James Benning, L. Cohen, 2018
The analogy frequently invoked between films and dreams is usually concerned with the experience of the audience. The spectator sits in darkness, and the sort of involvement the entertainment film invites necessitates a certain switching-off of consciousness, a losing of oneself in a fantasy-experience. But the analogy is also useful from the point of view of the filmmakers. Dreams — the embodiment of repressed desires, tensions, fears that our conscious mind rejects become possible when the "censor" that guards our subconscious relaxes in sleep, though even then the desires can only emerge in disguise, as fantasies that are 'innocent" or apparently meaningless.
One of the functions of the concept of "entertainment" — by definition, that which we don't take seriously, or think about much ("It's only entertainment”) — is to act as a kind of partial sleep of consciousness. For the filmmakers as well as for the audience, full awareness stops at the level of plot, action, and character, in which the most dangerous and subversive implications can disguise themselves and escape detection. This is why seemingly innocuous genre movies can be far more radical and fundamentally undermining than works of conscious social criticism, which must always concern themselves with the possibility of reforming aspects of a social system whose basic rightness must not be challenged. The old tendency to dismiss the Hollywood cinema as escapist always defined escape from, but escape logically must also be escape to. Dreams are also escapes, from the unresolved tensions of our lives into fantasies. Yet the fantasies are not meaningless; they can represent attempts to resolve those tensions in more radical ways than our consciousness can countenance.
Popular films, then, respond to interpretation as at once the personal dreams of their makers and the collective dreams of their audiences — the fusion made possible by the shared structures of a common ideology. It becomes easy, if this is granted, to offer a simple definition of horror films: they are our collective nightmares. The conditions under which a dream becomes a nightmare are (a) that the repressed wish is, from the point of view of consciousness, so terrible that it must be repudiated as loathsome, and (b) that it is so strong and powerful as to constitute a serious threat. The disreputability noted — the general agreement that horror above films are not to be taken seriously — works clearly for the genre viewed from this position. The censor (in both the common and the Freudian sense) is lulled into sleep and relaxes vigilance.
Robin Wood, American nightmare: essays on the horror film, 1979.
Editado por Robin Wood e Richard Lippe.
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James Benning, L. Cohen
Yann Gonzalez, Un couteau dans le coeur
Juliana Rojas, Marco Dutra, As Boas Maneiras
Ari Aster, Hereditary
Lars von Trier, The House That Jack Built
François Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell, Summer of 84
Andy Mitton, The Witch in the Window
Johannes Roberts, The Strangers: Prey at Night
John Krasinski, A Quiet Place
Shinichiro Ueda, Kamera o tomeru na! (One Cut of the Dead)
Joachim Trier, Thelma
Cory Finley, Thoroughbreds
Mike Flanagan, The Haunting of Hill House
Coralie Fargeat, Revenge
Duncan Skiles, The Clovehitch Killer
Justin Benson, The Endless
David Gordon Green, Halloween
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sanpo suru shinryakusha (Before We Vanish)
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