Let Me Dream Again

Another familiar trope that will seem poignant to many people. A man is wining and dining a young lady only to wake up beside an old shrew who gives him what for. The master of this dream/reality narrative is Buster Keaton, who developed it with heartbreaking inventiveness.

This film is not without interest though. Firstly, the dream sequence is excellently imagined, with the couple dining in the foreground and a blank background creating a suitably unreal effect. The symmetry between couples is effective, suggesting that the wife may once have been like this one, asking us to ponder the processes that led to her 'decline', even the possibility of the husband's malign influence. Of course, this symmetry is actually a representation of rupture, division, disharmony - between dream and reality, the ideal and the mundane, the young and the old, the unattainable and the attainable.

The strange thing about the dream is that, firstly, the woman is unattainable in it, she flirts, but she doesn't give herself; secondly, she is dressed in a costume reminiscent of the circus or carnival. Here the dream is something subversive, something that can critique the failures, the repressions, the dissatisfactions of real life. It also points to the use most people make of the cinema, to dream about better lives than our own, lives we can see but cannot have. It is this melancholy vein that helps the film transcend misogyny.

Let Me Dream Again (1900)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Clocking in at less than two minutes, this is a pretty funny movie that shows a middle aged man drinking, smoking and flirting with a beautiful young woman. The man is having a terrific time until he wakes up and realizes that in bed with him is his rather unattractive wife. LET ME DREAM AGAIN is a pretty simple film but for 1900 it was rather clever and used the dream sequence for a great cause. George Melies was using dream sequences to show off horrors and magic tricks but this here was clever use of it because we get a very big laugh. I thought it was rather hilarious when the man woke up and the facial expression when he sees his wife was extremely good.

Dreams are closely associative with cinema. That idea isn't really explored here, as the film only consists of two scenes and lasts around a minute. However, it is an early exploration of the film language of how to tell a dream and how to tell, or separate, the inner narrative of the dream from the outer narrative of "reality". Moreover, it's a rather early film to consist of spatially separate scenes, although there had been a few already, including G.A. Smith's own "The Kiss in the Tunnel" (1899).

The first scene is the dream and the film narrated by the male character within the dream. He's fantasizing about having an affair with a younger woman. In the second scene, we see him awake in bed with his older, less attractive "real" wife. Smith's transition between shots consists of an in-camera out-of-focusing at the end of the first shot and then beginning the second scene out-of-focus before pulling it within focus. There's also a sort of disrupted match on action, with the actors being within the same position for each scene--the man continuing his embracing action into the second shot. It's a good effect, especially for its continuity and how the focusing is analogous to coming out of a dream and awakening. Ferdinand Zecca, for Pathé, used a dissolve in his remake, "Dream and Reality" (Rêve et réalité) (1901), but, then, he seems to have been using dissolves for all shot transitions at this time.

Many of the other early films about dreams don't split the scenes, but the separation of dream world and "reality" is implied by the character going to sleep, weird things happening, and then the actor waking up. These are usually trick shot films, which Georges Méliès largely invented. Edwin Porter's "Dream of a Rarebit Fiend" (1906) is an example. Another way to separate them was with a scene-within-a-scene, accomplished by blacking out part of the set, or masking part of the camera lens, and filming the awake part; then, the effect is reversed and filmed again. Zecca did this in "Story of a Crime" (Historie d'un crime) (1901), and Porter did it in "Life of an American Fireman" (1903) and other films. Smith actually introduced this scene-within-a-scene effect to motion pictures with such films as "Santa Claus" (1898). These early efforts aren't quite as interesting and exciting as, say, "Sherlock, Jr." (1924) or "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004), but they are important for having gotten us started.

An old man flirts with a pretty young woman and gets very amorous, only for the reality of his situation to become horribly apparent to him! This is a very simple film with one gag to deliver and a short time to do it in. The joke is funnier than it sounds mainly because the manner of delivery of the punch line is good. It has enough time at the end to milk the gag so it does tend to work. Contrast this with the French short that repeated it less successfully the following year where the delivery was the problem and the punch line felt like it was delivered in a rush without allowing the actors to react.

Of more note is the way that the film moves from dream sequence to reality. The film goes out of focus and when it returns we are in the second scene. It is now a common effect and we all clearly know what it means but this film was the first known example of it being used.

The same night I watched this silent short, I also saw a French film called "Rêve et réalité" (1901). It turns out the French movie was a knockoff of this film--with the exact same plot and scenes! While it was common for many of the very early studios to plagiarize each other's work, this one is one of the more flagrant examples. I just hope that LET ME DREAM AGAIN is the actual first film of its kind and not a rip-off of another, earlier film! The story is immensely simple (as was true of nearly all films from this era). An old guy is making out with a pretty young lady and life seems grand--until he wakes up and realizes it's all a dream! The idea is cute, though the execution is a tad primitive and rough. Still, given its tremendous age, it's still pretty watchable today.