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HISTORY AND FANTASY 83
instance, rejects realism as an unfounded limitation of the medium's potentialities: 'The flexibility of cinematic expression which in a flash passes from the objective to the subjective and simultaneously evokes the abstract and the concrete does not justify [the assumption] that film confines itself to [following] an aesthetics as narrow as that of realism."7 A number of critics even go so far as to contend that ''the true import of the cinema is the realm of dreams."8 The opinion of these extremists finds some support in the undeniable fact that, due to its specific techniques, film is better equipped than the other representational media to render visible things that have been imagined. Add to this the belief in the overwhelming significance of inner life and the widespread confusion of film with the traditional arts. Also, many a film maker's insistence on his freedom as a creative artist may blind him to the restrictions imposed on the formative tendency by the peculiarities of the medium.
Scheme oi analysis
The representation of fantasy on the screen may or may not conform to the cinematic approach. To find out about the possibilities involved and evaluate them correctly, we will have to examine two factors which play a major part in the rendering of the fantastic. One concerns the ways in which fantasy is established: whether in a stagy manner; with the aid of specifically cinematic devices; or in the material of physical reality itself. Since this factor raises problems of technique, it will be called the "technical" factor.
The other factor concerns the relations of fantasy to physical reality within a given work on the screen. It is evident that the relations between them must vary with the weights allotted to each. Two alternatives claim attention. Fantasy may or may not be allowed the same relevance to the medium as visible actuality. Take a supernatural event: in the first case it may be assigned a role which suggests that it is at least as amenable to cinematic treatment as a real-life event; in the second, it may be made to appear as belonging to a realm less adequate to the cinema than nature in the raw. This factor will be called "relational."
The cinematic or uncinematic quality of screen fantasies obviously results from the interplay of both factors. For example, the uncinematic effect of a stagy hallucination may well lose its sting if the hallucination emerges from, and remains subordinated to, contexts devoted to physical existence. This example also illustrates the analytical procedures to be followed. It would seem advisable to inquire into the three ways in which