Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness

1895 is a key year in the history of psychoanalysis and of 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 some day 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’. (Masson 1985, p. 417)

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 (SE 4, xv). The Interpretation of Dreams was, Freud himself claimed, ‘finished in all essentials at the beginning of 1896’ (SE 14, p. 22).

The Lumiere brothers’ Cinematographe gave its first public presentation (to the Societe d’ Encouragement de l'Industrie Nationale in Paris) on 22 March 1895. exhibiting their film Workers Leaving the Lumiere 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 actualite films, and a complex act of historical reflexivity: the workers at Lumiere pere's photographic plate factory look into the camera which would transform the very act of looking and turn still into moving images. George Melies’ trick-films, which directly exploited the relationship between dream and film, followed soon after.

Psychoanalysis and cinema thus emerged in tandem at the close of the nineteenth century: twin sciences or technologies of fantasy, dream, virtual reality and ‘screen memory’. In the following century, a vast body of literature has explored the complex historical and conceptual relationship between the two fields. Psychoanalytic film theory has turned to a wide range of Freud's writings