Kinaesthesia review – treasure trove of early cinema visions and the dream life they contain
Gerald Fox’s documentary on early film-makers’ fascination with dreams and human consciousness is a fascinating, if rather scholarly endeavourLuis Buñuel wrote that dreams were the first cinema. His short film...
By Cath Clarke · The Guardian Culture
Gerald Fox’s documentary on early film-makers’ fascination with dreams and human consciousness is a fascinating, if rather scholarly endeavour Luis Buñuel wrote that dreams were the first cinema. His short film Un Chien Andalou, co-written with Salvador Dalí and inspired by the pair’s dreams, is nearly 100 years old but its images still have the power to shock and disturb: a razor slicing through an eyeball; two rotting donkeys strapped to grand pianos. Un Chien Andalou is one of dozens of films in this documentary about the influence of dreams in early cinema. It is directed by Gerald Fox, based on an essay by the late Harvard film studies professor Vlada Petrić that expounds a theory that early cinema pioneers used techniques to activate the brain much like dreams. In the nicest possible way, the documentary itself feels like a film-school lecture, erudite and exhaustive. Its expert edit of clips conveys the shock of the new that audiences must have felt in the 1910s and 1920s, watching the double exposure used to create the ghost-like vision of a victim in the tormented mind of his murderer in DW Griffith’s The Avenging Conscience . Or Charlie Chaplin turning into a chicken in the eyes of a man delirious with hunger in The Gold Rush. Continue reading...