Abstract
Cinema is a form of communication and equally important, it is a major type of entertainment. There are serious movies, edifying movies, and movies that promote ideologies and beliefs. It is the collective capacity to deliver entertainment that makes movies so influential. How these processes operate is another theme of the book as well as an examination of cinematic techniques that make palpable the “illusions” of reality that filmmakers create. This chapter also explores Hugo Munsterberg’s analysis of how film infiltrates, and in some sense embodies, our individual and collective dreams, and Manvell’s theories on the visual language of film.
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Notes
- 1.
Our use of the terms ‘collective unconscious’ is not meant to imply that a Jungian approach. However, for the purpose of this discussion it is a convenient and apt description of the kind of social dream that films can embody.
- 2.
For a more detailed discussion of the Sybil case please see my book The Bifurcation of the Self published by Springer in 2006.
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Rieber, R.W., Kelly, R.J. (2014). The Cultural Psychology of Motion Pictures: Dreams that Money Can Buy. In: Film, Television and the Psychology of the Social Dream. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7175-2_1
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