Do we have any Sigmund Freud experts here?

[Squee]

So, I've finally started writing my master thesis about ambient music and dreams and how things can be visually and auditorily out of focus - at least according to me. Anyway, not long ago I was told that when people started making movies Sigmund Freud freaked out, because he felt that this was the only way we could recreate dreams. I was told that he was fascinated by the "point of view from nowhere" and so on, but here's the problem... I can't find anything about this anywhere at all, so I was wondering if any of you guys could point me in the right direction?

 

Pwease?

[Guest Aserinsky]

*awaits arrival of dese manz hatin*

 

You might want to look at the relationship between the surrealist film movement and Sigmund Freud, they were highly influenced by Freud's ideas and I'm sure there was a lot of discussion and criticism of his ideals within the surrealist movement at the time. I've found this paper on Sage Journals (I'm not sure if you'll be able to access it, my university doesn't unfortunately) but it's a paper on Andre Breton and Sigmund Freud directly, I can't vouch for how good this article is but hopefully this could be a good point of research to start from!

[Guest Lucy Faringold]

quick Google search brought up this essay which mentions Freud and cinema:

 

http://www.answers.com/topic/cinema-and-psychoanalysis

 

"Even though he allowed himself to be filmed by his close friends (Marie Bonaparte, Mark Brunswick, René Laforgue, Philip Lehrman, see Mijolla, A. de, 1994), Freud was never very interested in the cinema. Arguing that "he didn't feel that a plastic representation of our abstractions worthy of the name could be made," he disavowed his disciples, Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs, for their collaboration on the script of The Mysteries of a Soul (G. W. Pabst, 1925). He also refused a considerable sum of money
offered by Samuel Goldwyn to develop a script on "famous love affairs." This suspicion of the filmic representation of psychoanalysis continued after the death of its founder. It was primarily Freud's daughter who opposed any attempt to make a film about Freud. Fearing Anna Freud's hostility, John Huston abandoned the idea of using Marilyn Monroe to play the part of Cecily in Freud, the Secret Passion (1962)."

[Guest chunky]

carl jung is better. he also talked about dreams

[Guest Mirezzi]

You might want to read Lacan, though I can't say I recommend it. Dense, impenetrable, nonsensical, brilliant, typically at the same time.

[Squee]

Yeah, Zizek mentions Lacan in The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and talks about how movies tell us a lot about the unconscious. He says something along the lines of, "Cinema doesn't give us what we desire. It teaches us how to desire".

 

Anyway, I guess it wasn't Freud then. Damn.

[plstik]

 

That which is within the frame (characters, props) is a relatively closed system, and can be treated as a spatial composition. However, it can never be completely closed, because of the way it can define the "out-of-the-frame". This is particularly apparent in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Deleuze defines the shot (which is dependent on the position and movement of the camera) as the movement-image (p22). The mobile camera acts as a general equivalent to forms of locomotion, for instance walking, planes, cars (p22). The great moments of cinema are often when the camera, following its own movement, turns its back on a character (p23). In this way, the camera acts as a mechanical consciousness in its own right, separate from the consciousness of the audience or the hero (p22).

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_1:_The_Movement_Image

 

?

[azatoth]

Freud is a bunch of hogwash anyways.

[Squee]

 

 

That which is within the frame (characters, props) is a relatively closed system, and can be treated as a spatial composition. However, it can never be completely closed, because of the way it can define the "out-of-the-frame". This is particularly apparent in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Deleuze defines the shot (which is dependent on the position and movement of the camera) as the movement-image (p22). The mobile camera acts as a general equivalent to forms of locomotion, for instance walking, planes, cars (p22). The great moments of cinema are often when the camera, following its own movement, turns its back on a character (p23). In this way, the camera acts as a mechanical consciousness in its own right, separate from the consciousness of the audience or the hero (p22).

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_1:_The_Movement_Image

 

?

 

That's pretty interesting and kinda supports the whole idea of cinema being able to portray dreams.

I just found this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneiric_%28film_theory%29

I think I should dig deeper into some of this.

 

You know what...? It might be interesting to tell you guys about what I'm writing about since it's all about ambient music and cinema and you guys might have some interesting things to say about this.

 

To me, reverberation is what "out of focus" is to the visual media. If you take a look at the ambient track that I've embedded in my signature you will see that the image that accompanies the music is fairly blurry and it might take you a couple of seconds before you can see what it is - or maybe not. Anyway, you can blur an image to make it hard to see what it's supposed to be an image of, but you can also take something like the sound of a piano and manipulate it with reverb and filters etc. to stretch it out and make it into something you would probably call a drone or something.

Imagine you've painted a picture of a woman on a canvas. Then take your fingers and wipe them across the wet paint. The paint will get all smooshed together but you can still tell what it used to be a painting of. It might take some time, but you can still make out some details that will help you understand what the painting used to depict.

I hope this makes sense.

 

So here's where the dream part starts. When I think back on my dreams I can rarely ever describe what the people in my dreams looked like. They're all extremely blurry and the same goes for the scenery. As a matter of fact, when I think back on most of my dreams they all look a bit like the photo in my signature... but this is not something I've ever thought about until I was asked to make music for an art video about dreams and about waking up. I immediately started making ambient music for the video and the artist loved it and a lot of the soundscapes in the art video are made out of real life sounds such as people talking or instruments that everyone immediately would recognize - but everything was drenched in reverb and filters so you really have to pay attention to the sound before you can actually tell what instruments are being used to create these sounds.

 

So to boil it all down, when I think back on my dreams all I see is a blurry mess, and I believe that you can also "blur" sound by manipulating it and making it unrecognizable.

 

So... I believe that ambient/drone music and manipulating regular sounds into something unrecognizable is very fitting music for dream sequences in movies. Take Lynch as an example... two of the best dream sequences (the scene where Fred meets The Mystery Man in Lost Highway, and the diner scene in Mulholland Drive) he has ever created are accompanied by some of the darkest drone music ever. Another great example is how the first note of "Non, Je Ne Regrette" by Edith Piaf was transformed into something completely unrecognizable for the theme for Inception. Hell, the movie might not have been what it could have been, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that it's a great idea and the fact that the real melody plays an important role throughout the entire movie is really neat.

 

Jesus Christ, I'm rambling...

[encey]

Dunno if you'll have access to it, but here's an article called "Films and Dreams" by Robert Curry, where he explains why the two are similar, but also importantly different: www.jstor.org/stable/428950

 

I think if Freud's theories are going to have any immediate relation to movies, it's going to have to do with the ideas of displacement and transformation, where movie characters, images, scenes and settings can be interpreted as having unconscious meanings 'displaced' onto them in the same way that the elements of dreams can.

 

That's a slightly different kind of manipulation than blurring. I think the interesting question is, if your claim about the appropriate soundtrack to dreams is right, why is it right, and how can we tell that it's right? Do all people experience things as 'blurry' in their dreams? Is it just an artistic convention that we've come to immediately grasp as signaling 'dream' (in the same way you know a flashback is coming when a harp plays and Wayne and Garth go 'diddldidldidldlledioo-diddledidldleildoo!')?

[Guest Lucy Faringold]

I think the interesting question is, if your claim about the appropriate soundtrack to dreams is right, why is it right, and how can we tell that it's right? Do all people experience things as 'blurry' in their dreams? Is it just an artistic convention that we've come to immediately grasp as signaling 'dream' (in the same way you know a flashback is coming when a harp plays and Wayne and Garth go 'diddldidldidldlledioo-diddledidldleildoo!')

 

Yeah, this is interesting. I think I would describe the dreamstate as 'fluid' rather than blurry. I think a lot of the perceived 'bluriness' is due to distortions of memory, due to the fact that in most dreams you don't bring your full waking state of consciousness with you. Lucid dreams would be distinguished by the fact that you bring more of that waking consciousness and thus have experiences that can be as vivid as waking life (often more vivid/expansive, in fact).

[TRiP]

I did my thesis on 'Dreams as Cinema, Cinema as Dreams' basically looking at the connection between oneiric cinema and our dreams - how cinema stands as a collective unconscious for our dreams (Jung style)

you're more then welcome to have a look through it for info if ya were stuck for stuff, although it may be more film oriented than sound/music - however, I did a bit about silent cinema which might be of interest - how the Russians of the soviet montage days (among other worldwide surrealists) were highly against the introduction of sound to film, or more specifically sync sound,

that's a paragraph taken from it summing it up:

 

Montage for the Soviets provided a method in which they could juxtapose random

shots together and allow meaning to emerge from within. The adding of synchronised sound

to these individual shots ‘increases the independence of its meaning’ therefore leading to the

‘detriment of montage’3. They felt sound would objectify the image and not allow for

personal subjective interpretation – alike Jung who pioneered the ‘subjective level’ in dream

interpretation as opposed to Freud who pioneered an ‘objective level’. However, many of the

people who were against synchronous sound did admit the positive possibilities that

asynchronous sound could provide in representing subjective emotional realities rather than

objective naturalistic ones and could lead to creation of further potential meanings and

become a new tool in the montage tool box. This use of asynchronous sound in film can be

likened to ‘dream incorporation’ – which is the natural phenomenon whereby the mind

incorporates external environmental sounds into our dreams, but not exactly in the same

form as the source object. Through this process our mind is perceiving a sound and

incorporating it in a subjectified manner, which fits with the emotional context of the

particular dream.

[Guest Lucy Faringold]

 

 

 

 

This use of asynchronous sound in film can be likened to ‘dream incorporation’ – which is the natural phenomenon whereby the mind

incorporates external environmental sounds into our dreams, but not exactly in the same form as the source object. Through this process our mind is perceiving a sound and incorporating it in a subjectified manner, which fits with the emotional context of the particular dream.

 

This reminds me I did this with some visual information the other day - dreamed I was covered in bright boils all over my body, woke up in a panic and realised it was just my spotty duvet cover wrapped around me.

[vamos scorcho]

[vamos scorcho]

this is pretty interesting:

it's about Blue Velvet

http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/Oediblue.html

[dr lopez]

Freud is a bunch of hogwash anyways.

what does this mean? it's social theory and philosophy, not science. additionally, what the fuck do scientists these days have to say about dreams? We still have no clue 100 years later. Sure we know people dream, and how they dream, getting closer to why they dream, but no one really touches the contents of dreams, which is where I believe Frued's genius shines.

[encey]

Well that's exactly what philosophers and psychologists reject, if they reject Freud's views--the idea that the content of dreams is always, or mostly, or most importantly, repressed and transformed beliefs and desires.

[joshuatxuk]

[Hoodie]

 

Freud is a bunch of hogwash anyways.

what does this mean? it's social theory and philosophy, not science. additionally, what the fuck do scientists these days have to say about dreams? We still have no clue 100 years later. Sure we know people dream, and how they dream, getting closer to why they dream, but no one really touches the contents of dreams, which is where I believe Frued's genius shines.

 

most of my psych classes that touched on dreams have said the following: one of the purposes of rem sleep, where dreaming commonly occurs, is memory consolidation. the conscious content of dreams is simply a by-product of the firing of neural pathways in this process. i haven't read anything specifically on dreams so there's probs more to it, but i think freud was way off target.

 

that's not to say that freud didn't have some important work. i totally disagree that he was all "hogwash." yeah, he was a misogynist and obsessed with sexual repression, but he had some good points about defense mechanisms and transforming psychology into a more scientific field (i mean, he was trained as a neurologist...).

[Alcofribas]

^^to me this sort of avoids the question. i mean, to call conscious content (whether waking or dreaming) a by-product of some neural process doesn't do much to explain consciousness or dreams at all, unless i'm missing something here.

[whylessness]

 

my compadre

[Hoodie]

^^to me this sort of avoids the question. i mean, to call conscious content (whether waking or dreaming) a by-product of some neural process doesn't do much to explain consciousness or dreams at all, unless i'm missing something here.

 

what are you trying to explain about consciousness?

[goDel]

 

 

 

Freud is a bunch of hogwash anyways.

 

what does this mean? it's social theory and philosophy, not science. additionally, what the fuck do scientists these days have to say about dreams? We still have no clue 100 years later. Sure we know people dream, and how they dream, getting closer to why they dream, but no one really touches the contents of dreams, which is where I believe Frued's genius shines.

most of my psych classes that touched on dreams have said the following: one of the purposes of rem sleep, where dreaming commonly occurs, is memory consolidation. the conscious content of dreams is simply a by-product of the firing of neural pathways in this process. i haven't read anything specifically on dreams so there's probs more to it, but i think freud was way off target.

 

that's not to say that freud didn't have some important work. i totally disagree that he was all "hogwash." yeah, he was a misogynist and obsessed with sexual repression, but he had some good points about defense mechanisms and transforming psychology into a more scientific field (i mean, he was trained as a neurologist...).

As far as I can tell can Freud's work happily coexists with current scientific knowledge, to a certain extent. Freud was always heavy on the sex and parents department. So as far as meanings go he is largely of the table. But trying to interpret these 'conscious by-products' is still very much on the table. So in this sense, Freud is still valuable for opening the door to discussions about dreams. The technical aspects dont deny the more subjective aspects.

 

Btw, for a study project on connectionistic models we had to train a model on doing a certain task, and then emulate a rem-sleep to see if we could get that consolidation effect (more specific, would the model be better after a night sleep?). That was some years ago, so the idea was to figure out how this consolidation proces should be modelled for this connectionistic model. I believe we settled mainly at just random activitaions and allowing some pruning ( dropping connections). I can't remember any specific outcomes though. Which basically says: no real or interesting outcomes...