The act of thinking—those electric impulses within the brain that give rise to signs through which one can understand both one’s own actions and those of others, describe the surrounding world, and ponder one’s fate or that of a people—cannot be seen. Only the tangible effects of thought can be perceived: spoken words, written sentences.

Since the earliest days of cinema, there have always been filmmakers eager to materialize the movement of thought. How does one film a decision, a desire, an idea, the arc of the imagination? How to film a dream, which is nothing less than a prodigious cinematic montage within the resting consciousness? In Chaplin and Keaton, there are magnificent passages in which each artist’s ingenuity unfolds to render visible the intangible: the association of ideas, moral deliberation, the workings of dreams. The earliest silent filmmakers intuitively relied on juxtaposition within the frame. Superimposition allowed for the depiction of a split consciousness and the coexistence of two thoughts in a single visual field. The best example is the visual (and bodily) separation of Keaton as the projectionist in Sherlock Jr.—a device that splits the sleeping Keaton from the one who dreams.

It comes as no surprise that Alfred Hitchcock was a consummate inventor of cinematic form. As can be read in Hitchcock/Truffaut, the English master was obsessed with discovering a grammar capable of translating thought into a shot. And he succeeded—countless times. The famous camera movements in Vertigo, the dream sequences in Spellbound, the visual expression of trauma in Marnie—nearly every Hitchcock film poses an aesthetic challenge tied to the acrobatics of consciousness.

In cinema, the dream sequence offers a direct passage into the associative workings of the unconscious. One need only watch Wild Strawberries (Bergman), Cardiogram (Omirbayev), or No Rest for the Brave (Guiraudie) to find differing models of how to film dreams. The same can be said of psychosis. Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, both by David Lynch, are sufficient to intuit what it means for the psyche to withdraw from reality, to strip it of its signs in order to shield itself and continue functioning. Who could forget the scene in Lost Highway in which Robert Blake—the “mysterious man”—calls the protagonist, Bill Pullman, from inside the very party where they’re both standing, only for the mysterious man to answer the phone as well? Rarely has the dismantling of reality been filmed so effectively.

Cinema and thought, shots and consciousness, montage and the unconscious; the fact that psychoanalysis and cinema were both born in 1895 is a happy coincidence.

Roger Koza / Copyleft 2025