Collection on Screen:
Dream Machine Cinema
April 25 to July 6, 2025
"Every dream becomes a reality," wrote the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg in 1916 in the first theoretical work on the medium of cinema. Amazement over the Lumière Brothers' presentation of the cinematograph and film's subsequent triumph were undoubtedly due to filmmakers and audiences' intuitive recognition that the movie-going experience was akin to the unreal and yet familiar world they experienced in sleep. Like no other artform, the dream machine left its mark on the 20th century, including as an economic factor: By the 1920s, Hollywood had already declared itself the dream factory, while surrealism celebrated film's fantastic and irrational potential.
"We were struck by the major similarities between dreams and film: the power they both had to create an unreal, fantastic world," noted the important director and theorist Jean Epstein at the time. In 1925, his friend, the music scholar Paul Ramain, went into more detail in L'influence du rêve sur le cinéma (The Influence of Dreams on Cinema): "Film technology is dream technology. All the visual and expressive means of cinema are found in dreams. The simultaneity of actions, soft-focus, fades, double-exposure, distortions, time-lapse, silent movements – are not these techniques the soul of dreams?"
The parallels between dreams and film even left their mark on the popular image of the audience manipulated in the movie theater. In The Dream Factory, Ilja Ehrenburg evokes the propagandistic potential of Hollywood machinery: "In those dark rooms, they lie in slumber, they dream wonderful dreams. We must infect them with our poetry, the poetry of dollars and ideals, the poetry of the struggle for success – the strong give orders, the weak work." As impressive as this may sound on the page: Cinema's dreamlike power – which does not influence viewers in deep sleep, but rather puts them in a daydreamy state of mind – is first and foremost mythical, especially in narrative film.
As the American sleep researcher Allan Hobson observed after doing many studies: Only experimental films are really dreamlike, freed from coherent storylines. From this perspective, the true history of dream films took place in avant-garde cinema, from the surrealist milestone Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929) – for which Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí took inspiration from their dreams – to Maya Deren's masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and a wide array of after-images, such as James Broughton's Dreamwood (1972) or Peter Tscherkassky's Dream Work (2001).
It is therefore no wonder that in cinema, dreams almost automatically took on a key role and were able to reconcile their conflicting tendencies toward poetry and industry. It is no doubt thanks to the close relationship between dreams and film that hardly any other subject is as widespread in the movies. In cinema, heroes escape into dream worlds like in Buster Keaton's comedy masterpiece Sherlock Jr. (1924) or in the classic The Wizard of Oz (1939), which provides the standard for the most popular storytelling pattern of "dream cinema": The dream world mirrors the film's real world from which the main characters want to escape, and the problems of this "reality" must be overcome through their symbolic resolution in the dream realm.
Dreams become mirrors of the soul, as in Ingmar Bergman's Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries, 1957), which picks up on the nightmarish vision in Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932). They are a gateway for dystopian visions of the future, such as Total Recall (1990) and Terminator 2 (1991), or they function as omens, as in countless film noirs from Man in the Dark (1953) to Femme fatale (2002) – in The Big Lebowski (1998) the subject is parodied in a musical number. The interpretation of such dreams proves to be a key for psychoanalytical explanations, from Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) to David Cronenberg's Freud film A Dangerous Method (2011).
Sometimes everything was just a dream or the film stands on the threshold between dream and reality. Dreamlike atmospheres are evoked in both commercial productions and avant-garde artworks. The surrealist Buñuel remained faithful to this even in later narrative films like Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972): His name alone stands for a dreamlike cinema, as was later the case for David Lynch, whose Blue Velvet (1986) features an unforgettable scene involving a karaoke version of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" and who is a focus of our Dream Machine Cinema retrospective. In parallel to the opening of the exhibition "Träume... träumen" in Schallaburg, we have chosen 57 shorts and features from our collection to provide a comprehensive overview of the many ways dreams and film are entangled, accompanied by many introductions and a curatorial talk about the topic. (Christoph Huber / Translation: Ted Fendt)
Introductions by Christoph Huber at selected screenings
In collaboration with Schallaburg
"Every dream becomes a reality," wrote the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg in 1916 in the first theoretical work on the medium of cinema. Amazement over the Lumière Brothers' presentation of the cinematograph and film's subsequent triumph were undoubtedly due to filmmakers and audiences' intuitive recognition that the movie-going experience was akin to the unreal and yet familiar world they experienced in sleep. Like no other artform, the dream machine left its mark on the 20th century, including as an economic factor: By the 1920s, Hollywood had already declared itself the dream factory, while surrealism celebrated film's fantastic and irrational potential.
"We were struck by the major similarities between dreams and film: the power they both had to create an unreal, fantastic world," noted the important director and theorist Jean Epstein at the time. In 1925, his friend, the music scholar Paul Ramain, went into more detail in L'influence du rêve sur le cinéma (The Influence of Dreams on Cinema): "Film technology is dream technology. All the visual and expressive means of cinema are found in dreams. The simultaneity of actions, soft-focus, fades, double-exposure, distortions, time-lapse, silent movements – are not these techniques the soul of dreams?"
The parallels between dreams and film even left their mark on the popular image of the audience manipulated in the movie theater. In The Dream Factory, Ilja Ehrenburg evokes the propagandistic potential of Hollywood machinery: "In those dark rooms, they lie in slumber, they dream wonderful dreams. We must infect them with our poetry, the poetry of dollars and ideals, the poetry of the struggle for success – the strong give orders, the weak work." As impressive as this may sound on the page: Cinema's dreamlike power – which does not influence viewers in deep sleep, but rather puts them in a daydreamy state of mind – is first and foremost mythical, especially in narrative film.
As the American sleep researcher Allan Hobson observed after doing many studies: Only experimental films are really dreamlike, freed from coherent storylines. From this perspective, the true history of dream films took place in avant-garde cinema, from the surrealist milestone Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929) – for which Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí took inspiration from their dreams – to Maya Deren's masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and a wide array of after-images, such as James Broughton's Dreamwood (1972) or Peter Tscherkassky's Dream Work (2001).
It is therefore no wonder that in cinema, dreams almost automatically took on a key role and were able to reconcile their conflicting tendencies toward poetry and industry. It is no doubt thanks to the close relationship between dreams and film that hardly any other subject is as widespread in the movies. In cinema, heroes escape into dream worlds like in Buster Keaton's comedy masterpiece Sherlock Jr. (1924) or in the classic The Wizard of Oz (1939), which provides the standard for the most popular storytelling pattern of "dream cinema": The dream world mirrors the film's real world from which the main characters want to escape, and the problems of this "reality" must be overcome through their symbolic resolution in the dream realm.
Dreams become mirrors of the soul, as in Ingmar Bergman's Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries, 1957), which picks up on the nightmarish vision in Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932). They are a gateway for dystopian visions of the future, such as Total Recall (1990) and Terminator 2 (1991), or they function as omens, as in countless film noirs from Man in the Dark (1953) to Femme fatale (2002) – in The Big Lebowski (1998) the subject is parodied in a musical number. The interpretation of such dreams proves to be a key for psychoanalytical explanations, from Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) to David Cronenberg's Freud film A Dangerous Method (2011).
Sometimes everything was just a dream or the film stands on the threshold between dream and reality. Dreamlike atmospheres are evoked in both commercial productions and avant-garde artworks. The surrealist Buñuel remained faithful to this even in later narrative films like Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972): His name alone stands for a dreamlike cinema, as was later the case for David Lynch, whose Blue Velvet (1986) features an unforgettable scene involving a karaoke version of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" and who is a focus of our Dream Machine Cinema retrospective. In parallel to the opening of the exhibition "Träume... träumen" in Schallaburg, we have chosen 57 shorts and features from our collection to provide a comprehensive overview of the many ways dreams and film are entangled, accompanied by many introductions and a curatorial talk about the topic. (Christoph Huber / Translation: Ted Fendt)
Introductions by Christoph Huber at selected screenings
In collaboration with Schallaburg
Related materials
For each series, films are listed in screening order.
