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Cinematic Dream: Time Within Time

© Lauri Jean Crowe

Dreams and art have been closely knit across cultures and throughout the ages, more often than not in a negative manner. For instance, at one point in history Plato condemned both art and dream as simply being appearances which led people away from the pursuit of truth. However, for some creative individuals, art is an expression of personal truths often inspired by, or reflecting, the dream.

Examples of this can be seen in many cinematic creations. Russian author Andrei Tarkovsky's films hold the audience rapt with their dreamlike quality that defies everyday logic, giving the viewer a feeling that something is amiss although they cannot place what is amiss within the cinematic portrayal which at once seems credible and illogical. Films such as Tarkovsky's The Mirror (1975), which is seen as a dream film par excellence, succeed in reflecting the author's remembrances of youth, while conveying the past and future through daydream using strictly cinematic means.

Similarly, flashbacks and time shifts such as those portrayed in German-born Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957) give us yet another mingling of dream and reality and the spaces in-between. Wild Strawberries offers an opening nightmare sequence and commences in the story of a day in the life of one grouchy, introverted and elderly professor as he journeys to collect a university award for fifty years of service in his field of medicine. Throughout, the professor is immersed in a dreamlike existence of painful nightmare and nostalgia.

The idea of a dreamlike state of existence is also popular in the films of Japanese artist Akira Kurosawa, where the lines between the dreaming and waking states are explored through the use of visual imagery and film. The best example of this is in Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990), a series of eight vignettes on the relationship between man and nature. Two segments explore an aspect of Japanese society that refuses to take the threat of nuclear danger seriously. Kurosawa expresses this through the use of an imagined apocolypse and dream imagery of an accident at a nuclear power station. Another episode transports a young Japanese man into the time when van Gogh was creating his paintings, and the young man wanders through a full-scale world of the artist's drawings and paintings.

Kurosawa's young man is not unlike the dreamer as they immerse themselves in their own imagery. For some it is mere entertainment, for others a quest. Always it is a place where time is suspended from that we know in waking reality. Tarkovsky is well-known for his quote, "The one important thing is to find TIME within TIME." This is perhaps a task of the dreamer who chooses to pay attention to their dreams whether they are remembered as nightmare, or fondly over time as nostalgic discourse into the self, which is hopefully less devastating than that of Bergman's professor.

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