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164 II. AREAS AND ELEMENTS
instance, may be relieved in many different ways. Hence the permanent interaction between mass dreams and film content. Each popular film conforms to popular wants; yet in conforming to them it inevitably does away with their inherent ambiguity. Any such film evolves these wants in a specific direction, confronts them with one among several meanings. Through their very definiteness films thus define the nature of the inarticulate from which they emerge.26
However, the daydreams which Hollywood— of course, not Hollywood alone— concocts and markets are beside the point within this particular context. They come true mainly in the intrigue, not in the whole of the film; and more often than not they are imposed upon the medium from without. Much as they may be relevant as indices of subterranean social trends, they offer little interest aesthetically. What matters here is not the sociological functions and implications of the medium as a vehicle of mass entertainment; rather, the problem is whether film as film contains dream-like elements which on their part send the audience dreaming.
Stark reality Cinematic films may indeed be said to resemble dreams at intervals— a quality so completely independent of their recurrent excursions into the realms of fantasy and mental imagery that it shows most distinctly in places where they concentrate on real-life phenomena. The documentary shots of Harlem houses and streets in Sidney Meyers's The Quiet One, especially its last section, would seem to possess this quality. [Illus. 33] Women are standing, all but motionless, in house doors, and nondescript characters are seen loitering about. Along with the dingy fayades, they might as well be products of our imagination, as kindled by the narrative. To be sure, this is an intended effect, but it is brought about by a clear-cut recording of stark reality. Perhaps films look most like dreams when they overwhelm us with the crude and unnegotiated presence of natural objects— as if the camera had just now extricated them from the womb of physical existence and as if the umbilical cord between image and actuality had not yet been severed. There is something in the abrupt immediacy and shocking veracity of such pictures that justifies their identification as dream images. Certain other communications peculiar to the medium have about the same effect; suffice it to mention the dream-like impressions conveyed by sudden displacements in time and space, shots comprising "reality of another dimension," and passages which render special modes of reality.
THE TWO DIRECTIONS OF DREAMING
Toward the object Released from the control of consciousness, the spectator cannot help feeling attracted by the phenomena in front of