Oniric Cinema

and the Diegesis of Film Consciousness

Cătălin Moise

BA Thesis

Bard College Berlin

April 10th 2014

 Table of contents

I Introduction 1

II “Language” of cinema 5

III Pasolini and Nietzsche 10

IV Oniric Cinema as Consciousness 20

V Contemplating the Oniric Consciousness 27

VI Conclusion 30
[I] Introduction

The problem with Cinema is in a way similar to the problem with the world and the

problem with man. Whenever man is confronted with something that seems undefined,

mysterious, or even unknown, the first thing that man sets upon is to define it, control it and

know it by breaking it apart and splitting it into concepts that the mind can grasp. This is the

story of millennia of man’s compulsion to knowledge, and cinema, having entered the fray at a

fairly late stage in this development, is not saved from being sucked into this compulsion to

knowledge. Oniric Cinema is that type of cinema that tries to escape this compulsion, and inhabit

a space that is comfortable with residing in the unknown. Oniric cinema does not aim to produce

knowledge as a summation of concepts, but rather to produce feeling as a summation of

experience. As such, it should be understood as only one type of cinema out of many. What this

paper will attempt is not to give an all-encompassing understanding of cinema, but rather an

analysis of one of its possible modes.

The comparison of cinema to dreams is one of the first theoretical observations that surfaced

after the invention of this new art form:

The dream metaphor has a long history in film theory. It begins as early as the
birth of cinema, with the famous dispute on the contrast between cinema as a
(perfect) system of reproduction of reality on the one hand, and as magic and
dream on the other. In Esthetique du cinéma (1957), Henri Agel listed the early
theorists who recognised the oneiric nature of cinema, beginning with Ricciotto
Canudo (1879-1923), who urged filmmakers to transform reality in conformity
to their inner dream; and ending with Jean Epstein (1897-1953), who found in
film a perfect affinity with dreams. (Rascaroli n.p.)

1
This comparison of cinema to dreams, however, after being somewhat timidly explored in the

beginnings of cinema1, has then been stuck in a web of structural and semiotic studies, the focus

of most endeavors being on identifying the similarities between the two experiences on the level

of the spectator. There is a fundamental problem, however, in presupposing that by comparing

cinema to dreams there is an automatically illuminating effect, for indeed we know very little

about dreams themselves. As Noël Carroll writes in his book, Mystifying Movies (1988):

For an analogy to be informative, we should know more about the item that is
meant to do the illuminating than we do about the item that is supposed to be
illuminated, e.g., we should know more about dreams than we do about films.
This is basic to the logic of analogy. But I am not sure that this condition is met
by film/dream analogies. Indeed, I suspect that we probably know more about
the workings of film than we do about the workings of the mind. […] How much
do we learn by being told that films are like such things as daydreams or night
dreams when we know so little about dreaming? We do not even know why we
sleep. Dreaming is far more mysterious than cinema. (49)

Consequently the approach in the present paper will distance itself from a presupposed

knowledge of the function of dreams in order to analyze what cinema can be when it is not

shrouded behind a theory that serves more to confuse than to illuminate. The endeavor here will

be quite opposite, as it will be an inquiry into cinema’s ability, as an art form, to enable

reflection upon the image-world of dreams. This seems to me like the potentially more

interesting aspect of this connection, however individuals have been fascinated with the

environment in which cinema presents itself and out of this fascination poured a considerable

quantity of these physiological comparisons between pre-sleep, sleep and dream states that

1
Besides the examples that Laura Rascaroli offers, other names to note would be Hugo Münsterberg’s book The
Photoplay. A psychological study (1916) – while not directly addressing the issue of dreaming, it is the first
theoretical study to compare cinema to cognitive functions – and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Der Ersatz für die
Träume (1921)

2
ultimately addressed the art of cinema much less than they did its environment. These studies,

although founded on an understandable fascination with new technology, have always seemed

like going to see a painting only to get stuck in theorizing the effect of the gallery. Due to this

focus, however, the oniric quality of cinema got entangled into a fatal combination between

semiotics and psychoanalysis, a very predictable predicament, given cinema’s development in a

world in which Freudian ideas of the dream were developing in parallel.

The couple Cinema & Psychoanalysis was endorsed in the seventies chiefly on
the basis of the analogies that were said to exist between film and dream. The
celebrated Issue 23 of Communications (1975) sealed the union in the name of
semiology: linguistics and psychoanalysis, in fact – according to Christian Metz –
not only were both concerned with the symbolic, but were also the only two
sciences whose immediate and only object of study was the act of signification
itself; for this reason they seemed able to lead to 'a relatively autonomous
science of cinema' -- a semiology of cinema. (Rascaroli)

It seemed like a match made in heaven, two perfectly suiting sciences combined into the super-

science of the semiology of cinema. The only question that remained was – why? What purpose

does this serve, beyond the immediate annihilation of anything that is fundamentally aesthetic in

the art of cinema?2 Noël Carroll argues first and foremost that contemporary film theory has

done nothing but confuse the issue of cinema even further3. Consequently, his book concludes

with quite the categorical statement that “The theme of this book has been that ‘contemporary
2
Noel Carrol argues in his book that

“Contemporary film theory is “top down”. From their readings of such people as Lacan and Althussser, they derive a
general theory, such as that of subject positioning, and then they attempt to graft that account onto specific
phenomena […] usually by means of equivocation or some other exercise of ambiguity. That is, they apply the
general theory to each aspect of film which they want to explain. The problems this creates in their reasoning has
been explored, as well as the fact that the general theory they employ is, to say the least, questionable.” (230)
3
“Specifically I shall argue that in their attempts to show how movies purportedly mystify spectators,
contemporary film theorists, in fact, mystify our understanding of cinema.” (Carroll 2)

3
film theory’ has been nothing short of an intellectual disaster and that it should be discarded”

(226). What he refers to as “contemporary film theory” is “film theory that proceeds within a

semiological framework […] amplified by Marxism and psychoanalysis” (1)

I would therefore dare say that the forcing of abstract foreign grammar over the fundamentally

oniric quality of cinema has little to do with the art itself and its capabilities, and more with the

incessant desire of man to dismember everything into concepts in an effort to create labeled jars,

thus exhausting any possibility that any sensation might escape unnamed. Such an “autonomous

science of cinema” is something of no interest to this paper, as it is only something designed to

neutralize and designate post-factum that which is most profoundly irrational in cinema. Once

more, this turn of events in the history of film theory seems nothing but detrimental, and it is a

path that can be followed ad-infinitum. The more one follows it, however, the more one departs

from the art of it. This “autonomous science of cinema” speaks nothing of what cinema can do as

an art, but it is rather a demonstration of force on behalf of reason, showing the extent to which

one can squeeze cinema into pre-made abstract concepts, thus automatically diffusing its impact.

Consequently, the deeper one engages with this psycho-semiology of cinema, the less one

engages with cinema. This paper will distance itself from any such analysis, in an effort to once

again understand that which is quintessentially cinematographic. Instead of looking at how

cinema already fits into the grammar of our understanding of the world, the endeavor here will

be to understand the capacity of cinema to change our understanding of the world, it will be an

inquiry into what cinema has the ability to be at its root, when it is not sentenced to be a piece of

text that one reads off of, or a patient of psychoanalysis.

4
[II] “Language” of cinema

The natural consequence of all of this intense focus on semiology is the emergence and

study of “the language of cinema”. This understanding of the phenomenology of film as a

communicational model similar to that of a language is highly partial to a understanding of

cinema in which the primary effort is that of semiological decoding. The manner in which this

approach to theorizing cinema strays from cinema itself is similar to the manner of experiencing

a dream. While dreaming, an individual is not preoccupied with decoding experience into

psychoanalytical or semiological concepts, but is rather overwhelmed with the aesthetics of the

experience. The attempt to decode and understand, make abstract and conceptualize, comes only

after the waking moment. The question of what happens in the moment of cinema, which – as an

aesthetical reaction to an art form, the art of cinema – it cannot possibly be a moment of rational

decoding, remains open. Due to the inheritance of fundamental notions of linguistics that come

with a semiotic theory, and as such with a fundamental understanding of the cinema experience

as one of decoding, the theory of semiology and language will always be a posteriori to the

experience, and will preserve the original experience in equal part as when one tries to

understand what it is that he has dreamed of – that is, it will only be a grasping at that unique

aesthetic experience which dissipates in the moment that one attempts to conceptualize it.

Looked at from this perspective, it should be understood that any such theorizing in terms of

semiology and language and anything resulting from it, will always be twice removed from the

experience itself and the results will always be a matter not of what has been found, but what has

been built. Semiology does not achieve an understanding of cinema, but rather builds a parallel

compatible system that serves to explicate in borrowed terms the moment of cinema. This
5
intense theoretical focus on the parallels between the function of film and the function of

language is something that has today often become the default way of thinking in relation to

cinema. As Stephen Prince writes:

In its analysis of images, film theory since the 1970s has been deeply indebted
to structuralist and Saussurean-derived linguistic models. Indeed, it would be
difficult to overstate the depth and importance of this relationship. [...] To
speak, for example, about ‘reading’ a film, as many film analysts now do,
irrespective of the critical methodology employed to generate the reading, is to
index and emphasize this lineage. Like books, films are regarded as texts for
reading by viewers or critics, with the concomitant implication that such reading
activates similar processes of semiotic decoding. (16)

The caveat with understanding film as a language is that for all the arguments that exist in favor

of this understanding, there is an equally potent argument to be made on all the ways in which

cinema does not function as a language; the most poignant of which would be the difference

between the founding unit of the word and the founding unit of image. Between these two units

there is an abyss to be found, one as all-encompassing as the difference between reason and

sensation. It is only a matter of the amount of deference that one is willing to confer to this

difference. It is, therefore, a matter of perspective. The semiological perspective collapses the

difference entirely, in an effort to unite both units under a set of shared characteristics. This

seems to be the most uninteresting of approaches, as it does away with that which is most

important, unique and elusive in cinema: the moving image.

One of the few people to arduously oppose this movement in film theory, from its very

beginning, was Pier Paolo Pasolini. The interpretation of what he was trying to communicate was

lackluster at best, one of the reasons perhaps being the fact that he was a mere artist, and not an

academician. It is only due to the lack of better terms that Pasolini’s “The Cinema of Poetry”

6
(1965) misses its mark, if one must say that it misses its mark. In his essay, Pasolini tries to

rebuke the applicability of language concepts arguing in favor of the abyss between word and

image, only he concludes in favor of the fact that, if one must understand cinema as a language,

one must understand it as poetry. He also attempts to describe a murky new type of semiology

that would be more suiting to this language of poetry. This is perhaps one of the reasons why not

much has been made of this essay, as Pasolini is trying to argue against the system of semiotics

from within it, having no other terms but its own to use against it. The other reason is perhaps

that the current in film theory seemed to be moving much more in favor of semiology than

image. What Pasolini argues for, however, transcends semiotics, perhaps even without him

knowing it, and points towards a much more profound difference and uniqueness in the

phenomenology of cinema. What he argues for as the fundamentally oniric quality of cinema

takes the form of a much more ontological claim than what had been theorized before in terms of

understanding this comparison between the dream and cinema.

Following in Metz's footsteps […] Pier Paolo Pasolini suggested that, despite not
being a language, cinema succeeds in communicating thanks to its use of a
common store of signs. Cinematic spectators can read films because they are
already used to reading the visual reality surrounding them. (Rascaroli)

Pasolini is compelled to build his argument within the same terms of “reading”, but the question

of “reading the visual reality surrounding them” would perhaps be in need of better terms to

illustrate what exactly is being meant here, and how this can achieve a communication.

Memories and dreams, along with the cinematic image, are for Pasolini part of
visual communication, which is a pre-morphological and pre-grammatical fact.
Dreams, in this perspective, are a precursor of cinema (Rascaroli)

7
This is the fundamentally ontological connection that Pasolini draws between the existence of

cinema and that of dreams. Not that there is a similar sleepiness, not that it happens in the dark,

not that there can be a semiotic of dreams in the form of psychoanalysis, and that consequently

there can be a semiotic of cinema; that all may be, but this is not the point here. The manner in

which this claim is more ontological is that it points to that primary connection that cinema and

dreams share, that moment of cinema, that which gives it the aesthetical force of representation:

the dream is the only element of human experientiality where one is subjected to the compulsive

vision of images, linked in time, without a preexisting notion of their connection; cinema is the

only art that can precisely reproduce this experience. The consequence of this connection, and

the inclusion of mnemonic mechanisms as well, is that it effectively widens the argument to

include not only the semiotics of dreams, but also how it is that one experiences images, period,

and how it is exactly that cinema breaks with that experience. Therefore, in order to accurately

interact and ultimately expand upon what Pasolini is proposing, an invocation of Nietzsche’s

essay, “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” (1873), would be most beneficiary, as he

discusses the issues of image, metaphor, and the transformation of image into concept, most

ontologically.

Nietzsche’s essay fundamentally engages with the image in that truth is merely a synthetization

of feeling into language concepts, one that has the image at its root. His argument is that the

forgetting of this one fact by humanity, that truth is merely a metaphor of experience, an

approximation of feeling by reason, has lead to the death of the “artistically creating individual”,

the individual recognizant of the fact that the web of concepts that he is in possession of is a

mere metaphorical approximation of experience. Consequently, in Nietzsche’s essay, linguistic

truth in its paroxysm is voided in order to make room for the recollection of the a priori
8
determinancy of image. Nietzsche speaks of the society of the Ancient Greeks and likens it to a

more dream-like state than the present one:

The waking day of a mythically excited nation, the ancient Greeks for instance,
is, by constant action of marvels, indeed more like a dream than like the day of
the scientifically sober thinker. When any tree may begin anytime to speak as a
nymph, or a god in the guise of a bull can abduct a maiden, when the goddess
Athena herself is suddenly seen driving through the marketplaces of Athens on a
beautiful team of horses in the company of Pisistratus – as the honest Athenian
believed – then at any moment, as in a dream, anything is possible, and all
nature crowds around man as if it were only the masquerade of the gods, who
only make a joke of deceiving man in all forms. (Truth 255)

He speaks of a society in which the dynamic of image-concept was still very much in motion,

when man was much more prone to adapt his understanding of the world in concepts depending

on the images that he witnessed, much more able to incorporate potentially unintelligible visual

experiences into his life. It should also be noted that the description of Ancient Greece that

Nietzsche offers sounds very similar to a film, perhaps one that we have even already seen, or at

least other equally marvelous showings. Why has the ability to witness such marvels as that

which previously shaped societies, has had no world-changing impact? It is because humanity

has grown too smart to be affected in such a way by mere images and consequently, experience

has become subordinate to concept. This is, naturally, an exaggeration, as I am not actually

advocating that individuals should believe everything they see on a cinema screen. It cannot go

unnoticed, however, that this ability to discern reality has extended to such a proud extent that

few marvels are allowed to slip through. The argument that Pasolini makes is one for a more

fundamentally marvelous understanding of cinema, whereas Nietzsche argues for a more

fundamentally marvelous understanding of life. The spaces in which they overlap are essential to

understanding the quintessential ability that cinema possesses as an art.

9
[III] Pasolini and Nietzsche

Pasolini begins his essay by formulating the fundamental problem that arises when one starts

discussing a “language of cinema”:

Whereas literary languages found their poetic inventions on the institutional

basis of an instrumental language, quite common to all who speak, cinematic
languages seem not to be founded on anything like this. For their real basis,
they do not have a language whose primary objective is communication.[…]
Men communicate with words, not with images; this is why a specific language
of images would appear as a pure and artificial abstraction (543)

This presents itself as the first issue in dealing with the language of cinema: a language is, by

default, a means of communication, it is solely what it exists for, whereas the existence of image

precedes the need for communication. Consequently, any such configuration of image within the

bounds of a language will always be a departure from the nature of images, or an “artificial

abstraction”. Therefore, the endeavor in Pasolini’s essay becomes that of investigating the image

beyond its ability to be placed within a language or, in other words, how is communication via

cinema to be understood, if not through the model of language? Pasolini continues by offering a

number of peripheral instances in which images can be wielded with the purpose of

communication – such as the sign-language for the deaf and dumb – but then quickly abandons

this in order to formulate the idea of a perpetual aesthetic dialogue between one individual and

his surroundings, one that happens not in language or words, but in images:

But we must immediately add the intended recipient of the cinematic product is
equally accustomed to visually “read” reality, that is to keep up a dialogue with
the reality which surrounds him […] The fact of walking alone in the street, even
with our ears stopped up, constitutes a continual dialogue between ourselves

10
 and an environment which expresses itself by the mediation of the images
which compose it: the physiognomy of the passers-by, their gestures, their
signs, their actions, their silences, their expressions, their collective reactions
(544)

The claim that one “reads” reality visually, entails that there is a continual exchange of

information being performed that happens at the level of image. Image being a priori to reason

and concept, this exchange of knowledge is to be understood as being performed intuitively. The

fact that Pasolini here allows for transference of information via image is essential for the

development of his argument, as he continues:

But there is more: in man, an entire world is expressed by means of significant

images – shall we therefore propose, by analogy, the term “im-signs” (insegni,
i.e. image-signs). This is the world of memory and of dreams. […] In sum, there is
a whole complex world of significant images – formed as much of gestures and
of all sorts of signs coming from the environment, as of memories or of dreams
– which is proposed as the “instrumental” foundation of cinematic
communication, and prefigures it. (544)

“Significant images” here can be understood as any one image that an individual carries in his

memory (be it consciously or subconsciously) and imbues it with a significance that is private:

such as the image of a lover departing, or the image of woods, which for film director Andrei

Tarkovsky always signaled the dreamscape of memory, or, in general, any such image that is

powerful enough to have an impact on one’s consciousness, enough to be preserved in what can

be called not only memory, but the aesthetic existence4 of an individual. When Pasolini claims

4
Much of the understanding of the aesthetic existence of man in the present paper is indebted to Friedrich
Schiller’s paramount essay “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” (1794). Schiller is one of the first individuals, on
the cusp of Enlightenment, to confer a highly significant importance to what he deems “the sensuous nature of
man”. What he proposes is that there are two fundamental drives in man of equal strength: “the sensuous drive,
[which] proceeds from the physical existence of man” (78), and therefore encompasses intuition and sensation,
and “the formal drive, [which] proceeds from the absolute existence of man, or from his rational nature” (81). The
11
that “this is the world of memory and dreams”, he means that this image matter is what

composes both memory, and dreams, as memory acts as a preserver of these significant images,

whereas dreams act upon these significant images under an unknown creative impulse that

results in their various transfigurations. This represents the more ontological claim that Pasolini

is making with his essay, one that has largely been left undiscussed by his critics5 in pursuit of

dismantling the more fragile case that Pasolini makes for a new “poetic” semiotic of cinema. To

be certain, the claim that is being made here is that there is an existence of man parallel to that of

reason, an aesthetic existence, one that manifests itself first and foremost in images, images

being that prime matter of existence that is a priori to the employment of reason:

Indeed, gestures, the surrounding reality, as much as dreams and the

mechanisms of memory, are of a virtually pre-human order, or at least at the
limit of humanity – in any case pre-grammatical and even premorphological
(dreams are unconscious phenomena, as are mnemonic mechanisms; the
gesture is an altogether elementary sign, etc.)

The linguistic instrument on which cinema is founded is thus of an irrational

type. This explains the profoundly oniric nature of cinema, as also its absolutely
and inevitably concrete nature, let us say its objective status. (545)

This last paragraph might seem like a contradiction, however what Pasolini refers to as the

“objective status” of cinema, or its “concrete nature”, is cinema’s inescapable (at least at the time

of the writing) compulsion to reproduce reality. His fundamental argument, however, for the

profoundly oniric nature of cinema is the “virtually pre-human order” of image, image as that

idea of the aesthetic education of man is the harmonious reconciliation of these two drives under a third drive,
deemed the play-drive. The idea of the play-drive remained Schiller’s own, however much of the significance that
he ascribes to the sensuous nature of man continued to echo in other thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche and
Henri Bergson.
5
cf. Stam “Film Theory” pp. 112-115

12
which is wholly untranslatable in language concepts. This argument, as ontological as it is,

seems to be underestimated or ignored in the subsequent critical reception of Pasolini’s essay

within film theory and therefore its significance cut short. Curiously enough, as film theory after

Christian Metz and the 1970s seems to have shunned the image and encapsulated it within the

prison of psychoanalytic semiotics where one can safely “read” the image via the advents of

science. This seems like a grave error to make when the subject in question is the art of cinema:

This means that cinema has undergone a violation which was moreover rather
foreseeable and unavoidable: everything in it that was irrational, oniric,
elementary and barbarous has been kept this side of consciousness, has been
exploited as an unconscious factor of shock and glamour, and upon this
naturally hypnotic monstrum which a film always is, there was quickly
constructed a whole narrative convention which has authorized useless and
fallaciously critical comparisons with the theatre and the novel […] whereas
[cinema] lacks one of the fundamental elements of the “language of prose”: the
rational. (545)

Therefore, in order to help revive the argument in favor of the irrationality of images, that is,

their fundamentally pre-rational nature, Nietzsche’s essay in favor of intuition offers an

argument that is highly similar to Pasolini’s, only it is not applied to the approach that humanity

has to cinema, but in the approach that humanity has to life. Since this is the approach that

humanity has to life, it is therefore “foreseeable and unavoidable” that cinema should endure a

similar corruption of image.

13
Nietzsche begins by dismantling and demystifying truth in a non-moral sense, that is, truth in

language. It is important to understand this deconstruction as where Nietzsche does ultimately

allow for some truth is in manifestations of the intuition and consequently in the arts6.

For Nietzsche,

[t]he “thing-in-itself” (which would be pure, disinterested truth) is also

absolutely incomprehensible to the creator of language and not worth seeking.
He designates only the relations of things to men, and to express these relations
he uses the boldest metaphors. First, he translates a nerve stimulus into an
image! That is the first metaphor. Then, the image must be reshaped into a
sound! The second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of
spheres – from one sphere to the center of a totally different, new one. (Truth
249)

It is in this manner, then, that truth is to be understood as a metaphor. One that is, in language,

twice removed from the initial nerve stimulus, having to suffer a transformation into image and

then a transformation into an abstract sound (the word). It should be understood, naturally, that in

each of these translations something of that nerve stimulus must necessarily be lost.

Consequently, the argument that lends itself to film theory is for a return to that first translation

to image which, be though as it may a translation still, it is at least prior to its translation into a

unit designed for communication and directed by reason. It can therefore be ontologically

6
This issue is explored more at length in Chapter V of this paper. However, it should be noted that in a preliminary
version of “On Truth and Lies in a non-moral sense”, Nietzsche writes:

“Afterwards, the original imaginative act of transference into images: the first provides the matter, the second the
qualities which we believe in. Comparison to music. How can one speak of it?” (Notebooks 88)

This is therefore proof that Nietzsche, at the time of the writing, had in mind an art that contains both duration
and motion, the problem of “how can one speak of it?” seemingly being resolved by simply not speaking of it.
Cinema contains duration, motion and is composed of images, therefore, rather than music, I believe it is an even
closer medium to the ideas that Nietzsche is formulating.

14
“truer”, as image will always be closer to experience than language could ever be. Therefore, for

the purpose of the argument, Nietzsche voids linguistic truth in its entirety:

What is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in

short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically
heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seems solid, canonical,
and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten
that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors without sensory impact (250)

Truth is therefore merely an illusion built up by humanity through the ages through a process of

repetition that ultimately conferred the illusion its legitimacy. The purpose of this illusion is to

confer to its user the appearance of a certain degree of control over his environment at the

expense of sacrificing sensory impact. Therefore, truth becomes a tool of conquest, the more

truth, the less fear of the unknown. The subjection of the fundamentally oniric nature of cinema

to rational schemata that Pasolini deplores, echoes here in Nietzsche’s description of the

“rational man”:

As a “rational” being, he now puts his actions under the rule of abstractions; he
no longer lets himself be carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions7; he
first universalizes these impressions into less colorful, cooler concepts, in order
to hitch the wagon of his life and actions to them. (250)

Furthermore:

Whereas any intuitive metaphor is individual and unique and therefore always
eludes any commentary, the great structure of concepts displays the rigid
regularity of a Roman columbarium and has an aura of that severity and
coldness typical of mathematics. (251)

7
It should be noted that the German word that Nietzsche uses is “Anschauungen” which contains the idea of
image etymologically and is closer to “perception” or “view”.

15
And finally,

Only by forgetting that primitive metaphor-world, only by the hardening and

rigidification of the mass of images that originally gushed forth as hot magma
out of the primeval faculty of human fantasy, only by the invincible belief that
this sun, this window, this table is a truth-in-itself, in short, only insofar as man
forgets himself as a subject, indeed as an artistically creative subject, does he
live with some calm, security, and consistency. (252)

What Nietzsche describes here is what is lost when the transference of the nerve stimulus

performs its second transformation, that into cognition, that is: the intensity of experience, being

here flattened out in the service of reason. Nietzsche’s argument here is that only through an

artificial conquest of image, and its subjugation to reason by virtue of sheer hubris, can man

claim to have “concepts”, “knowledge” and “truth”. This argument needs not be made so

extremely in the case of cinema, but given the particularities of oniric cinema, it is important to

note that Nietzsche builds an argument for a wholly encompassing profound desensitivization of

humanity to image. In fact, the claim that Nietzsche makes can be understood as the entirety of

the race towards knowledge being fundamentally aimed at overpowering the ontology of image

by virtue of reason. It should be of no wonder, then, that for this art form that uses images most

wildly, a “naturally hypnotic monstrum” (545), as Pasolini calls cinema, the dominant mode of

theory that exists is that of psycho-semiology, an infinity of abstract-absurd concepts that deal

with image only peripherally and only as an excuse to spin the web of their concepts (Truth 253),

as Nietzsche writes.

It should be therefore first and foremost understood that oniric cinema is that type of cinema that

aims to escape the rule of abstractions, that encourages one to be carried away by sudden

impressions, by intuitions, by intuitive metaphors that are individual and unique, it is a cinema

16
that aims to reside in that primitive metaphor-world in which its prime matter is the “mass of

images that originally gushed forth as hot magma out of the primeval faculty of human fantasy”

(and it does so without attempting to create a new conceptual taxonomy of sensation, it is content

with “undefinability”). And finally, oniric cinema aims to revive the artistically creative subject,

both in the creation and reception, as it aims to displace one’s rational web of concepts so as to

make room for intuition and, more precisely, for a profound aesthetic relation that aims to

destroy and recreate the world not in the image of reason, but that of sensation. This is where

Nietzsche’s notion of the artistically creative subject, that individual who is at liberty to shape

worlds while unrestrained by a pre-existing matrix of concepts, becomes paramount to the

understanding of the capabilities of oniric cinema. Pasolini describes this moment of invention,

the moment in which one interacts with that “mass of images that originally gushed forth as hot

magma”, and the manner in which this invention is distinct from linguistic invention. He refers

to this moment of invention as picking images from “chaos”:

The cinema author has no dictionary but infinite possibilities. He does not take
his signs, his im-signs, from some drawer or from some bag, but from chaos,
where an automatic or oniric communication is only found in the state of
possibility, of shadow. Thus, toponymically described, the act of the filmmaker is
not one but double. He must first draw the im-sign from chaos, make it possible
and consider it as classified in a dictionary of im-signs (gestures, environment,
dreams, memory) ; he must then accomplish the very work of the writer, that is,
enrich this purely morphological im-sign with his personal expression. While the
writer’s work is esthetic invention, that of the filmmaker is first linguistic
invention, then esthetic. (545)

The wielding of this prime unconceptualized matter becomes, therefore, and naturally so, a

matter of artistic ability and the boundaries are set at the extent to which one can interact with the

images within oneself so as to reproduce them. The self-propagating idea behind this

17
understanding of oniric cinema is that one gains access to those images that exist

“unconceptualized” within oneself solely through repeated exposure to such “unconceptualized”

image matter. As due through this exposure, one potentially becomes aware of these images and

is then consequently more able to summon them. As such, armed with this image matter that

exists beyond reason, one would potentially be able to create worlds that can exist independent

of any rational compulsion. This drive to reforming the world around oneself, the drive towards

being the artistically creating individual is one of the defining features of humanity for

Nietzsche8:

That drive to form metaphors, that fundamental desire in man, which cannot be
discounted for one moment, because that would amount to ignoring man
himself, is in truth not overcome and indeed hardly restrained by the fact that
out of its diminished products, the concepts, a regular and rigid new world is
built up for him as a prison fortress. It seeks a new province for its activities and
a different riverbed and generally finds it in myth and in art. It constantly
confuses the categories and cells of the concepts by presenting new
transferences, metaphors, and metonyms; constantly showing the desire to
shape the existing world of the wideawake person to be variegatedly irregular
and disinterestedly incoherent, exciting and eternally new, as is the world of
dreams. (Truth 254)

The art of cinema provides the perfect province for this drive towards destroying and creating

worlds. It is in this manner that the fundamentally oniric quality of cinema is to be understood.

Cinema has the ability to shift and manufacture dimensions that are quintessentially man-made.

That is, it has the ability to create custom-made worlds that cannot be conceptualized in words,

8
Perhaps this is also Jean-Louis Baudry’s “desire of ancient, instinctual origins”, as Carroll writes:

“Baudry holds that Plato’s cave is proto-cinematic, which leads him to claim that cinema answers a desire of
ancient, instinctual origins.” (30)

18
as the intelligibility of their existence resides solely on the level of image and intuition. In short,

it can embody a sensation. Of such unutterable concepts Nietzsche writes:

From these intuitions no regular road leads to the land of ghostly schemata, of
abstractions. The word is not made for these intuitions: man falls silent when he
sees them, or he speaks in sheer forbidden metaphors and unheard of
conceptual compounds, in order at least by smashing and scorning the old
conceptual barricades to correspond creatively to the impressions of the mighty
present intuition. (256)

It is this metaphysical silence that oniric cinema can spawn as its reaction. Cinema has the ability

to simulate a world-view, or, indeed, a consciousness, that need not be bridled by any law of

reason but can be wholly preoccupied with the evocation of unutterable concepts in the form of

image. If one agrees that there is a rational existence to man, as well as an aesthetic existence,

formed of images, sounds and tactile input, then it should be understood that what oniric cinema

has the ability to explore in images must be in a similar volume to that which philosophy has

been able to explore in words. That is, if reason in language concepts has been utilized through

the ages to the point in which Nietzsche voids linguistic truth altogether, it should be understood

that there is an entire world of impossible image-concepts that are intelligible solely as aesthetic

feeling. Never before has this image-world of memory and dreams been so accessible to

humanity as it is now in the art of cinema. No other tool in the history of man has come close to

being able to represent the phenomena of consciousness in the manner in which oniric cinema

can. This is the reason for which this approach to cinema is opposite to that of the psychoanalytic

semiological decoding – whereas psycho-semiology assumes that it can understand cinema by

virtue of the science that humanity possesses in the domain of the dream, oniric cinema is

employed so as to “understand” dreams and one’s inner world of images by virtue of cinema.

19
That is, to interact, by virtue of contemplation, with that hitherto inaccessible world of moving

images that exists in man, which has now become, by virtue of cinema, able to be contemplated.

This is cinema’s artistic truth that Nietzsche would allow, the aesthetic truth in the moving

image. To hyperbolize for illustration: what “truth” one would be able to discover after five years

of psychoanalysis, could potentially be aesthetically activated by oniric cinema in one moment.

[IV] Oniric Cinema as Consciousness

The first half of Pasolini’s essay about the Cinema of Poetry concludes with “Cinema, as I said

before, because of its lack of a vocabulary of concepts, is directly metaphorical.” (549) He then

continues by positing the question of what one can do with the cinematic language of poetry, and

by virtue of his position as a literary man as well, he comes to re-encapsulating the issue of this

unique “language” within the concepts of “free indirect discourse” (549) and “free indirect

subjective” (552). This is where this paper parts ways with Pasolini’s, as what is presently

desired is a further departure from any understanding of cinema that is analogous to the written

tradition. As his conclusion, Pasolini states:

This implies, theoretically at least, that the “free indirect subjective” in cinema is
endowed with a very flexible stylistic possibility; that it also liberates the
expressive possibilities [of images] stifled by traditional narrative conventions,
by a sort of return to their origins, which extends even to rediscovering in the
technical means of cinema their original oniric, barbaric, irregular, aggressive,
visionary qualities. It is the “free indirect subjective” which establishes the
possible tradition of a “technical language of poetry” in cinema. (552)

20
What Pasolini names as cinema’s ability to simulate the poetic linguistic “free indirect

subjective” I would like to propose to be understood as cinema’s ability, by virtue of its prime

matter of images, to simulate a consciousness. The term consciousness here should not be taken

in an extremely philosophical fashion. The issue of consciousness, since its first Cartesian model,

has been debated by philosophy endlessly without it having been solved in any particularly

concrete fashion – even today the issue of what exactly is consciousness remains up for debate.

Consequently, within this ambiguity of consciousness, for the benefit of the argument I shall

relate the relationship between cinema and consciousness by virtue of Henri Bergson’s Matter

and Memory (1896), as Bergson discusses the issues of consciousness and memory with

reference to the domain of the image.

For Bergson a consciousness consists of a inescapable compulsion towards a subjective and

therefore limited perception of the world. As the title of the first chapter of the book stands, “Of

the selection of Images for Conscious Presentation”, consciousness for Bergson exists in this

selective discernment of reality:

Our representation of matter is the measure of our possible action upon bodies:
it results from the discarding of what has no interest for our needs, or more
generally, for our functions. […] our consciousness only attains to certain parts
and to certain aspects of those parts. Consciousness – in regard to external
perception – lies in just this choice. But there is, in this necessary poverty of our
conscious perception, something that is positive, that foretells spirit: it is, in the
etymological sense of the word, discernment. (38)

At an earlier point he more briefly defines consciousness as

[t]he world of consciousness, wherein all the images depend on a central image,
our body, the variations of which they follow. (26)

21
It should therefore not have to be a stretch of the imagination to understand oniric cinema as

representing a consciousness. The fundamental feature of cinema is this discernment of image

that Bergson describes as the fundamental feature of consciousness9. That is, in the choice of the

images that are to be presented in the film – the questions of why these images and not others,

why in this manner and not another – the answers to these questions result in ascribing a

consciousness to the arrangement of the images on the screen.

Before continuing on any further with the argument, so that I may not be accused of a conceptual

obscurity or of an idealistic idea of cinema, it would be useful to name a number of examples of

films that already exist within this definition. Therefore, films which overtly behave as

consciousnesses are such as Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966),

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975), and perhaps Tarkovsky’s films in general, and, more

recently, Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002), Belá Tarr’s Turin Horse (2011), and Lars von Trier’s

Melancholia (2011). The list would be, indeed, very large, as this mode of filmmaking exists and

has existed in art cinema for quite some time. Therefore, when consciousness as the selection of

images is understood as applied to cinema, it should be noted how great of a diversity of

consciousnesses this allows for. Tarkovsky’s Mirror is a consciousness that very much coincides

with its author’s, but even regardless of this fact, it is quite overtly a human consciousness that is

being represented.

9
Bergson further elaborates on consciousness as the selection of images by arguing that the choice is influenced
by memory:

“For though the function of these bodies is to receive stimulations in order to elaborate them into unforeseen
reactions, still the choice of the reaction cannot be the work of chance. This choice is likely to be inspired by past
experience, and the reaction does not take place without an appeal to the memories which analogous situations
may have left behind them.” (65)

22
Persona, on the other hand, is novel in going farther and giving cinema its own self-reflexivity;

thus in Persona what is being emulated is a sort of cinematic consciousness, a dimension that is

not dependant on the laws of reality but rather on the laws imposed by this cinematic

consciousness which, in Persona, exists within the self-imposed aesthetical constrictions put in

place with the purpose of representing a split state of human consciousness.

In 8 ½ the main character is a film director on a set in search of his movie. The film

intermittently confuses what appears to be “objective reality” with constant interventions by

fragments of the director’s imagination, memory and dreams. As such, the cadence of these

repeated interruptions ultimately creates a homogeneity of reality that truly becomes the film’s

own. As Guido walks around the film set, images that he is confronted with in the present trigger

various reactions from his “inner world of images” that are then taken over by the film

consciousness. What results is a brilliantly stylized representation of a human consciousness that

opts to increasingly refuse this “objective reality” and retreats in its own personal world of

images and metaphors. This theme of the artistic genius succumbing under one’s own weight is

taken up once more by Charlie Kaufman in his debut as a director, Synecdoche, New York

(2008). The films are very similar, only in Kaufman’s the end result is a tragic one, as the theater

director there is obligated to a compulsive repetition and representation of his trauma, until his

very end. There is a line in 8 ½ in which the film critic quotes Stendhal as saying “The solitary

genius that revolves around itself and feeds only upon itself finally chokes on a great cry or a

great laugh.” 8 ½ ends with the circus of life, whereas Synecdoche, New York ends with

meaningless death.

23
Charlie Kaufman also wrote Adapation, a film which is highly similar in its self-determinancy

with 8 ½. In an extreme example of mise-en-abyme, in Adaptation Charlie Kaufman is shown as

himself trying to write the script for the movie that we are currently seeing. In this extreme form

of self-reflexivity the movie oddly evolves, learns and, ultimately, adapts. It is the most curious

film, as what it needs to adapt to is an outside force that pushes for a sort of commercialism in

film, a movement that can be identified in 8 ½ as well. Therefore, the film itself, as its own

consciousness seems to be fighting, evolving, and adapting from within to these pressing outside

forces, and this evolution happens gradually throughout the film.

Belá Tarr’s Turin Horse starts with the director narrating the fabled story of Nietzsche’s collapse

in Turin, when he is supposed to have descended into madness after having witnessed an angry

coach-man beating his horse. The film is based on the question: but what happened to the horse?

Belá Tarr shares the same belief with Tarkovsky, that cinema is motion and time10, therefore he

opts for composing his 150 minutes long film out of only 30 shots, probably half of which are

the camera moving through the 19th century log-cabin much in the same way that Tarkovsky was

moving his in The Mirror. The effect is that one experiences being, as well as time, as the film

consciousness is designed so as to represent simply being a subject of time, time being the main

subject matter of Belá Tarr’s self-declared last film11.

10
“Time, captured in its factual forms and manifestations: such is the supreme idea of cinema as an art, leading us
to think about the wealth of untapped resources in film, about its colossal future […]I think that what a person
normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for
cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person's experience—and not only enhances it but
makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema: 'stars', story-lines and entertainment have
nothing to do with it.” (Tarkovsky 63)
11
In an interview with Belá Tarr dated June 2011, he states:

24
Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, however, occupies a privileged position at this crossroads of

building worlds and consciousness. In Melancholia the pathological state of consciousness that

inhabits the main character, Justine, expands to the film’s state of consciousness. Therefore, as

Justine succumbs to the world of depression, the world of the film is subjected to the annihilation

of the planet called Melancholia. The film begins with a prologue of some of the most overtly

oniric images imaginable. They happen in slow-motion, and they illustrate beautiful images of

the motion of planets, of death and decay, entrapment, and, ultimately, annihilation as the planet

Melancholia collides with and destroys Earth, as seen from a cosmic point of view. These are the

first 7 minutes in which the destruction of the world that we are about to see is prophesized.

After this moment of cosmic annihilation, the film continues with its first chapter, showing its

main character Justine apparently happily celebrating her wedding. As time goes on, however,

her effort of maintaining her apparent happiness becomes increasingly impossible. She becomes

increasingly distracted by the stars in the sky, and sees one star that seems odd to her. Her

increasingly bizarre behavior becomes connected to this odd star. By the end of the party

however, Justine has determined to retreat from the marriage, as she seems unable to function

within this paradigm. Consequently, chapter 2 begins with Justine’s collapse. As with her

collapse, Melancholia is now no longer an odd star that she catches a glance of in the sky, but

rather it has become a planet, in vision of everyone, threatening to destroy the entirety of the

world. As everyone panics, Justine is familiar with this planet, she goes on the riverbed and

bathes in its light. Ultimately, the film ends with a view of the destruction at the level of the

“In the last 20 years, what I did was I was just destroying the stories and I tried to involve some other element like
time, because our lives are happening in time […] But what do we call information? What do we call action? Maybe
dying is also information. Maybe a piece of wall, or when you are just watching the landscape and it’s raining
outside, [that] is also a part of time and also part of our lives and you cannot separate that.” (Electric Sheep
Magazine)

25
earth. But this destruction we have already seen in the prologue. It is the destruction that Justine

embraces in her collapse, as it is the destruction of her inner images and metaphors, of her inner

world. What we see in the prologue exists, for the time being, only at the level of potentiality –

the world is destroyed however the film obviously continues – we experience it, in time, before

witnessing the existence of Justine. As Justine appears, however, through the choices that she

makes in the film and through her behavior, she brings this prologue, this dream of destruction,

into being, and her world is effectively destroyed. This is yet another type of self-determining

consciousness in cinema. It is not static, it does not adapt, what it does is it creates a self-

fulfilling prophecy of its destruction. Therefore Melancholia quite masterfully represents that

otherwise unique dimension of a depressed consciousness’s drive towards self-destruction.

This is all to say that, when one understands consciousness as the compulsion towards certain

images, and not others, then it becomes quite clear that the diversity of potential consciousnesses

to be represented is infinite. This diversity is as infinite as the diversity of dreams and potential

human sensations. As I have shown above, it is not just the diversity of human consciousness

that cinema can represent, but it can rather go beyond and build directed consciousnesses, ones

that can exist solely as films or, as the only available explicative analogous tool, as dreams. This

is the diegesis of film consciousness, worlds built that answer solely to their self-referential and

self-imposed laws of reality.

26
[V] Contemplating the Oniric Consciousness

I have so far argued that oniric films create their own internal system of self-referential

metaphors in images, and that this ultimately constitutes a consciousness. The question that

follows, therefore, is, if one understands cinema as the representation of a consciousness, how

does this allow for a type of communication?

In Mystifying Movies, Carroll contradicts a belief widely held by psycho-semiotic theory, and

especially by Baudry and Metz, according to which cinema spectators are understood to not be

able to distinguish the illusion of cinema from reality12 – that is, that there is an inherently

irrational aspect to the process of watching movies. He writes:

The illusion of reality plus the mundane facts of interacting with representations
result in an embarrassing inconsistency. The spectator is said to both believe
and not believe that the representation is a representation. At this point, we
must consider whether one should abandon one wing of this contradiction, or
accept that the spectator is in a contradictory state and postulate some psychic
mechanism, like Metzian disavowal, to explain how the spectator tolerates this
contradictory state. Most contemporary film theorists appear to prefer the
latter tack. But I, instead, advocate that we simply abandon the illusion of reality
thesis, i.e., that we deny that the spectator takes the representation for reality,
thereby believing it is something it is not. (99)

Indeed, it is curious to see how long this argument of the spectator seeing cinema as reality has

been upheld. This is perhaps one of the fundamental reasons for the degree of confusion that

12
“So to mobilize psychoanalysis, we must show that the phenomena or behavior in question are irrational rather
than rational. At the very least, one problem with Metz, Baudry, and their epigones is that they have not bothered
to show that such things as the cinematic apparatus or cinematic representation are irrational or that our
interactions with them as viewers are irrational. More importantly, it is not clear that anyone could show that these
phenomena are irrational.” (Carroll 51)

27
exists in “contemporary film theory”. For perhaps in the fabled story of the projection of the

Lumiere brothers’ L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1895) it is said that spectators fled in terror

as they believed an actual train was moving towards them, but if not in the following five

minutes, then surely at least in the next 118 years human beings must have realized that the train

on the screen is not, in fact, coming towards them, but that it is, indeed, a representation. I would

argue that this confusion in relation to the status of cinematic representation is one of the most

detrimental events in film theory, as for an art to be discussed in its proper terms of art, indeed

for it to be accepted as an art, its status of representation must be equally accepted.

Nietzsche, at the time when he was developing his essay “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral

Sense”, writes down the implications of his argument in his notebooks:

Thus arts treats illusion as illusion; therefore it does not wish to deceive; it is
true. Pure disinterested contemplation is possible only in regard to illusions
which have been recognized as illusions, illusions which have no desire to entice
us into belief and to this extent do not stimulate our wills at all. – Truth cannot
be recognized. Everything which is knowable is illusion. The significance of art as
truthful illusion. (Notebooks 88)

Therefore only in accepting cinema as the illusion that it is can one even speak of the art of

cinema. It is in this illusory status of representation that cinema can claim to hold any relevance

as an art, and it is only this status that allows it the degree of truth conferred to art that Nietzsche

describes.

Carroll also argues in favor of the recognition of cinema as illusion, not in the epistemic

pejorative sense, but illusion as representation:

What I wish to stress here is that recognition rather than illusion supplies us
with a perfectly adequate framework for characterizing the spectator’s
28
 apprehension of mimetic representation. […] Furthermore, I think that by using
recognition as our key concept, we can accommodate the intense response we
have in regard to mimetic representation. (103)

Consequently, what I propose is that oniric cinema, as an art composed of a series of self-

referential metaphoric images linked in time, offers one the illusion of consciousness, that is, a

representation of consciousness. Therefore with oniric cinema one is given the opportunity to

“disinterestedly” contemplate a consciousness. The mechanism of this contemplation, in the case

of oniric cinema, is not meant to convey a perfect understanding of the self-referential system of

image metaphors presented on screen, but rather, by virtue of contemplation, it activates one’s

own internal system of self-referential image metaphors. That is, through contemplation of a

oniric consciousness one is granted access, albeit temporarily, to one’s own “inner world of

images” as Pasolini describes it. Bergson in his argument for the selection of images as

consciousness ultimately concedes to memory that which gives perception its subjective

character, as memory will always be the key factor in the determination of the selection of

images. He writes:

Memory, inseparable in practice from perception, imports the past into the
present, contracts into a single intuition many moments of duration, and thus
by a twofold operation compels us, de facto, to perceive matter in ourselves,
whereas we, de jure, perceive matter within matter. (73)

Oniric cinema confers to its spectator the possibility of the function that Bergson here ascribes to

memory. Memory gives one the ability to contemplate (albeit not disinterestedly) one’s existence

in images. It is the ability to perceive images not only of the exterior, but within oneself, as

recollection is possible without the need to conceptualize in linguistic terms. Consequently,

oniric cinema virtually gives one the opportunity to contemplate the dreams, memory and images

29
of another consciousness. But because they are not one’s own memory and because one is aware

that he is being exposed to a representation, disinterested contemplation here acts as the enabler

towards one perceiving that matter in oneself which exists only in image form and can be

accessed only haphazardly, by an art such as cinema, by dreams or by mnemonic mechanisms.

Therefore, the issue with oniric cinema is not one of understanding and assimilating a foreign

“inner world of images”, but rather that it prompts the recognition of the existence of such a

thing as one’s “inner world of images”: the aesthetic existence (Schiller), man’s existence a

priori to language concepts. Oniric cinema therefore enables a degree of self-reflexivity, as that

which it awakens in response is man’s “inner world of images”, a world which is only accessible

in this mode of reflection. Through contemplation, one becomes aware of it, to one extent or

another. The claim here is not that there is a wholly illuminating effect on the entirety of the

aesthetic existence of man, but merely that in this contemplation of the oniric dimension of

consciousness one obtains an unprecedented connection to one’s own oniric consciousness.

[VI] Conclusion

I have argued that, in concordance with the manner in which humanity has developed its drive

towards abstract knowledge as a means of control, the theorizing of cinema has also fallen prey

to conceptual systems that ultimately ignore experience. The dominating mode of film theory,

that of psycho-semiology, has attempted to offer an all-encompassing universal Film Theory to

serve as the model for understanding cinema, however, in that attempt, what was not congruent

30
to this universal Film Theory has been discarded. This endeavor has proved to be detrimental to

film theory as a domain, as Carroll writes:

In fact, the desire for such a Film Theory may stand – and I would contend that it
has stood – in the way of acquiring theoretical insight into the workings of
cinema. (232)

Therefore, what this paper proposes is that one puts aside the hubris of absolute knowledge so

that one may acquire the chance to experience cinema and consequently to experience oneself.

Oniric Cinema, therefore, is to be understood as that art which gives one the ability to artistically

create consciousnesses. The potential diversity of oniric cinema can consequently be understood

as the potential diversity of dreams, with the addendum that they are dreams that can be created

by an individual with a certain degree of control. Therefore, the diegesis of the oniric film

consciousness is to be understood as that dimension which answers solely to human

“Anschauungen”. It is in this that there is to be found the most profound revival of Nietzsche’s

“artistically creating individual”. As with oniric cinema, one has quite literally the ability to

entirely disregard any rational web of concepts and shape and experience intuitive worlds and

dimensions that could potentially find an analogue only in the dream-world of man, for only in

dreams is there possible such a profound reshaping of the world around one singular feeling.

Oniric Cinema gives the possibility to create and experience the representation of dreams and

inner-images, and as such, it gives one the unique possibility of contemplating the dream state

and the world of inner images. In that ability for contemplation there can reside more

information than any one science could potentially claim to identify about dream mechanisms.

This is, therefore, the aesthetical truth of cinema, it has the ability to represent man’s experience

31
of images in a manner that is inconceivable in concepts and as such, as a “truthful art”, it has the

ability to utter artful truths that cannot be uttered through any other medium.

Literature

Baudry, Jean-Louis. "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus." Film

Quarterly 28.2 (1974): 39-47. JSTOR. Web. 09 Apr. 2014.

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Ed. Nancy Margaret. Paul, and William Scott Palmer. New
York: Zone, 1988. Print.

. Mystifying Movies: Fads & Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. New York:
Columbia UP, 1988. Print.

Metz, Christian. Film Language; a Semiotics of the Cinema. New York: Oxford UP, 1974. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. "On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense." Friedrich
Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language. Ed. Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent
New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 246-257. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Daniel Breazeale. Philosophy and Truth: Selections from
Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s. Amherst, NY: Humanity, 1999. Print

Pasolini, Pier Paolo. "The Cinema of Poetry." Movies and Methods: An Anthology. Ed. Bill
Nichols. Berkeley: University of California, 1976. 542-58. Print.

Prince, Stephen. "The Discourse of Pictures: Iconicity and Film Studies." Film Quarterly 47.1
(1993): 16-28. Print.

R sc i L u . “Onei ic Met ph in Fi m The y”. Kinema A Journal for Film and Audiovisual
Media. N.p., Fall 2002. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.
<http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/article.php?id=141/>
32
Schiller, Friedrich Von. On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters. Ed. ,
Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, and L. A. Willougby. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967. Print.

Stam, Robert. Film Theory: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. Print.

T s y n e sen e ich. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1987. Print.

Tarr, Belá. "The Turin Horse: Interview with Bela Tarr." Interview by Virginie Sélavy. Electric
Sheep. N.p., 4 June 2012. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.
<http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/features/2012/06/04/the-turin-horse-interview-with-
bela-tarr/>.

33