The Machinist (Brad Anderson, Spain | USA, 2004)

Actor Christian Bale captures Trevor’s deterioration through his emaciated frame, blank stares, mumbling drawl and slow movements; and director Brad Anderson shoots the film in half-light, all murky blue-greys. It is as if The Machinist is a dream, or dream-like. Accordingly – and as the film progresses – it becomes uncertain if Trevor does sometimes sleep and dream, or if dreams are invading his waking world as hallucinations. (Or even some complex amalgam of the two, some back and forth between these states). Dreams, nightmares, hallucinations – this is Trevor’s real world. Where does the nightmare end and the world begin? Deleuze describes such dream-images as an ‘unhinging,’ the restrained dream. Restrained in the sense that the transformation of the real world into the dream or the dream world into the real is not signalled by rich cinematographics. No closing of eyes and crossfade into the weird and crazy images of the unconscious. No return from dreams through a character opening their eyes and retaining awareness of the dream: images as well as the condition. Rather, in the restrained dream the image ‘“looks like” dream, but between objects that remain concrete’ (C2:58). Dream world and real world become ambiguous; and the effect of each domain on the other is very powerful: the character believes or thinks the dream was a moment of the real.

To read the full exploration of The Machinist through the Deleuze's sign of the 'restrained dream,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Star Trek – First Contact (Jonathan Frakes, USA, 1996)

Without doubt – one of the most beautiful camera moves in cinema history. Neither a dolly-out nor
zoom-out as such, but effectively both in (and possible only through) CGI – the camera pulls back from a black screen to reveal an eye. The eye becomes a face – Jean-Luc Picard, now captain of the Enterprise-E – and the face stares straight into the lens. As the camera continues on its reverse trajectory, the mise-en-scène reveals Picard is captured in a glass tube that is part of a spaceship, either side of him other beings, and behind each of them, many more. This section of the ship is but a fragment of an immense superstructure, the core or hub in an area so impossibly vast the camera never seems to encompass it. It is like a fractal – never-ending. Cut to corridor, the camera flies through the space, side to side, a disembodied spirit. Picard restrained on an operating table, his head encased in machinery. Picard in his tube – eyes close – he gasps. Picard with his face now augmented with Borg technology – merely an outward sign of his assimilation into the hive mind: ‘Locutus’ – comes a woman’s voice at the edge of consciousness. The image on screen distorts. ‘I am Locutus of Borg,’ whispers what was once-Picard, and turning to face the camera: ‘Resistance is futile’. A drill enters Picard’s eye.

Picard awakes from this dream-image. Director Jonathan Frakes, by zooming in on a sleeping Picard as he opens his eyes, signals this first moment of Star Trek – First Contact as a dream. As a nightmare. These are not memories, as such. Rather – they are perceptions, affections and actions subsumed within an unconscious state. For Deleuze, dream-images conjure up a ‘metamorphosis of the situation’ by linking dream situation to waking situation and so negotiating the latter through the former (C2:273). Accordingly, the dream-image of Star Trek – First Contact describes the sign of the rich dream...

To read the full exploration of Star Trek – First Contact through the Deleuze's sign of the 'rich dream,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...

Inception (Christopher Nolan, USA | UK, 2010)

The final moment of Inception may well become known as one of the most powerful in cinema. Not simply for the image itself, but because of the cut from that image to black. The image is of Cobb’s totem, a spinning-top, gyrating on his kitchen table. And the cut makes the ending ambiguous: we do not know if it keeps on spinning, endlessly; we do not know if it is subject to entropy, and so will eventually topple and fall, lie still. To know seems essential. If the top were to keep revolving, it would be clear that Cobb is lost in a dream (as his wife believed). If the top were to fall, Cobb has completed his mission successfully, returned to the real world, his real home and his children. Everything seems to be dependent upon the state of the spinning-top. Yet this is where director Christopher Nolan cuts. And there is something really essential at stake, although it is not a question of knowing the actual outcome. Rather, it is the condition of not knowing either outcome – of the ambiguity in-itself. We want closure. We cannot abide the ambiguity the final cut seemingly imposes. This is not as naïve as it may sound, for this is the very theme of Inception and exactly the situation Cobb finds himself in. This is why he has the spinning-top. He needs to know, throughout the film, exactly where he is, dream world or real world. The final moments of the film places the spectator in exactly the same position as Cobb, it generates the very crisis of knowledge that will be exploited by that cut. The question is, can this ambiguity be resolved?

To explore this question we can turn to Deleuze’s Cinema books and his exploration of what he calls dream-images... ‘movement of world,’ the ‘implied dream’ (C2:59). Here ‘every world and every dream, closes up around everything it contains, including the dreamer’ (C2:63)...

To read the full exploration of Inception through the Deleuze's sign of the 'movement of world,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...