Christopher Nolan’s Inception, is a film set in a world where technology exists that can gain access to the mind through dreams. Nolan builds a construct and then plays within that construct. The set up allos him to play with narrative, semiotics, and the rules and limitations of physical laws. The dreams used in the film are recreations of recognisable urban landscapes to car chases and gunfights: these could be read as documentary elements inserted into a genre (science fiction) film. The people invading the subconscious of the target mind keep up the appearance of reality, to keep the dreamer unaware of the dream. This echoes the concept of ‘suspension of disbelief’ which is a mechanism for justifying the use of the 'fantastic' in literature. The film also references the craft of film making itself. Ariadne the architect is set design, Arthur functions as a producer, Eames is their star (taking on other identities beyond his own) and Yusuf the projectionist, providing the venue for the dream movie to occur.
Cinema has often been compared to dreams. It is interesting to compare Inception with Hitchcock’s 'Spellbound' which has a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí.
The area of theory that could be used of course is psychoanalysis. Read: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2001/jun/17/features.review this review picks out the importance of Freud’s ideas on how we can read cinema. “The birth of cinema offered a collective sense of what Freud called the uncanny: the images on screen were both familiar and somehow strange, alive and yet lifeless, real but illusory.”
No comments:
Post a Comment