Just over 100 years ago, in August 1909, on his first visit to New York, Sigmund Freud went to the cinema for the first time, accompanied by his colleagues CG Jung, AA Brill, Sándor Ferenczi and Ernest Jones, his biographer. Jones later recalled they saw “one of the primitive films of those days with plenty of wild chasing. Ferenczi in his boyish way was very excited by it, but Freud was only quietly amused.” Had it been on in Manhattan at that time, Christopher Nolan’s dazzling new film Inception would have provided all the wild chasing needed to excite Ferenczi, while its obsession with dreams and dreaming would have brought a good deal more than quiet amusement to Freud, who’d spent the Atlantic crossing analysing his companions’ dreams.
The anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker disparagingly called Hollywood “The Dream Factory” but, from the beginning, the closeness of dreaming to movie-going and the ways films shape and are shaped by our nocturnal inner journeys were perceived early on. Back in 1970, more than 30,000 people responded to a Sunday newspaper questionnaire about the films that most closely resembled dreams, the top 15 ranging from Last Year at Marienbad and 2001 to Belle de jour and The Seventh Seal. Nolan’s film is the most thoroughgoing to deal with the subject. It centres on an American, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio playing a character not unlike his troubled cop in Shutter Island), a top practitioner of industrial espionage who, instead of breaking into safes, infiltrates other people’s dreams. People like him are known as “extractors”, and they carry devices called “totems” to remind themselves whether they are conscious or unconscious (Cobb’s is a small brass spinning-top), and watch out for “the kick”, the falling feeling that will wake them up.
# Inception
# Production year: 2010
# Countries: Rest of the world, UK, USA
# Cert (UK): 12A
# Runtime: 148 mins
# Directors: Christopher Nolan
# Cast: Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ken Watanabe, Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, Sir Michael Caine, Tom Hardy
Full article:http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jul/18/inception-film-review-philip-french