In Victor Erice's 1971 film Spirit Of The Beehive, two young girls in a small Spanish village in 1940 attend a screening of James Whale's Frankenstein. The youngest is particularly enthralled by what she sees on the screen and asks her slightly older sister why the monster killed the little girl and why the villagers, in turn, killed the monster. The latter explains to her sister that neither the little girl nor the monster were killed, that in the movies people only pretend to do things. She does not question the reality of the characters, only what they do. The younger girl takes this to mean that Frankenstein's monster is still alive and from this innocent mis-understanding follows a deft account of the way in which the child's ability to distinguish between the real and the imaginary breaks down. This core concern in Erice's film is, of course, making a general observation about human psychology - about how we differentiate the information we receive in the cinema from the information we receive in our non-cinematic daily experience.

Another film which demonstrates a related interest in human psychology is Wim Wenders Until The End Of the World (1991). In it, Max von Sydow's character develops a device originally intended to enable the blind to see but that also can be used to let people record and playback their dreams whilst awake. The film's characters become so addicted to watching their dreams that they can no longer be bothered to fulfil the requirements of the everyday. The metaphoric and metonymic allusion to film (and its threadbare relation, television) is apparent.

Both these films touch on a universal human characteristic, the coexistence of a real and an imaginary world in human consciousness.

The relationship between the real and the imaginary is of ill-defined shape, although we normatively distinguish between them as discrete opposites. There is the world in which we live and work and then there are dreams, fairytales, the theatre and, the movies, which are variously related to it. Learning this distinction is part of the formative processes of education and socialization. There are grounds for claiming that artists are people who test this distinction in material form. But everyone tests it in their dreams, where the familiar and the strange coincide.

Dreams offer us a suspension from the restrictions of society and an experience of a totality not available in our daily lives. They are a psychosomatic restorative and an expression of our unconscious being.

It is well-known that "the movies", that particularly American achievement, provides us with something akin to Wender's dream machine. Classic Hollywood was known as The Dream Factory, Spielberg et.al. continue the tradition by calling their studio Dreamworks. According to this view, for the price of a ticket, for a brief span a time at least, the purchaser can vicariously experience a world where the people are more attractive, better dressed, live in better houses, drive better cars and do more exciting things than themselves, where even in pain and grief, nay death, they are more composed, more elegant.

But the "dream" in this context is not dreaming in the individual psychological sense. The movies may offer vicarious experience but of a kind that is strictly controlled and conventionalised, driven by a commercial motive and that, particularly in the Hollywood variant, eschews the illogical and the vague. Movies may be works of imagination, but a highly fettered one. And the movies today are not what they were in the heyday of Hollywood, when there were firmly-fixed boundaries distinguishing the audiences' daily reality and their sanctioned escape from it. Today like the fashion, music, car and home décor industries and so on, the dream that the movies offer is a consumption-based fantasy. In consumer culture, The Megaplex and The Mall are part of an air-conditioned environment in which the imaginary IS reality.

Is there anything questionable with this? Is Hollywood's role simply to provide an aetheticized joyride for consumer gratification or does it have any moral responsibility for its creations? The answer is, yes, because unlike the joyride, and as Erice's film explores, there is a relationship between its creations and the consciousness of its audience.

The Hollywood movie may fulfil the suspension and substitution functions of the dream but whether it has a restorative, let alone expressive, role is another matter. As part of a consumer culture, driven by marketing, the movies are, based on a desire that is increased by the very act of consumption. The more you have, the more you want. The relationship with addiction, as in Wender's film is apparent. As the purveyors of fast food are held accountable for the spread of obesity so makers of movies should be held responsible for the equivalents of fat, salt and sugar with which they tantalize their increasingly de-sensitized audience.

Just as health food cannot compete with fast-food in the market place, so real life cannot compete with the manufactured world of the movies. The movies become the reality to which the everyday is compared and found wanting. (This displacement is reinforced by the celebrity industry, which interpellates movie stars into real life and the loop is closed with "reality television" which makes its participants into celebrities).

Unquestionably we have a universal and trans-historical appetite for escape into other worlds but this appetite does not in itself license anyone to gratify it unreservedly. As the dream proper offers way of understanding the world so the makers of cinematic dreams transmit explicit and implicit values which travel back and forth between spectator and screen, between individual consciousness and pre-constituted externality. These range from modes of dress and modes of behaviours to attitudes towards, and expectations of, the extra-cinematic world. To use the language of dream analysis, movies have both manifest and latent content. The movies shape our world in obvious and not so obvious ways, telling us what is acceptable and what is not. As with advertising, religion and politics we should be critically aware of its material and ideological goals.

Can cinema deal with reality or is it, as Plato would have had it, an essentially flawed mimetic deception?

All film is a distortion of the real world in some respect, including documentary film, and "the movies" are pretty much a lost cause in this respect. Cassavettes comes to mind as a rare exception in American film-making of a director prepared to de-gloss his representations of life. Other nationalities have done much better in attempting realistic "style". From Rossellini to Bunuel, Loach to the Dogme group, headed by Lars von Trier, there are many examples of filmmakers who have wanted to take film to reality rather give it up to sweetly or sourly ingratiating fantasy. In the opposite direction, European filmmakers have also fared much better, at least in the past, with notable cases such as Renais, Fellini, and Bunuel again, in making film a medium of art, that other portal to the unconscious, and so, justifying the analogy between cinema and the dream proper. Both approaches are representations of the truth and thereby not identical with it, but both, after all, lead to truth - the truth of the everyday and the truth of the unconscious. It is this kind of cinema that I would like to see more of. Cinema without dollops or fat, sugar or salt.

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