We've looked at Dead of Night as our first example of the Uncanny in art for a number of issues it raises:
-- The role of dreaming--the nightmare in particular--as exemplary experience of the Uncanny
-- The peculiar compulsion to narrate the uncanny incident, and the enthrallment of the audience
-- The reality status of the uncanny incident: Within the rules of the fiction, do we accept the supernatural event, or explain it as a psychological phenomenon?
-- The contribution of plot structure and style of narration/depiction to the uncanny effect
To prepare for next week's discussion, please post a comment below on the uncanny in Dead of Night.
You should review your notes first and focus on a key topic that you find promising in understanding how the film achieves its effects. You may want to consult your own sense of the uncanny, and your recollections of other films, tales, or artworks that struck you as uncanny, for comparison and contrast.
I found Dead of Night incredibly interesting. I see the word "uncanny" as something that can't be represented in a specific way...I see it as something that's so foreign to general knowledge but it ambiguously known by everyone in different ways. I've always always seen the word as meaning something intangible or relating to the Sublime. I feel like this film shows "uncanny" situations buy different people. I think these would be considered uncanny because:
ReplyDelete1) In the first story the man dreamt about being in a room he'd never been in before that moment. I think his dream is "uncanny" because it is so unbelievable that he dreamt a place he'd never been and people he never met...but the people in the room wanted to believe him because its so strangely cool. It's the whole real vs unreal complex and this fascination with the unknown.
2) The ghost story in the film is another example of this. Once again its the fascination with something thats little known by general knowledge...but people want to believe it because one person claims that it is true. But at the same time, there is this fear of the unknown as well as the fascination.
3) The mirror story is a prime example of how this fascination with something so strange or unknown can lead to obsession. This story is all about a false reality. Throughout the entire story, the man experiencing this false reality thinks he's going mad and eventually does. And when he tried hard enough to "see reality", he eventually does...it was all in his head. Unknown or ambiguous events can lead to obsession or insanity because one wants to believe it so badly.
The Dead of Night is all about the unconscious, it is a story entirely about dreams and what they reveal about ourselves. It takes the familiar and twists it just enough to make the viewer question what is real and what is not.
ReplyDeleteIn the film, each character recounts an event that to them was unexplainable. There is suspension of disbelief with these stories because of the way they are presented to us as the viewer.
When the architect first enters the room he is forcefully reminded of a dream he had that contained the exact same people and the exact same location. This sets up the framework for the other dreamlike stories that are about to be told and places the story into an otherworldly context. This allows the viewer to believe the stories that are about to be told could be true because they exist in this fictional world that may or may not be a dream.
This is similar to how the Twilight Zone presented its stories. They tell the viewer in the beginning of the episode that they are entering another dimension, one where these strange events are able to occur. Because of this they become believable. They are similar enough to our own world that we believe them and just different enough that they terrify us.
They could also been seen as merely psychological events. In fact there is a character in Dead of Night that is there for the purpose of explaining every supernatural instance away. The viewer is presented with both sides of the argument and this makes the story even more believable.
We want to believe that there is something else out there, and any time we are given the opportunity to explore another reality, we take it.
I found Dead of Night to be perplexing and compelling in regards to understanding the uncanny. Among the many ways the uncanny is presented in the film, I found that the best way to understand its presence was to accept the idea that the uncanny is equally a physical experience as much as it is a mental or psychological experience. Even the recollection of the scenario brings a powerful sensation of confusion and apprehension. I found that the uncanny is an immensely individualized experience as well, personalized by one’s own emotions and life experiences.
ReplyDeleteDuring each person’s recollection of their encounter with the uncanny, I couldn’t help but notice how calm and blissful their experience was initially. Despite their feelings upon reflection, it appeared that each person interacted with the uncanny with an eager sense of wonder and fascination. Since everything felt so “real”, there was no need to legitimize their experience to anyone or themselves. It’s not till after they explain it to someone when this uncomfortable sense of panic and paranoia set in, along with the strong desire to verify and authenticate it.
This strange transition from bliss to mere insanity brings me to my next point, the element of isolation and privacy. In each story, the uncanny is experienced when the individual is alone, left to his or her own thoughts and delusions. The uncanny unfolds, further supporting the idea of the individualized experience and raising the question of what each person’s needs, wants and desires are. No matter what it is they're searching for, each person was physically confronted with it therefore responding to it in a physical manor before and after the happening.
According to Freud, the uncanny is anything we experience in adulthood that reminds us of earlier psychic stages, of aspects of our unconscious life, or the primitive experience of the human species.
ReplyDeleteI can’t describe the uncanny qualities in the film Dead of Night without referring to a film that haunted most of my childhood, Rosemary’s Baby. Dead of Night caused the same dithering response, albeit with less intensity. In Dead of Night, the uncanny arises as the product of the repressed or long forgotten, a reminder of our psychic past or primitive life, while in Rosemary’s Baby the story is filled with odd and gruesome events that happen in the present.
The uncanny has a tendency to having motifs of eyes and seeing and both films offer many examples of one or both. In Dead of the Night, the tale of the alternate-dimension-mirror is a clear example of the seeing motif. In fact, most scenes in this film are related to seeing or perceiving the world through an alternate reality. And in Rosemary’s Baby,a good example of the same type of motif is the scene where Guy, Rosemary’s husband, lands a role in the play for which the actor he is replacing suddenly and enigmatically goes blind.
The uncertainty of whether the events are real or imaginary is a constant topic in the uncanny. In Dead of Night the characters constantly fight over to find truth amongst such absurdities and in Rosemary Baby’s, the main character struggles to believe in the supernatural until it is revealed to her at the end of the film.
Both films make a pretense to realism. In both movies the viewer and the characters alike share a sense of uneasiness with the facts. Yet seeing that suspicion reflected in the characters helps suspend disbelief for the viewer. Hence, creating an uncanny effect.
The uncanny is a product of aesthetics. The ongoing aesthetics of the films show the fascination for the ugly and the grotesque. It also presents the aesthetics of feelings and sensations, that are somehow related to a type of strange beauty. The general feeling produced by the uncanny is fear or confusion, often accompanied by a sense of loss and anxiety.
In Dead of Night and Rosemary’s Baby the viewer often finds himself looking through a portal, a dream, or some type of foggy state of mind. It is with this veil that the uncanny comes to manifest its contents. What is common to the narrative of the uncanny is a realistic frame, the scenes present themselves like an everyday life account or report, informing the viewer that this might just be a familiar, normal scene, but then a sudden schism of fantastic events always follows. The events must be witnessed through the character’s eyes, through the character’s psyche.
In Alberto Cavalcanti’s movie, Dead of Night, something that struck me as peculiar, was that the feeling or sensation of the uncanny was personal, and experienced only by one person at a time. While other individuals may play a role in the sensation, the direct feeling always lies within one person. As each character recounted a personal sensation similar to the main character’s each time, he or she experienced something abnormal, but was brought back to reality when someone pulled them back. That is to say, that he or she was brought to a normal consciousness or realization of the world around them. This would hint to the understanding, that Cavalcanti felt that the uncanny rested within the mind and not the external world. As an example, when the woman recounted the story of how her husband became obsessed with the mirror she bought, she never experienced the visions he was seeing and the experience was solely his. Even though she had heard the story about the mirror from the shop keeper, she was unaffected directly. When the problem hit a fevered pitch and she destroyed the mirror she released her husband from his mental state. It could be said she felt something uncanny, but her mental/cognitive state did not change. This could also be backed by the addition of the Dr. Van Straaten, who consistently applied theoretical reasoning behind everyone’s experience. This character could be emblematic of the overarching theme and idea of Calvancanti’s view that the uncanny lies within the individual.!?
ReplyDeleteExplaining the Uncanny
ReplyDeleteThe unexplainable can be closely related to the uncanny, for example when a man dreams over and over the same dream and then it becomes a reality or is it all still a dream.
In the film Dead of Night a man can’t seem to figure out how his dreams have become a reality and how it will end. The rest of the characters go on to tell their own experiences with the unexplainable. When depicting a moment of uncanny films tend to use dramatic music queuing something is about to happen. Because films have done this so much in the past and then begin to close in on a mindless face I think this also has become an example of a person experiencing uncanny.
Edmund Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful starts with the idea of Curiosity being the “First and simplest emotion.” How as humans we cannot help but be curios of the unknown. He also goes on to explain that curiosity is short lived, once we discover what we are looking for we lose interest and move on. Applying this to the idea of uncanny, something we can’t quite put our fingers on or figure out. We find it so interesting because it holds our intentions.
One of the lines in the film states “look away… but I can’t, because it fascinates me”.
There is an accepted reality amongst individuals, which is what we consider as the ordinary and comfortable realm of life. The uncanny stems from the lack of knowledge to explain a phenomena or sensation which cannot coexist in our reality, meaning anything that defies our accepted laws of physics is seen as strange and baffling.
ReplyDeleteDead of Night plays with our mind by defying our logic. The placement of the character of the doctor is mainly to assert the audience’s perspective on the situation of the story. The use of the doctor among the group is done to represent the audience’s initial disbelief of uncanny phenomena. To render the architect’s story of having already encountered these individuals, who he has met in his dream, credible there is a necessity to prove a man of logic and reason wrong. Once the doctor cannot explain a phenomena with his vast mental knowledge, the uncanny becomes disturbing. As the film progresses the other characters become intrigued with the main character’s story and they begin to share their uncanny experiences. At the end of each narrative, the doctor is challenged to explain what psychological issue would distort the realm of reality. In many cases the setting of this story mimics that of a court room. The audience is the jury, the doctor is the lawyer fighting one perspective while all the other characters are called to support the architect’s uncanny story by trying to prove that more than one person can experience an uncanny situation. This discussion offers both sides of the argument to the audience.
The film also questions the plausibility of these uncanny situations with the fact that for every uncanny moment the characters who experienced strange premonitions, ghost visits and hauntings were alone. These stories could be simply invented, and exaggerated as the mind tends to never truly remember anything precisely. Like any uncanny situation the mind is mostly unwilling to believe it as truth -until it can be proven in some logical term in order for us to comprehend it. Hence another reason for the placement of the doctor is to show our neediness to understand strange phenomena through logic and study.
Although the doctor’s explanation summarizes these illusions, he does so in terms of psychology and ignores the principles of physics which would render the stories as flawed. When we enter into the realm of the uncanny, physics or any other discipline that explains the “how” of the world no longer exists as we are willing to discredit logic in order to believe in the uncanny. The mind is a chimera playing tricks on us, eluding us to see things that are not necessarily there. Similar to the movie, “Shutter Island” where the main character is convinced that he is a police officer, when in reality it is all a game in his head. So if all these phenomena are a chicanery and only one individual experiences them alone than his reality has been distorted from the one that the rest of humanity lives in, therefore suggesting that if everyone agrees upon one reality, the individual’s reality is not real.
Adriana Serrato
Dead of night
ReplyDeleteTo me, uncanny means dumbfounded, not able to explain something, or amazed. The architect of the movie has come to the doctors place with a couple of people. Hes confused about were he is and the people there. He tells them he has met before. He asks them if they are real, if the situation of him being in there presents is real. He says he thinks this might be a dream and goes on to explain it and how everyone is in it. A man named Mr. Granger goes to sleep and then a second later wakes up and its morning. This doesn't make any sense because it was just night. There seems to be loss of time, knowing about the future, and fear. What makes this whole experience that the architect is having uncanny is that he is skeptical and unable to believe that he is telling a dream to people who have no reckolection of the events he explains. I don't think he quite understands how he is telling everyone what they have done in his dream when he hasn't "really" met them before. The doctor is skeptical as well because this is something that doesn't really seem possible nor can be reality. Later in the film Dead of Night, we come across a man and his soon to be wife. She buys him a mirror that ends up making him go crazy. He questions his sanity. He at first sees his reflection in the mirror which most of us do. But later finds that he sees the reflection of another room that isn't his. He is the only one that can see it. Another example of something you would have no words for explaining. All of the dreams in this film seem bizzare and not possible and that they can't be a reality. But it is almost as if they are tested possibly could be apart of reality when the doctor and the architect try and come up with an explanation as to whats happening and whats real.
In watching Dead of Night I find myself thinking about the relationship between the words uncanny and scary. As a longtime fan of the horror film genre, I don’t get frightened very easily. I believe I watch horror for the broad palette a filmmaker is able to work with: the vibrant colors, the elaborate sets, the makeup. Monsters, zombies, vampires, why don’t these things scare me? Upon further reflection, I believe it’s the filmmakers that employ the uncanny that instill the most fear. “Scare” isn’t even the correct word. When we are confused, unsettled, unsure, taken off our guard, we are taken out of our comfort zone. Monsters fall under the category of entertaining fantasy. Concepts such as time, space, dreams, reality, the universe, death, God/s, and creation on the other hand, are actual mysteries that affect our day to day experience. When an artist explores and utilizes these concepts in their work, the reaction from the audience is almost participatory. We can all relate. When our defenses are down, we may become profoundly frightened by these thoughts. This is the stuff of anxiety and panic attacks. Often, a movie that unsettles you is much worse than one that scares you.
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ReplyDeleteIn many ways, the Dead of Night appears to be linked very closely to Freud's text "The Uncanny" that seeks to define why certain occurrences are able to evoke fear within an individual. However, I am certain that many of you are already familiar with this writing so I'll spare you for now.
ReplyDeleteThe prevalence of the Uncanny within Cavalcanti's 1945 film entitled "Dead of Night" is present from the very moment in which Walter Craig arrives at the farmstead. Craig experiences a flashback and regains awareness of a specific dream that mimics the exact situation he now finds himself "caught" in. The uncanny is evoked through this "impossible-real" moment as the subconscious becomes part of focal awareness. In more descernible terms, what we perceive to be real becomes superimposed with an experience that is outside of what we would consider a possibility, or a reality, henceforth causing the viewer or the individual whom is experiencing such an occurrence to feel unsettled, frightened, or merely "creeped out".
Each story that the characters of "Dead of Night" individually possess contain one specific commonality. Each story seeks to communicate a description of an occurence that is, infact, indescribable and unexplainable. The unexplainable aspects contained within each of character's experience or story becomes juxtaposed with the character of the Doctor, who stands as an icon for science, a narrator of the truth, that which is real, tangible, and explainable.
Although many of the stories with which the audience is presented may seem arguable or even false, the way the film enters the life of each character and showcases their story from an exact point of view allows a viewer to form a closer psychological connection with each of the film's characters, henceforth leading one to believe everything a character "dictates" as opposed to the knowledge that the Doctor, who stands as an icon for reality and the tangible, constantly exudes in response to Walter Craig's experience and the experiences of each subsequent character.
The uncanny may also be linked to each character in a more personal sense. For instance, as each story and experience is different, this can be considered proof that phenomena which could be considered "frightening" or "creepy" is unique to the individual who experiences the emotion of fear.
In short, the "uncanny" is evoked through Cavalcanti's "Dead of Night" by the way in which the film portrays the dichotomous relationship that exists between unfamiliarity and familiarity, that which is definable and inexplainable.
Im totally didn't get the memo about commenting by 9am tuesday.. However here is my intake, Night of Dead is not far from reality in my perspective. I have had uncanny moments my self or heard of them threw friends and family. The action of the physical world and the spiritual world/realm merging has also been relevant threw out history in the most basic forms. Religion or spirituality can be included in one of those form, God being a spirit or a being that some even give a gender, talking to you thru out the day guiding one, with each and everyone of us as some believe. That connection that people have may be so simple but it is also a reflection of the uncanny. One can not show me his God or say that he or she has seen him/her, just a feeling of spirit something more something unseen.
ReplyDeleteThoughts or intuition can reflect uncanny as well. Being a mother sometimes I know when my son is going to fall or hurt him self right before he does it. "Mothers Intuition", very interesting how these things develop and how one responds to it. Is it practice? WHat is it?
Twins sometimes have connections where one twin knows if the other is hurt or happy. These things are all uncanny. As far as Night of Dead I have had more in depth things happen to more or family members that are even more uncanny. A lot of my dreams come to pass, or feelings in dreams surface and ill know the exact feeling from feeling it in my dream. Then I ask what is reality, My dream or whats happening right now. Night of the dead wasnt far fetch to me and it was interesting how everyone had a story but the doctor in the movie also played the role religion does today, tries to snap you back to "reality", also as if he doesn't want them to believe their own reality or afraid that if they do believe his logic will become worthless and their reality wont be his reality so he is power less.
Also missed the Tuesday 9am instruction...
ReplyDeleteThe word uncanny, to me, refers to an experience that offers a sense of familiarity, but can't quite be explained. It's striking because you don't understand it, but you're convinced that it's real.
Alberto Cavalcanti's Dead of Night is a brilliantly constructed film and concept for its time, and a prime example of the uncanny. During the first half of the film, Walter can't decide if he's in the middle of a familiar dream, or if he's truly experiencing his worst nightmare. This is one of the underlying instances of the uncanny throughout the film; the question of reality. As the other characters at the farm recount their own supernatural experiences, we see each character question his or her own reality as their stories progress.
What really struck me about Dead of Night was the ending. It makes the audience wonder if the entire thing was Walter's dream or a premonition, since we see him wake up and relive the beginning of his nightmare all over again after getting a phone call from Eliot. It also makes you wonder if Walter waking up at the end is actually just the nightmare starting over again, which would mean that whoever is having this nightmare (maybe it's not even Walter, and he's just a character too) is experiencing it over and over again.