H. Matthews, 10-33; Hammond, “Available Light,” 6, 21-22; Richardson, 21-25, 62-64; Ado Kyrou, Le Surréalisme au cinema (Paris: Arcanes, 1953), 68-71; Kruenzli, 8; Robin Walz, “Serial Killings: Fantômas, Feuillade, and the Mass-Culture Genealogy of Surrealism,” The Velvet Light Trap, 37 (1996): 51-57; Finkelstein, Salvador Dalí’s Art and Writings, 83-84; Finkelstein, Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, 140; Robert Short, “Magritte and the Cinema,” in Levy, 95-108. 56. André Breton, L’Amour fou (Paris: Gallimard, 1937), 87-89. 57. Matthew Gale,Dalí & Film (London: Tate Publishing, 2007); Elliot H. King, Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema (Harpenden, Herts: Kamera Books, 2007). 58. Irene Susan Fort, “Moontide 1941,” in Gale, 164-173; King, 67-74. 59. Ken Mogg, The Alfred Hitchcock Story (London: Titan Books, 1999), 95. 60. James Bigwood, “Solving a Spellbound Puzzle,” American Cinematographer 72 (June 1991): 35. 61. Leff, 157-159; Sara Cochran, “Spellbound,” in Gale, 174-185; King, 74-87. 62. Contra to this trend, Freedman argues that Hitchcock’s subsequent films were increasingly critical of psychoanalysis and that his most subversive account is found in Vertigo. Jonathan Freedman, “From Spellbound to Vertigo: Alfred Hitchcock and Therapeutic Culture in America,” in Hitch- cock’s America, eds. Jonathan Freedman and Richard Millington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 77-98. 63. Andrew Britton, “Alfred Hitchcock’sSpellbound : Text and Countertext,” in Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), 175-193. 64. The extent of Dalí’s participation in the dream sequence forFather of the Bride is unclear. Cochran writes that Dalí was “not directly involved” in the film (Cochran, 184), whereas King writes that the film was “the last Hollywood picture in which he [Dalí] would directly contribute” (King, 93). 65. David Lomas, “Surrealism, Psychoanalysis and Hysteria,” in Surrealism: Desire Unbound, ed. Jennifer Mundy (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), 73. 66. Film noir, which is a “film movement” rather than a genre, has been compared to dream films: “Noir films as a group are the only films in which the presentation of dreams is constantly identical to the presentation of straight narrative action.” Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), 221. It is perhaps for this reason that few film noirs have dream sequences. Dream sequences were redundant in a genre in which the style of distortion and the feelings of claustrophobia, entrapment, and paranoia were an integral part of the major diegesis. There were, however, a few exceptions. A dream is prominent in Stranger on the Third Floor (Boris Ingster, 1940), considered by some as the first

88 Stephen sharot film noir, andThe Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944) is a film noir in which almost the entire film is a dream. In the latter case we learn only retroactively, at the end of the film, that the narrative we have been watching is a dream of the major character. Perhaps in order to forestall any suspicion that what we are seeing during most of the film is a dream, there is little of the expres- sionist techniques characteristic of film noir. 67. Martin Rubin, Showstoppers; Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 37. 68. Rubin, 37. 69. Rubin, 12. 70. Patricia Mellencamp, “Spectacle and Spectator: Looking Through the American Musical Comedy,” Cine-Tracts 1.2 (1977): 33-34; Christian Metz, “The Fiction Film and the Spectator: A Metaphychological Study,” New Literary History 8.1 (1976): 77. 71. Eberwein, 79-80. 72. Rubin, 40-41. 73. Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 72-73. 74. Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 166. 75. Glen O. Gabbard and Krin Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema (Washington, DC: American Psy- chiatric Press, 1999), 12. 76. Beth Genné, “Vincente Minnelli and the Film Ballet,” in Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertain- ment, ed. Joe McElhaney (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 241. 77. Yolanda and the Thief is one of three Minnelli musicals that have been characterized as “a self- conscious camp style of visual excess.” Steven Cohan, Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 50. Perhaps the camp style in musicals, especially those made by the Arthur Freed unit at MGM, was particularly appropriate to the even greater visual excess of the dream sequences. On Yolanda and Brigadoon as fantasy musicals see, Michael Dunne, American Film Musical Themes and Forms (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2004), 108-117. 78. Matthew Tinkcom,Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 62. 79. Marc Griffin,A Hundred Or More Hidden Things: The Life and Films of Vincente Minnelli (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2010), 101-102; Dunne, 114. 80. The influence of popular films to be found in the paintings of Magritte, especially Feuillade’s serials, Fantômas and Les Vampires, is discussed by Short, 99-103, and Finkelstein, The Screen in Surrealist Art and Thought, 162-165. 81. Richardson, 66. 82. Barbara Creed, “The Untamed Eye and the Dark Side of Surrealism: Hitchcock, Lynch and Cronenberg,” in The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film, eds. Graeme Harper and Rob Stone (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 115 83. Richardson, 73-75; Creed, 119. 84. In addition to Halpern, Richardson, and the articles in Harper and Stone see Robert Short, The Age of Gold: Surrealist Cinema (London: Creation Books, 2003).

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