The cinematic experience can be a very deep and emotional experience and, in this sense, there is an obvious similarity between dreams and cinema. Sigmund Freud describes dreams as the royal road to the unconscious. At the end of this royal road is the Kingdom governed by the Unconscious or the Spirit. The royal family understands events and emotions that have not been able to express themselves in the conscious world. These repressed emotions come into constant conflict with consciousness. The battle traps these emotions in a prison guarded by consciousness. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay After the tedious battle and the consciousness guard falls asleep. The repressed emotions take advantage of this moment, disguise themselves as a dream and escape from the prison. She travels the entire royal route and seeks her freedom of expression. When imprisoned for a long period of time, these emotions become capable enough to destroy the entire realm of Spirit. From this perspective, we can assume that consciousness deliberately falls into rest, allowing repressed people to escape into a safe world. “Film is the art of representing dreams,” wrote the poet Hilda Doolittle in 1930 (Lebeau 3). The purpose of cinema is similar to Freud's original logic that dreams had the biological function of maintaining quiet sleep. Movies allow us to not be disturbed by our external reality, so that when we finish watching a movie, it's like we're waking up from a dream. Cinema and psychoanalysis mark their birth between the end of the middle and the end of the 19th century. This period is also known as the Fin de Siècl characterized by world weariness which is accompanied by opulence with the emergence of new technologies. The new mass media, film cinema, becomes the means of escaping an anxious time. The Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud was a complex, brilliant, and domineering man who had a powerful impact on many of our assumptions about personality and psychological disorders. He opened a new path towards the analysis of the human mind and its disorders. He discovered the three levels of the human mind and the three corresponding fundamental structures of personality. The conscious level includes our current thoughts and perceptions and corresponding to this is the Id which includes all the basic impulses like sexual desires, aggressive impulses and various bodily needs. The second level is the preconscious level which is made up of memories that are not part of current thinking but can be recalled when needed. The ego is this conscious mind. Finally, it is at the unconscious level that all our repressed emotions such as fear, violent motivations, selfish needs, shameful experiences and certain unacceptable sexual desires take refuge. The Superego corresponds to this level and can be called our consciousness. These terms are drawn from social contexts and cultural codes and influence the way consciousness functions. While the Id demands immediate and complete gratification, it is the task of the Ego to keep the Id in check until conditions are conducive to the satisfaction of these impulses. . It is the task of the Superego to check whether these conditions are morally correct or not. This moral conscience is internalized in us by our parents or by the norms of society. His theory of “psychoanalysis” can be “defined as a form of mental therapy that aims to cure mental disorders by studying the interaction of the conscious and unconscious elements of the mind”(Nagarajan 217). Psychoanalytic literary criticism developed as a type of applied psychoanalysis. It follows from Freud's general idea that creative writings are the product of an unconscious process and that it is possible to understand how the mechanisms of psychic forces operate there. With his work in psychoanalysis, Freud attempted to explain people's behavior and their dreams. Freud emphasizes that language reveals all hidden desires, anxieties and fears. According to him, desire is not easily expressed because culture does not allow or facilitate it, and we must pay attention to language and other forms of symbolic expression such as gestures, sounds, facial expressions , the writings to find out. The conscious self projects the type of image that is culturally and socially acceptable. But the unconscious finds ways and means to express itself and this is what literary texts and language allow. Freud's idea is that the mechanism of the unconscious, of desires and fears has also required and acquired a language of its own. His theories of psychoanalysis brought a systematic and scientific investigation to the analysis of written works while examining compositions from different perspectives, including gender, age, race, and sexuality. Many of Freud's thoughts and concepts have been translated by scholars into theoretical frameworks which have then been applied to literary and film criticism. When we watch the films, the Freudian ego and superego become apparent in dualistic entities as hero and villain or man and woman. The surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s considered cinema with its particular techniques such as dissolution, superposition and slow motion corresponding to the nature of dreams. The films dismantled reality into multiple images as if in surrealist art, then reassembled these images to create a wondrous dream world that captured the unconsciousness of the mass audience. Psychoanalytic film theory is an approach that aims to unmask the ways in which the phenomenon of cinema in general and the elements of film in particular are both shaped by the unconscious minds of the filmmaker, his characters, and his audience. Freudian theories such as the unconscious, the return of the repressed, the Oedipal drama, narcissism, castration and hysteria can be applied to the psychoanalytic analysis of films. This theory is a modern form of dream interpretation that places fantasy at the heart of the understanding of being and reality. Some of the film theorists are Jean Louis Baudry, Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey. Metz's debate is about film language and filmic representation while Mulvey's debate is about psychoanalytically informed feminist theory. Russian writer Maxim Gorky describes cinema as a strange amalgam of art and technology, illusion and reality, capable of producing effects unlike any mode of representation. Psychoanalysis offers the means to account for the specifically visual aspect of the film, understood as a system for developing a “scene”, comparable to the “original scene” of psychoanalysis. Some critics use psychoanalytic theory to explain how film acts on the viewer's mind as an image such that the viewer can imagine their dreams being projected onto the screen. Freud's method of dream analysis is also used by some critics to interpret the meaning of a film. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a personalized article from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay Films like Manichithrathazhu directed by Fazil in Mollywood features the protagonist attaining the persona of a dancer..