Shades Of Consciousness & The Cinematic Dream
Thoughts On: Types Of Meaning In Cinema
This is a look at how we engage different kinds of films and their meaning.
In my best estimation, art is simultaneously a collective dream and collective dreaming. That is to say that art is the product of unconscious minds and thus a projected dream, but also a perceived dream and thus a vision dreamt somewhat unconsciously. I believe this to be especially true with those who simply experience art. For the general audience member who just watches movies, just sees paintings and just reads books - often with the genuine, but ill-understood belief that they are only being entertained or are just entertaining a hobby - art remains as pure of a dream as it can be. This is especially true with children. A different process occurs with those who analyse and critique arts. This process sees the dream move out of the unconscious and up into the conscious and maybe even back down again. Alas, whilst dreams can be analysed, they never stop being dreams, which is to say that they retain a mysterious and shadowy element of unconsciousness no matter what.
What fascinates me most in regards to this idea of art, more specifically cinema, as a dream is the element of meaning. As is the philosophy of the psychoanalysts, the unconscious bears the most meaning and the most profound answers to questions of human psychology and the human complex. The dream is one of the primary roads to the unconscious for the psychoanalysts, and so it is a primary road to understanding and meaning. Alas, whilst a figure like Freud considered this idea literally, Jung is one of the key figures who sees the fundamental narratives we tell as dream-like, and so roads into, not just the individual unconscious, but the unconscious of all of us: the collective unconscious. Jung's philosophy of the collective unconscious was profoundly simple. He posited that we so easily consider ourselves collectively human in regards to our physiology and biology, and can do so through our psychology too. In regards to biological science, every human is a unique individual, but nonetheless operates with a heart, lungs, brain, spine, etc. that aren't unique at all on a macroscopic level. What then makes us all biologically human is not necessarily our individuality alone - our unique genetic code - but our capacity for individual expression through our common constructs; through eyes, which everyone has, reaches out the soul. Such is just as true in the psychological domain for someone such as Jung. Psychologically, we are all individuals. However, there are psychic constructs that are tantamount to hearts, lungs and spines. Jung called these the archetypes and they were concepts of moral and behavioural being that we all embody, reflect upon and project onto the world, and must in turn wrangle and contend with as to express our higher individuality. It is through the archetypes that Jung found meaning in the unconscious; meaning that transcends personal existence and is in communication with the great human conception of the beyond from which we emerged and were gifted our consciousness. I believe a very similar process can occur through cinema.
With cinematic stories as dreams, they become gateways into the collective unconscious presiding over modern society. And this is not to say that movies express a quality of the unconsciousness that some of our oldest mythological narratives do. Movies interact with the collective unconscious somewhere between unconsciously and consciously. That is to say that they are operating on levels far more self-aware and conscious than more fundamental stories are thought to. As a result, they mould meaning, comment on meaning, and also mean to have meaning, they do not just embody/express it. They do this knowingly and unknowingly and so put between the screen and the abstract collective unconscious a persona and an ego via the very present artist. Because cinema is always constructed, it is not a true dream - but a dream of sorts, I believe, it nonetheless is. Alas, before anyone can begin analysing the elements of any cinematic dream, routing out its archetypes and, in turn, accessing its meaning, it would be important to ask what kind of dreams cinema can dream up.
Cinema is a construct, a dream if you'll have it, that exists between a screen, an audience and filmmakers; it exist between objective reality, perceptual interpretation and perceptual projection. As a result, there are three factors that determine the kind of dream that can be conjured and called cinema. Firstly, there is the objective reality: the screen. One (audience and/or filmmaker) can watch a film with the screen being a screen, or a screen as a window into a different reality - one can even mediate between these two views of what a screen is. As a result, there are two key philosophies of what a screen is; a screen can either be a human construct, and thus all that it contains is seen as a human construct, or it can be a functional illusion and a magic box that allows us to peer into other 'real' realms that are, themselves, autonomous and self-dependent. As a child, one often assumes the latter, that the screen is a window into alternate reality. That isn't to say that the screen is literally seen as a portal into a different place - though, for some particularly young children, maybe this is true. Whilst a toddler or a young child can tap on a television screen as a movie plays and know that what exists within isn't truly existing within, they do not necessarily perceive what is within to be non-real and, in turn, inconsequential. Movies can deeply affect children. As most parents know, movies can scare children because they do not understand that what they're seeing isn't real. And parents understand this quite specifically. It is not that the child doesn't know that an evil clown can't come out of the TV, it is just that they can't separate their unconscious fear from such a recognition and perceive what is on the screen as truly inconsequential. We know this to be true as adults. We know that monsters can't come out of the TV - moreover, that they don't exist within. Nonetheless, movies can still scare us because we do not always have the ability to separate this fact from our unconscious urge and recognition of consequence; the evil clown surely can't come out of the TV, but try tell you're unconscious nervous system this when you jump out of your seat.
In truth, some people can assure their nervous systems that they are safe and, in turn, that the screen is just a screen. Some of us can then tell ourselves that "this is just a movie" and not be affected by even a jump scare. We do the same thing any time we start to question how a filmmaker blocked a scene or achieved a certain shot. We stop seeing the constructed illusion of a cinematic space and the screen stops being a portal into an alternate dream-reality. One mediates between these two modes when they not only ask what a filmmaker is doing with a camera, but asks why and how this affects story. In such a circumstance, a screen is simultaneously real and unreal. In being both, a screen can become supra-real and thus transcendent of the dichotomy of real and unreal and thus something new, whole, unified and imbued with greater meaning.
The screen is just one component of three. The next we can discuss is the audience themselves who can project into the cinematic space between the screen, themselves and the filmmaker, a persona or self of varying quality. We can save the individual analysis of the filmmaker's role as they project into the cinematic space a persona or self, too. The difference between the filmmaker and audience, however, is that the audience projects a persona or their self as to understand and experience a movie in the context of themselves; a filmmaker projects a persona or self to express something, to put out, not to receive.
The difference between persona and self is quite simple. The persona is a conscious construct guided by unconscious drives. The self on the other hand cannot be constructed; it is what we inherently are and so it oversees all that we become. The self can then be consciousness guided by unconscious drive, or it can, to some degree or another, just be unconscious drive for a person who never engages in introspection and self-analysis, who is not self-aware. By projecting a persona into a cinematic space, an audience member or filmmaker is choosing to play a game of sorts; to construct a framework through which a cinematic story can either be told or received. An audience member or filmmaker can do this as they watch/make a movie and decide to do so with certain ideological constructs. When they watch a movie, they project a persona that is constructed by the rules of an ideology of any kind and thus operate in regards to it. For example, if you like looking for the 'sins' a movie makes, you subscribe to a set of ideals and one of them may be that exposition is bad. If you project this persona into a cinematic space as you watch it develop, you will see and interact with it with little tolerance for exposition and in turn mould the cinematic space around rules it may not have been constructed to comply with. Another example may be found in being a teacher. If you watch a film as a teacher, you will see it in regards to the lessons it can help you teach children or the lessons it is already teaching children. What becomes obvious here is that the rules that come along with that persona drastically affect the cinematic space - whether you are projecting into it as a teacher who is making a film or gleaning from it as a teacher in an audience.
As opposed to projecting a consciously-constructed persona into a movie, which, to a degree, is inevitable, one can engage it unconsciously. This, quite ironically, can take conscious effort. Nonetheless, it is possible to watch a film as an individual who is not just bound to a set of ideas and ideals, but is the conveyor and manager of all such things. When one watches a film with multiple personas I believe they make a move towards watching it as a true individual. This is because, if you are both a teacher, a father, a husband, a Jew and a part-time fire-breather, you will be able to have multiple sets of ideals conflict and conflate when you watch a film in a manner that simulates the way in which your self conflicts and conflates multiple domains and rule sets as to be you. By watching a film as the multiple yous, in turn, the overarching you, you begin engaging cinema as an individual self and, in turn, project your unconscious temperament and abstract ideals into a film. This is just as true for a filmmaker constructing a film. They can choose to make a film as a feminist and thus will construct a political document, or, they can choose to make a film as a wife, daughter, Cambodian and knife-enthusiast with a masters in business management. For the fact that people are always and inherently composed of multiple personas in such a respect, I find it reasonable to suggest that we watch and make films as our selves--through our self--far more than we do our personas. Alas, it remains a possibility that one can make or watch a film as just a persona or as a self despite the fact that there is always, at least, some minor conflation and confusion between the two.
To take a step back, we have three major elements of the cinematic space - the screen, the audience and the filmmaker - and, in turn, we have the three factors of its construction: objective reality, perceptual interpretation and perceptual projection. These three factors are divided by 4 positions; objective reality, the screen, can be seen as real or unreal; perceptual interpretation, the audience, can function in regards to a persona or self; and perceptual projection, the filmmaker, can also function in regards to a persona or self. What emerges from the collision of these different positions are 4 different kinds of cinematic space with 4 different kinds of meaning. These four types are: conscious, non-conscious, unconscious and subconscious. These four terms imply the kind of dream-meaning that a cinematic space can be perceived as having and so we shall look at each individually and then in regards to the equations that build them up.
Conscious dreams are pseudo-dreams; they are imaginations and thoughts sold as products of the unconscious when they are, in fact, tightly wrapped in conscious decision. The conscious cinematic space is manifested when the screen is real and the audience and filmmaker projects a persona:
This kind of cinematic space is often reserved for documentaries, especially those of the political kind. Experiencing documentaries of this kind, the screen presents itself as a message board of facts whilst the filmmaker and audience member analyse those facts with pre-constructed sets of ideas. Narrative films that operate with the same equation will break the cinematic space whilst demanding and receiving a specific set of ideals so that it may be interpreted. This kind of cinema can then be propagandistic, highly reflexive or exploitative. Most propaganda then assumes people are thinking a certain way and enforces their beliefs with what should be perceived as just reality, or a highly symbolic reality, emitted from the screen. Deeply reflexive films, however, play games. This game is acknowledged with the screen being seen as a screen, as real. It is then played with using sets of rules, or sets of ideals, that must clash. An example of this could be Interior. Leather Bar. This is a film that has you perceive the screen as real and unreal, but mostly real (meaning consciously constructed), and then introduces rules of identity politics that must conflict and conflate. How one concludes will determine if the meaning of the film is solely conscious or if it transcends consciousness and becomes deep or poetic (terms we will come to shortly). Finally, the exploitation film perceives the screen as a board upon which to play a game; the audience and filmmaker becomes players who bring forth personas: the filmmaker must scare, disgust, arouse, etc. and the audience must refuse or indulge and/or confront this. Conscious cinema of this kind is sometimes an ironic test of the cinematic space. Alas, the meaning of the game played needn't always be conscious. It can very easily be non-conscious.
Non-conscious cinematic spaces are like dreams that are forgotten or maybe never even realised by their dreamer. They require the screen to be unreal, in turn, it is not seen to be constructed, and the audience and filmmaker project personas into them:
This kind of cinematic space is so often entertainment that is not assigned meaning. It is then created by an audience member who thinks they are just a consumer waiting to be entertained and a filmmaker who thinks that are just a producer who must entertain. With the screen operating as a fantasy-land and an illusion that is never questioned, it engages the senses, but remains benign and cannot be interacted with. Thus, it is never given meaning and/or the meaning that may reside within it is never found. The kind of films with non-conscious spaces are so often pop-corn movies that no one takes seriously - or are very hard to put meaning into. This space can, however, also be tantamount to propaganda with a false reality being sold and understood by simple idea-structures. It lacks real meaning and is just a means of projecting rules and engaging certain feelings.
Next, we come to unconscious, or deep, cinematic spaces - spaces that delve into the unconscious and so have meaning buried within them. These spaces operate with the screen as unreal or real and the filmmaker and audience project their selves into the space:
These two kinds of spaces are rather precious as they come to represent two deeply personal kinds of cinema that require a genuine and complete engagement with what is on a screen. The difficulty that arises when cinema becomes highly personal, however, is that meaning can become too difficult to find. This becomes the case when the screen is seen as unreal. In such circumstances the filmmaker and audience do not know how to decode what they sense to have deep meaning and to be bound to the essence of their being. However, when the screen becomes real, when it is seen as a construct, coherent meaning is much easier found and placed. This isn't to say that deep cinematic spaces with unreal screens do not have meaning; these bear the potential to have the most meaning - it is just most difficult to find. As a result, a mediation between seeing what is on the screen as constructed and a functional illusion often helps tease out truth. I find that our personally favourite movies have deep cinematic spaces with unreal screens. Deeply profound and difficult movies, or decoded personal favourites, usually have real screens.
Finally, we come to sub-conscious, or poetic, spaces. Poetic cinematic dreams are dreams that are stuck between consciousness and unconsciousness. These are the most likely films to emerge from cinema because cinema itself is also stuck between consciousness and unconsciousness. Cinema strives to journey downwards, but so often only gets so far, and so becomes sub-conscious; not completely unconscious, but almost there. These spaces utilise real and unreal screens and are built upon a disagreement between audience and filmmaker:
These four equations' outcomes are quite similar, but we should split them further into abstractly and technically poetic spaces. Thus, spaces made upon a disagreement between audience and filmmaker, but have real screens, are technical whilst those with unreal screens are abstract:
The poetic spaces emerge from an audience member wanting to interpret a film in a certain way or a filmmaker wanting to say something specific. When the audience member wants a movie to say something in accordance with their persona and ideological make-up, but are confronted with a cinema that is more complex than what it is created due to its projection through a genuine and complex self of a filmmaker, then the audience member either provides 'a perspective' or simplifies the film. This can be good or bad, it simply depends on how well this is done. To provide an example, a feminist film critic will see all films in accordance to the structure provided by their ideology. A filmmaker may not make a film as a feminist--if they do, the film becomes a conscious or non-conscious document--alas, if a filmmaker does not make a film as a feminist, but has their film read by a feminist, poetry is made out of the matter of life; the feminist turns the life provided by the filmmaker into poetry. In the reverse, when a filmmaker makes a film as, for example, a feminist, but is read by just an individual without this lens, they will make poetry out of rules.
It is dependent on how the screen is seen that will determine if the poetic space is technical or abstract. If a screen is real and constructed, it will be analysed as if it is meant to say something or as if it is already saying something. Those who take a film projected by the self of a filmmaker and engage it with a persona will find meaning through reduction. Those who take a film projected by a filmmaker's persona and engage it with their self will find meaning through addition; they build towards the rules, or build off of them.
Conversely, if a screen is unreal and an illusion, it will be analysed as if it is unconsciously saying or merely implying something. Meaning is then abstractly given to a film by an audience member. This can be done reductionistically or additively; reductionistically if the persona reads the self and additively if the self reads the persona.
There are values and virtues embedded in each of these spaces. However, there are also pitfalls and vices. One can easily interpret these for themselves and so I will not provide such an analysis. Nonetheless, having provided these different kinds of cinematic spaces and the meanings that they produce, we can become more capable of recognising what filmmakers are doing, how they are operating and how we are operating. In some cases we can alter our perception, in others we can focus our analysis and criticism. But, the point of the exercise one may engage when using these ideas is to become conscious in our journey into and out of unconsciousness and thus become more efficient and capable miners of different kinds of meaning.
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This is a look at how we engage different kinds of films and their meaning.
In my best estimation, art is simultaneously a collective dream and collective dreaming. That is to say that art is the product of unconscious minds and thus a projected dream, but also a perceived dream and thus a vision dreamt somewhat unconsciously. I believe this to be especially true with those who simply experience art. For the general audience member who just watches movies, just sees paintings and just reads books - often with the genuine, but ill-understood belief that they are only being entertained or are just entertaining a hobby - art remains as pure of a dream as it can be. This is especially true with children. A different process occurs with those who analyse and critique arts. This process sees the dream move out of the unconscious and up into the conscious and maybe even back down again. Alas, whilst dreams can be analysed, they never stop being dreams, which is to say that they retain a mysterious and shadowy element of unconsciousness no matter what.
What fascinates me most in regards to this idea of art, more specifically cinema, as a dream is the element of meaning. As is the philosophy of the psychoanalysts, the unconscious bears the most meaning and the most profound answers to questions of human psychology and the human complex. The dream is one of the primary roads to the unconscious for the psychoanalysts, and so it is a primary road to understanding and meaning. Alas, whilst a figure like Freud considered this idea literally, Jung is one of the key figures who sees the fundamental narratives we tell as dream-like, and so roads into, not just the individual unconscious, but the unconscious of all of us: the collective unconscious. Jung's philosophy of the collective unconscious was profoundly simple. He posited that we so easily consider ourselves collectively human in regards to our physiology and biology, and can do so through our psychology too. In regards to biological science, every human is a unique individual, but nonetheless operates with a heart, lungs, brain, spine, etc. that aren't unique at all on a macroscopic level. What then makes us all biologically human is not necessarily our individuality alone - our unique genetic code - but our capacity for individual expression through our common constructs; through eyes, which everyone has, reaches out the soul. Such is just as true in the psychological domain for someone such as Jung. Psychologically, we are all individuals. However, there are psychic constructs that are tantamount to hearts, lungs and spines. Jung called these the archetypes and they were concepts of moral and behavioural being that we all embody, reflect upon and project onto the world, and must in turn wrangle and contend with as to express our higher individuality. It is through the archetypes that Jung found meaning in the unconscious; meaning that transcends personal existence and is in communication with the great human conception of the beyond from which we emerged and were gifted our consciousness. I believe a very similar process can occur through cinema.
With cinematic stories as dreams, they become gateways into the collective unconscious presiding over modern society. And this is not to say that movies express a quality of the unconsciousness that some of our oldest mythological narratives do. Movies interact with the collective unconscious somewhere between unconsciously and consciously. That is to say that they are operating on levels far more self-aware and conscious than more fundamental stories are thought to. As a result, they mould meaning, comment on meaning, and also mean to have meaning, they do not just embody/express it. They do this knowingly and unknowingly and so put between the screen and the abstract collective unconscious a persona and an ego via the very present artist. Because cinema is always constructed, it is not a true dream - but a dream of sorts, I believe, it nonetheless is. Alas, before anyone can begin analysing the elements of any cinematic dream, routing out its archetypes and, in turn, accessing its meaning, it would be important to ask what kind of dreams cinema can dream up.
Cinema is a construct, a dream if you'll have it, that exists between a screen, an audience and filmmakers; it exist between objective reality, perceptual interpretation and perceptual projection. As a result, there are three factors that determine the kind of dream that can be conjured and called cinema. Firstly, there is the objective reality: the screen. One (audience and/or filmmaker) can watch a film with the screen being a screen, or a screen as a window into a different reality - one can even mediate between these two views of what a screen is. As a result, there are two key philosophies of what a screen is; a screen can either be a human construct, and thus all that it contains is seen as a human construct, or it can be a functional illusion and a magic box that allows us to peer into other 'real' realms that are, themselves, autonomous and self-dependent. As a child, one often assumes the latter, that the screen is a window into alternate reality. That isn't to say that the screen is literally seen as a portal into a different place - though, for some particularly young children, maybe this is true. Whilst a toddler or a young child can tap on a television screen as a movie plays and know that what exists within isn't truly existing within, they do not necessarily perceive what is within to be non-real and, in turn, inconsequential. Movies can deeply affect children. As most parents know, movies can scare children because they do not understand that what they're seeing isn't real. And parents understand this quite specifically. It is not that the child doesn't know that an evil clown can't come out of the TV, it is just that they can't separate their unconscious fear from such a recognition and perceive what is on the screen as truly inconsequential. We know this to be true as adults. We know that monsters can't come out of the TV - moreover, that they don't exist within. Nonetheless, movies can still scare us because we do not always have the ability to separate this fact from our unconscious urge and recognition of consequence; the evil clown surely can't come out of the TV, but try tell you're unconscious nervous system this when you jump out of your seat.
In truth, some people can assure their nervous systems that they are safe and, in turn, that the screen is just a screen. Some of us can then tell ourselves that "this is just a movie" and not be affected by even a jump scare. We do the same thing any time we start to question how a filmmaker blocked a scene or achieved a certain shot. We stop seeing the constructed illusion of a cinematic space and the screen stops being a portal into an alternate dream-reality. One mediates between these two modes when they not only ask what a filmmaker is doing with a camera, but asks why and how this affects story. In such a circumstance, a screen is simultaneously real and unreal. In being both, a screen can become supra-real and thus transcendent of the dichotomy of real and unreal and thus something new, whole, unified and imbued with greater meaning.
The screen is just one component of three. The next we can discuss is the audience themselves who can project into the cinematic space between the screen, themselves and the filmmaker, a persona or self of varying quality. We can save the individual analysis of the filmmaker's role as they project into the cinematic space a persona or self, too. The difference between the filmmaker and audience, however, is that the audience projects a persona or their self as to understand and experience a movie in the context of themselves; a filmmaker projects a persona or self to express something, to put out, not to receive.
The difference between persona and self is quite simple. The persona is a conscious construct guided by unconscious drives. The self on the other hand cannot be constructed; it is what we inherently are and so it oversees all that we become. The self can then be consciousness guided by unconscious drive, or it can, to some degree or another, just be unconscious drive for a person who never engages in introspection and self-analysis, who is not self-aware. By projecting a persona into a cinematic space, an audience member or filmmaker is choosing to play a game of sorts; to construct a framework through which a cinematic story can either be told or received. An audience member or filmmaker can do this as they watch/make a movie and decide to do so with certain ideological constructs. When they watch a movie, they project a persona that is constructed by the rules of an ideology of any kind and thus operate in regards to it. For example, if you like looking for the 'sins' a movie makes, you subscribe to a set of ideals and one of them may be that exposition is bad. If you project this persona into a cinematic space as you watch it develop, you will see and interact with it with little tolerance for exposition and in turn mould the cinematic space around rules it may not have been constructed to comply with. Another example may be found in being a teacher. If you watch a film as a teacher, you will see it in regards to the lessons it can help you teach children or the lessons it is already teaching children. What becomes obvious here is that the rules that come along with that persona drastically affect the cinematic space - whether you are projecting into it as a teacher who is making a film or gleaning from it as a teacher in an audience.
As opposed to projecting a consciously-constructed persona into a movie, which, to a degree, is inevitable, one can engage it unconsciously. This, quite ironically, can take conscious effort. Nonetheless, it is possible to watch a film as an individual who is not just bound to a set of ideas and ideals, but is the conveyor and manager of all such things. When one watches a film with multiple personas I believe they make a move towards watching it as a true individual. This is because, if you are both a teacher, a father, a husband, a Jew and a part-time fire-breather, you will be able to have multiple sets of ideals conflict and conflate when you watch a film in a manner that simulates the way in which your self conflicts and conflates multiple domains and rule sets as to be you. By watching a film as the multiple yous, in turn, the overarching you, you begin engaging cinema as an individual self and, in turn, project your unconscious temperament and abstract ideals into a film. This is just as true for a filmmaker constructing a film. They can choose to make a film as a feminist and thus will construct a political document, or, they can choose to make a film as a wife, daughter, Cambodian and knife-enthusiast with a masters in business management. For the fact that people are always and inherently composed of multiple personas in such a respect, I find it reasonable to suggest that we watch and make films as our selves--through our self--far more than we do our personas. Alas, it remains a possibility that one can make or watch a film as just a persona or as a self despite the fact that there is always, at least, some minor conflation and confusion between the two.
To take a step back, we have three major elements of the cinematic space - the screen, the audience and the filmmaker - and, in turn, we have the three factors of its construction: objective reality, perceptual interpretation and perceptual projection. These three factors are divided by 4 positions; objective reality, the screen, can be seen as real or unreal; perceptual interpretation, the audience, can function in regards to a persona or self; and perceptual projection, the filmmaker, can also function in regards to a persona or self. What emerges from the collision of these different positions are 4 different kinds of cinematic space with 4 different kinds of meaning. These four types are: conscious, non-conscious, unconscious and subconscious. These four terms imply the kind of dream-meaning that a cinematic space can be perceived as having and so we shall look at each individually and then in regards to the equations that build them up.
Conscious dreams are pseudo-dreams; they are imaginations and thoughts sold as products of the unconscious when they are, in fact, tightly wrapped in conscious decision. The conscious cinematic space is manifested when the screen is real and the audience and filmmaker projects a persona:
real + persona + persona = conscious
This kind of cinematic space is often reserved for documentaries, especially those of the political kind. Experiencing documentaries of this kind, the screen presents itself as a message board of facts whilst the filmmaker and audience member analyse those facts with pre-constructed sets of ideas. Narrative films that operate with the same equation will break the cinematic space whilst demanding and receiving a specific set of ideals so that it may be interpreted. This kind of cinema can then be propagandistic, highly reflexive or exploitative. Most propaganda then assumes people are thinking a certain way and enforces their beliefs with what should be perceived as just reality, or a highly symbolic reality, emitted from the screen. Deeply reflexive films, however, play games. This game is acknowledged with the screen being seen as a screen, as real. It is then played with using sets of rules, or sets of ideals, that must clash. An example of this could be Interior. Leather Bar. This is a film that has you perceive the screen as real and unreal, but mostly real (meaning consciously constructed), and then introduces rules of identity politics that must conflict and conflate. How one concludes will determine if the meaning of the film is solely conscious or if it transcends consciousness and becomes deep or poetic (terms we will come to shortly). Finally, the exploitation film perceives the screen as a board upon which to play a game; the audience and filmmaker becomes players who bring forth personas: the filmmaker must scare, disgust, arouse, etc. and the audience must refuse or indulge and/or confront this. Conscious cinema of this kind is sometimes an ironic test of the cinematic space. Alas, the meaning of the game played needn't always be conscious. It can very easily be non-conscious.
Non-conscious cinematic spaces are like dreams that are forgotten or maybe never even realised by their dreamer. They require the screen to be unreal, in turn, it is not seen to be constructed, and the audience and filmmaker project personas into them:
unreal + persona + persona = non-conscious
This kind of cinematic space is so often entertainment that is not assigned meaning. It is then created by an audience member who thinks they are just a consumer waiting to be entertained and a filmmaker who thinks that are just a producer who must entertain. With the screen operating as a fantasy-land and an illusion that is never questioned, it engages the senses, but remains benign and cannot be interacted with. Thus, it is never given meaning and/or the meaning that may reside within it is never found. The kind of films with non-conscious spaces are so often pop-corn movies that no one takes seriously - or are very hard to put meaning into. This space can, however, also be tantamount to propaganda with a false reality being sold and understood by simple idea-structures. It lacks real meaning and is just a means of projecting rules and engaging certain feelings.
Next, we come to unconscious, or deep, cinematic spaces - spaces that delve into the unconscious and so have meaning buried within them. These spaces operate with the screen as unreal or real and the filmmaker and audience project their selves into the space:
real + self + self = deep
unreal + self + self = deep
These two kinds of spaces are rather precious as they come to represent two deeply personal kinds of cinema that require a genuine and complete engagement with what is on a screen. The difficulty that arises when cinema becomes highly personal, however, is that meaning can become too difficult to find. This becomes the case when the screen is seen as unreal. In such circumstances the filmmaker and audience do not know how to decode what they sense to have deep meaning and to be bound to the essence of their being. However, when the screen becomes real, when it is seen as a construct, coherent meaning is much easier found and placed. This isn't to say that deep cinematic spaces with unreal screens do not have meaning; these bear the potential to have the most meaning - it is just most difficult to find. As a result, a mediation between seeing what is on the screen as constructed and a functional illusion often helps tease out truth. I find that our personally favourite movies have deep cinematic spaces with unreal screens. Deeply profound and difficult movies, or decoded personal favourites, usually have real screens.
Finally, we come to sub-conscious, or poetic, spaces. Poetic cinematic dreams are dreams that are stuck between consciousness and unconsciousness. These are the most likely films to emerge from cinema because cinema itself is also stuck between consciousness and unconsciousness. Cinema strives to journey downwards, but so often only gets so far, and so becomes sub-conscious; not completely unconscious, but almost there. These spaces utilise real and unreal screens and are built upon a disagreement between audience and filmmaker:
real + persona + self = poetic
real + self + persona = poetic
unreal + persona + self = poetic
unreal + self + persona = poetic
These four equations' outcomes are quite similar, but we should split them further into abstractly and technically poetic spaces. Thus, spaces made upon a disagreement between audience and filmmaker, but have real screens, are technical whilst those with unreal screens are abstract:
real + persona + self = poetic-technical
real + self + persona = poetic-technical
unreal + persona + self = poetic-abstract
unreal + self + persona = poetic-abstract
The poetic spaces emerge from an audience member wanting to interpret a film in a certain way or a filmmaker wanting to say something specific. When the audience member wants a movie to say something in accordance with their persona and ideological make-up, but are confronted with a cinema that is more complex than what it is created due to its projection through a genuine and complex self of a filmmaker, then the audience member either provides 'a perspective' or simplifies the film. This can be good or bad, it simply depends on how well this is done. To provide an example, a feminist film critic will see all films in accordance to the structure provided by their ideology. A filmmaker may not make a film as a feminist--if they do, the film becomes a conscious or non-conscious document--alas, if a filmmaker does not make a film as a feminist, but has their film read by a feminist, poetry is made out of the matter of life; the feminist turns the life provided by the filmmaker into poetry. In the reverse, when a filmmaker makes a film as, for example, a feminist, but is read by just an individual without this lens, they will make poetry out of rules.
It is dependent on how the screen is seen that will determine if the poetic space is technical or abstract. If a screen is real and constructed, it will be analysed as if it is meant to say something or as if it is already saying something. Those who take a film projected by the self of a filmmaker and engage it with a persona will find meaning through reduction. Those who take a film projected by a filmmaker's persona and engage it with their self will find meaning through addition; they build towards the rules, or build off of them.
Conversely, if a screen is unreal and an illusion, it will be analysed as if it is unconsciously saying or merely implying something. Meaning is then abstractly given to a film by an audience member. This can be done reductionistically or additively; reductionistically if the persona reads the self and additively if the self reads the persona.
***
There are values and virtues embedded in each of these spaces. However, there are also pitfalls and vices. One can easily interpret these for themselves and so I will not provide such an analysis. Nonetheless, having provided these different kinds of cinematic spaces and the meanings that they produce, we can become more capable of recognising what filmmakers are doing, how they are operating and how we are operating. In some cases we can alter our perception, in others we can focus our analysis and criticism. But, the point of the exercise one may engage when using these ideas is to become conscious in our journey into and out of unconsciousness and thus become more efficient and capable miners of different kinds of meaning.
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