Reel Recommendations: Cinema is Dreaming II

Cinema is a space for communal dreaming; one of the few architectural relics of myth, magic and transcendence that remain in an otherwise fracturing economics of individualism, dislocation and the vast chaos and inequality of a world too busy – with the ‘reality’ of late and later-stage Capitalism – to save itself. Cinema is not immune to those forces, the constricting logic of deifying economics controls and alters much of the ‘content’ we consume, and yet ‘the cinema’ as a physical space and lived experience still holds (at least in the optimistic romanticism of this writer’s opinion) the potential for a communal resistance to such logic. What better way to resist the ‘working’ logic of capital than with the ‘playing’ logic of dreams?

In celebration of Tyneside Cinema’s new season ‘Dream Logic’, Reel Recommendations has decided to offer a historic journey through a century of cinema (starting later than the earliest origins of the medium, beginning instead in 1910 and travelling through to 2020) in pursuit of a fevered map of filmic dreams and dreamy films. Imagine yourself striding through the oneiric ages: a cinematic sleepwalker, dreaming with eyes wide open.

 

1930s

 

L’Age D’Or (Luis Buñuel, 1930)

 

Limite (Mário Peixoto,1931)

 

Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931)

Europa (Stefan & Fransiczka Themerson, 1931)

Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)

 

Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1932)

Vampyr (Carl Dreyer, 1932)

 

L’idee (Berthold Bartosch, 1932)

 

The Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau, 1932)

 

The Sin of Nora Moran (Phil Goldstone, 1933)

 

Zero de conduite (Jean Vigo, 1933)

 

Snow White, Betty Boop cartoon starring Cab Calloway (Dave Fleischer,1933)

 

L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)

 

Mad Love / The Hands of Orlac (Karle Freund, 1935)

 

Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, 1936)

 

1940s

 

 

Fantasia (Walt Disney, 1940)

 

Stranger on the Third Floor (Boris Ingster, 1940)

 

Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)

 

Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943)

 

I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)

Le Vampire (Jean Painelevé, 1945)

 

 

Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)

 

La belle et la bête (Jean Cocteau, 1946)

 

The Potted Psalm (James Broughton & Sidney Peterson, 1946)

 

The Cage (Sidney Peterson, 1947)

 

Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947)

 

Dreams That Money Can Buy (Hans Richter, 1947)

 

Letter from and Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948)

 

On the Edge (Curtis Harrington, 1949)

 

Inspirace (Karl Zemen, 1949)

 

 

Explore our full ‘Dream Logic’ season here!