cinema drifting into dream
Cinema begins to shift when it no longer guarantees that one thing follows another for a reason. Narrative usually secures that relation. It tells us why something happens, what it leads to, who it belongs to. But there is a body of films where this chain loosens, to replace causality with association, recurrence, and displacement. In these films, meaning does not arrive through progression. It accumulates through proximity, stretching the plot until it begins to lose its shape and start resembling a dream state.
Across films by filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman, and Charlie Kaufman, this shift appears gradually, in the way scenes return without consequence, identities hesitate or overlap and reality becomes something that can no longer be clearly located.
David Lynch, Mulholland Drive, 2001
buñuel’s circular time meets lynch’s unstable realities
What changes first is time. Not in the obvious sense of flashbacks or jumps, but more subtly, in the way scenes relate to each other. A moment returns, but slightly altered, as if it had been remembered rather than repeated. The difference is small, but it cancels certainty. If the same event can occur twice without acknowledgment, then time is no longer moving forward. It is circulating. This is where Buñuel’s logic sets in: repetition without consequence. A situation restarts, but nothing has been learned or carried over. Cause and effect are not broken, they are simply no longer required.
But repetition does not behave the same way across these films. In Lynch, it produces instability. A scene feels familiar because it exists in more than one version at once. Identity follows the same pattern. A character does not change into someone else, they seem to occupy multiple positions simultaneously. The effect is not transformation, but overlap. The viewer is left holding two incompatible realities that do not resolve into one.
Luis Buñuel, Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, 1972
from bergman’s dissolving selves to kaufman’s recursive loops
Bergman pushes this further by reducing the space in which identity can exist. When the frame tightens around the face, when silence stretches and language begins to fail, the boundary between one person and another starts to erode. In Persona, this happens through proximity. Two figures begin to mirror each other so precisely that distinction becomes difficult to maintain. The image fuses and identity is compressed until it becomes unstable.
Kaufman takes the same instability and turns it inward. Instead of overlapping realities, he constructs recursive ones. Memory, imagination, and present experience fold into each other. A scene may be remembered, invented, or happening, but these states are indistinguishable because they are structured the same way. What’s different is the level at which the image is being experienced.
Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966 | image via MUBI
atmosphere replaces certainty as images refuse to settle
Across all of this, the boundary between reality and imagination becomes less useful. Not because films deliberately confuse the two, but because they refuse to mark the difference. As Susan Sontag observes in relation to Bergman, visions appear with the same weight and texture as anything ‘real.’ There is no visual cue that instructs the viewer how to read an image. Cinema does not shift into a dream. It was already operating there.
What holds these structures together is atmosphere. Sound plays a decisive role. A low hum continues across cuts, ignoring spatial logic. Silence expands until it feels like pressure rather than absence. Music enters without emotional justification, interrupting rather than guiding.
Spaces are composed with a precision that feels slightly excessive, producing environments that are both controlled and unreliable. A room appears stable, but its symmetry becomes oppressive. A face is held in close-up long enough to lose familiarity. Light isolates instead of revealing. These are not expressive choices in the usual sense. They are ways of reorganizing perception, of making the viewer aware that what they are seeing cannot fully settle into meaning.
David Lynch, Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, 1992
when films stop resolving and begin to hold tension
What these filmmakers share is not a style, but their refusal to resolve time into sequence, identity into unity, or reality into a stable category, constructing films that operate through the same logic as dreaming, where images are connected by intensity, memory, and association, resulting in a different kind of viewing, that no longer questions ‘what is happening,’ but ‘how is this holding together at all.’ And the answer is, not through coherence, but through persistence. Images remain, return, and interfere with one another. Meaning never fully arrives. Cinema produces an unstable reality, and then leaves the viewer inside it, without the tools that would normally allow them to exit.
Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind | image via Focus Features
When Bergman set up his one-act play Wood Painting, which has many similarities with The Seventh Seal, on the stage of the Malmö Municipal Theatre 1954, Bengt Ekerot (Death) played the knight. While Gunnar Björnstrand played his later film role as the squire. Photo: Louis Huch © AB Svensk Filmindustri
David Lynch, Mulholland Drive, 2001
David Lynch, Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, 1992
Luis Buñuel, Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, 1972
David Lynch, Mulholland Drive, 2001
In the script for Persona, Bergman writes the following about the prologue: ’I imagine the transparent ribbon of film rushing rusande through the projector. Washed cleaned of signs and pictures, it produces a flickering reflected light from the screen.’ Photo: Sven Nykvist © AB Svensk Filmindustri
David Lynch, Rabbits, 2002
This article is part of designboom’s Dreams in Motion chapter, exploring what happens when we treat our dreams and reveries as an active, radical rehearsal for impending material realities. Explore more related stories here.
The post from persona to mulholland drive: when cinema replaces narrative with the logic of dreaming appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.