Here's Bertolucci discussing Freud 'in' his films:
Since I started psychoanalysis I found that I had in my camera an
additional lens, which was - it's not Kodak, it's not Zeiss, it's Freud.
It is a lens which really takes you very close to dreams. For me movies,
even before knowing Freud, have always been the closest thing you can
imagine to a dream. First of all, the movie theatre in this amniotic
darkness for me has always been like a womb, so we are all dreamers, but
dreamers in the womb. We are there in the darkness. And it's very rare
having a collective dream all together. We're dreaming with open eyes
the same dream - which is the movie - which we receive in different
ways. If you ask at the exit of the theatre what the story was, you will
have many different stories. I always felt that the time in a movie is
not the time of realism, it is not the 'real' time of the watch, but it
is the same time that you have in dreams. We all know that in dreams
time does not exist.
That, for example, you have present, past, future, happening at the
same time. And characters are not what they seem, or look: they are
other, they represent other people.
That gives me freedom. To give you an example, in Last Tango in Paris
at the beginning of the movie we see this middle-aged American old fart.
He's desperate because he's ageing and desperate because his wife
committed suicide. Then the meeting with the girl, Maria, and everything
happens - the most irresistible thing for a middle-aged man, which is to
feel attractive to a young woman, which is difficult to resist. You
don't know how much time has passed, then he opens the door in the hotel
where he lives and you see the dead body of his wife, but you thought
his wife died a long time ago. In fact, only one or two days have
passed. So to play with that I think it is very interesting. Too many
times it is a pity that film directors merely illustrate a screen play
when they make a movie: they don't really ride the freedom that cinema
gives them.
Would one example suffice to counter Andrew's argument?
Best
Dean
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