For the Love of Film - Hitchcock Dreams

Today's Hitchcock themed post that's part of For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III, is about the fascinating subject of dreams.

BTW, there's one more day left for this blogathon and our goal is to raise $15,000 to help get The White Shadow, directed by Graham Cutts and written, assistant-directed by Alfred Hitchcock to stream online for free for everyone to enjoy and to also record the music score.

If you can spare two minutes and some cash, please click on the Donate badge on the right (or at the of this blogpost) or by going here.

OK, back to dreams.

Spellbound (1945)

In Spellbound, there's a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali and it's as surreal as it can get. Oh how I would love to know what the conversation at the time was like between Hitchcock and Dali that led to this scene. (This isn't Dali's first dabble in film. An exhibition called Dali: Painting and Film explored his painting and "moving" pictures. You can read more aout it here.)

Watch this clip and pay attention to the details in the dream sequence.

This excerpt includes the Salvador Dali dream sequence but puts it in context: Gregory Peck's character suffers from amnesia, and Ingrid Bergman has brought him to her own analyst and mentor. "JB" (Peck) recounts a dream which the two analysts examine for clues to a murder mystery. The film as a whole makes an appealing but illegitimate analogy between psychoanalysis and solving a mystery which proved to be central to the appeal of psychoanalysis in popular culture.

Vertigo (1958)

In Vertigo, we have another dream sequence designed by an artist. John Ferren, an Abstract Expressionist/Figurist/Still Life Painter, was the artistic consultant for the film and besides the dream, he also painted the Portrait of Carlotta that appears in the film. In a post by Alfred Hitchcock Geek, we can see the part of the dream sequence was inspired by Bursting Shell, a painting by Christopher Nevinson from 1915, "which depicts a victim's-eye-view of a World War I mortar explosion".

I'm quite entralled by this scene.