The Unconscious and its Relationship With Cinema

The East has always taken much more into consideration the unconscious and the less accessible parts of the mind. In the West, however, society has given much more importance to the conscious mind, to the rational aspect. The importance of listening to the unconscious has been overlooked. In recent decades, however, even in the West, personal growth and issues related to the deepest areas of our psyche have acquired importance.

The unconscious is a huge reservoir of forgotten memories, repressed aspects of our personality and communication with invisible dimensions. Some more or less, we are all in contact with our unconscious but the predominant lifestyle does not give it much importance. The unconscious seems to many people a territory reserved for artists and psychologists. The mysterious world of the irrational seems to belong only to individuals who live outside social norms: who do not have their feet planted on the ground. 

The reality however is that the unconscious comprises 95% of our being. Just 5% belongs to the rational mind and its power is much, much less. However much we can lead a life made up of practical things and rational works, however much we can logically plan all aspects of our existence, it is the great current of the unconscious that directs our destinies. This aspect has been understood in the East for millennia, and for this reason we find all kinds of schools and disciplines that concern the inner dimension.

The Unconscious Creates the External Reality

Many are unwilling to admit it: they will blame the outside world, the partner, the crisis, the competition, and a thousand other external things. But with a deeper self-analysis, meditation techniques and more contact with oneself, we realize that most of the events that occur in our life are the result of the continuous work of the unconscious. A job that lasts 24 hours a day for a lifetime.

The unconscious is the part of us that connects us to remote forgotten experiences but of which we have elaborated, without realizing it, the usefulness. When we are presented with a new situation with emotions and events of the same type, it is our unconscious that tells us how to act, and we do it automatically, just like when we have learned to drive a car or walk. 

In the unconscious there is 95% of the perceptions of the present moment, of the here and now. What we perceive through the senses, we think, we feel is nothing but a small part. If we can ground ourselves for some time in the present moment, forgetting the thoughts, past and future we continually imagine about, then we realize the power of the unconscious. 

The experience of the present moment then appears very rich, and for a few moments we are able to perceive the world as when we were children, without the filter of the rational mind. A filter that begins its process of separating the individual from reality with language learning and grows significantly with school education. The university and the world of work usually represent the final separation with this magic of reality. 

The Collective Unconscious

But the unconscious is not only us, it also includes a collective unconscious. The mind we carry with us was formed over the centuries and millennia. It brings with it the whole experience of humanity, animals, birds, plants. Somehow the collective unconscious knows all these experiences, it is a dimension of ourselves that is not only ours but universal. 

The unconscious includes, according to the theories of quantum physics, all the present and future potentials that have not materialized but are in a potential state. Getting in touch with your own unconscious can be of enormous value to refine our intuition and look beyond contingent reality. In other words, being able to grasp the potential of worlds that have not materialized, or that perhaps simply live in other dimensions parallel to ours. 

So I don’t exist just for what I am or what I think I am now. There are many other selves who have made different choices. The one who may have chosen to live abroad, the one who has chosen another profession or another partner, an ego that has formed beliefs that are very far from what we have … Each choice is a potential door to another dimension. If certain conditions occur, a world becomes concrete, otherwise another potentiality of it will be realized. 

The unconscious therefore represents 95% of our past, our present and our future, and we can consider it the director of the film of life. But then why in Western society is it so undervalued, and most of the potential uncovered represent only fictional stories? Because without the birth and continuous strengthening of a logical mind and our rational conscious part, the individual cannot be integrated into society, cannot be part of any group, association, school or family. 

Unconscious and Social Rules

The unconscious is an experience of individual depth and cannot be integrated with social structures and rules: it is pure anarchy. But it is an anarchy that can reveal the true flow of things to us. Many people are not willing to venture into the unknown of the unconscious: this would mean being more and more alone and not being able to belong to groups and associations. The unconscious is a force that leads us to the truth but which makes it impossible to follow external rules. The price to pay can therefore be isolation and loneliness. 

The unconscious dealing with the unknown and the unknowable and this is scary. Its power is that what is known today was unknown yesterday, It was possible to know it by going into the unknowable. Science believes that existence can be interpreted at any level, but there is a part of the unknown that cannot be explained from any scientific point of view. 

In fact, many artists are not integrated with social rules and feel the problem of loneliness and marginalization, of the conflict between society and the individual. The logic of the creative man is precisely that of remaining continuously in contact with his own unconscious and the most unknowable currents of his soul. All this takes him inexorably away from the exterior and its rules, from the superficiality of social groups. The creative man inexorably feels that he belongs only to himself and that he can find what he seeks only in his own mind. 

Unconscious and Individual Truth

This moment, however, sooner or later comes for everyone. This descent into the depths of oneself can be postponed for many years, but sooner or later the moment arrives that the superficiality of the external world is no longer enough for us. After postponing for a long time we will be forced to confront our unconscious, the force that has somehow shaped our life. We will be forced to go and seek that truth about ourselves even though we have been concerned with simple and practical things all our life. 

But can one live then only in the world of the unconscious? A lot of artists have done it but ended up having big problems. The potential of the unconscious in fact needs a rational container within which they can be told. Without this container there is a risk of fragmentation and madness. A fragmented self explodes into many small pieces and loses contact with reality: this is what has happened to so many artists. Many others, on the other hand, have also been lucky in the external world and in society: they have managed to integrate the unconscious and consciousness, the rational and irrational world, intuition and logic, mystery and concreteness. 

And certainly this is the real way to go to exploit the richness of the personal and collective unconscious, as explained by the masters of psychology Freud and Jung. Understand that most of us are made up of these boundless irrational worlds but don’t overlook or deny the rules and logic, which allow us to really profit from them. Without a logic and a rational and coherent narration, the submerged treasures of the unconscious are not brought to the surface. 

Cinema and the unconscious

Cinema and psychoanalysis were born almost simultaneously, twin disciplines emerging on the cusp of the 20th century to offer humanity new tools to investigate its inner world. While Sigmund Freud in Vienna was mapping the dark geographies of the psyche, the Lumière brothers in Paris were projecting the first moving images, giving birth to an art form that would prove to be an almost perfect apparatus for visualizing the very structure of the unconscious. This is not just about films that tell psychological stories, but about a cinema that, in its purest and most audacious form, becomes the language of the unconscious.

The avant-garde movements, particularly Surrealism, immediately understood cinema’s potential to mimic the logic of dreams. Techniques like non-linear editing, image superimposition, and fragmented narration are not mere stylistic flourishes but the very grammar of dream logic. This language allows directors to bypass the defenses of rationality and communicate directly with the viewer on a subliminal level, bringing to the surface repressed desires, primal fears, and unconfessed fantasies. The experience of the dark theater, with the spectator passive before the beam of light, replicates the conditions of a pre-conscious state, making cinema a true psychoanalytic machine.

In this radical exploration, independent and auteur cinema has always played a pioneering role. Free from the commercial pressures and narrative formulas imposed by major studios, independent cinema is the territory where authors can venture without a map into the liminal spaces between reality and illusion, sanity and madness, between the conscious Ego and the repressed Other. The films that follow are not simple “psychological thrillers,” but stages of a curated journey through works that use cinematic form and language to dissect, represent, and ultimately, embody the unconscious.

Here is a curated selection of films that perfectly embody the theme of the unconscious:

Un Chien Andalou (1929)

Un Chien Andalou (1929) remains a foundational text for understanding the cinematic representation of the unconscious. This short, silent film dispenses with any semblance of conventional plot, instead presenting a series of dreamlike and often shocking images that follow a logic entirely their own. The iconic opening scene, depicting the slicing of an eye with a razor, serves as a visceral metaphor for piercing through the surface of reality to access the unconscious. Throughout the film, seemingly unrelated sequences unfold, populated by unsettling imagery such as ants crawling from a hand and a man dragging pianos laden with dead donkeys. These scenes, while defying rational interpretation, resonate with the symbolic language of dreams, where condensation and displacement often combine disparate elements into potent visual metaphors. Un Chien Andalou‘s prioritization of visceral impact over narrative coherence established a radical approach to filmmaking, one that directly engaged with the viewer’s unconscious on a primal level.

L’Age d’Or (1930)

L’Age d’Or (1930), another collaboration between Buñuel and Dalí, furthered the Surrealist exploration of the unconscious by directly confronting societal norms and repressed desires. This film presents a series of vignettes that depict the frustrating and often violent pursuit of erotic love, constantly interrupted by the constraints and hypocrisies of bourgeois society and religious institutions. The film’s controversial content, which includes blasphemous imagery and the depiction of primal urges clashing with social conventions, aligns with Freudian concepts of the id and the societal forces that seek to repress it. By challenging the audience’s expectations of decorum and narrative progression, L’Age d’Or aimed to provoke a visceral reaction and expose the often-unacknowledged desires that drive human behavior.

Wild Strawberries (1957)

Ingmar Bergman, the celebrated Swedish filmmaker, frequently utilized dreams, nightmares, and introspective dialogues to explore the inner lives of his characters. Wild Strawberries (1957) stands as a prime example of his exploration of the subconscious. The film follows an aging professor on a journey to receive an honorary degree, during which he is plagued by vivid dreams and memories that force him to confront his past regrets and emotional coldness. Bergman masterfully uses these dream sequences as a narrative device, seamlessly weaving them into the protagonist’s journey to reveal his unconscious desires and the emotional baggage he has carried throughout his life. The film’s introspective nature and its focus on the protagonist’s internal landscape create a poignant and deeply resonant cinematic experience.

Altin in the City

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Drama, thriller, by Fabio Del Greco, Italy 2017.
Altin, aspiring Albanian writer arrived in Italy aboard a large ferry in the 90‘s, works in a butcher shop when he’s selected to audition for a reality of writers and finally sees a chance to be successful with his book “the journey of Ismail.” Unfortunately, this is the begin of the adventures which will lead him to learn about revenge, loneliness and extreme poverty, to the dark side of wealth and success.

The theme of Altin in the City should not lead to the assumption that it is merely the story of a young immigrant trying to integrate. In reality, it is a tale where greed, thirst for power and success, cynicism, and ambition intertwine, creating a sort of modern-day Faust and a new "pact with the devil" belonging to the 22nd century, which we could summarize as: show business. The reality show becomes the Mecca, the keystone, and the springboard for those who wish to achieve success without effort. Del Greco presents this world with subtle irony, characterized by kitsch nuances and parodic tones. However, success without effort comes at a price: Altin has sold his soul to the devil and, from being an easy prey of television showbiz, will soon become a victim of himself.

LANGUAGE: Italian
SUBTITLES: English, French, Spanish, German.

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Solaris (1972)

Andrei Tarkovsky, the revered Russian director, was known for his use of dreamlike imagery, potent symbolism, and deliberate, slow pacing to create a sense of immersion in the inner worlds of his characters. Solaris (1972) serves as a profound exploration of memory, loss, and the uncanny manifestations of the unconscious within a science fiction setting. The film centers on a psychologist sent to a space station orbiting the planet Solaris, a mysterious entity capable of materializing the innermost thoughts and memories of the station’s crew. Tarkovsky uses the science fiction genre as a framework to explore deeply human themes of guilt, longing, and the overwhelming power of the unconscious to shape reality. The planet Solaris acts as a catalyst, bringing forth the characters’ repressed emotions and desires, blurring the lines between objective reality and subjective inner states.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

David Lynch stands as a contemporary master of the surreal, consistently employing non-linear narratives, dream logic, and often disturbing imagery to represent the enigmatic landscape of the unconscious. Mulholland Drive (2001) exemplifies his complex exploration of dreams, identity, and repressed desires within the seductive and often sinister world of Hollywood. The film’s shifting realities, ambiguous symbolism, and dreamlike structure delve into the protagonist’s subconscious desires, fears, and the constructed nature of self. Lynch’s masterful use of atmosphere and unsettling imagery creates a cinematic experience that mirrors the fluid and often illogical nature of dreams and the unconscious.

Lost Highway (1997)

Lynch further explores fractured identities and dreamlike realities in Lost Highway (1997). This work becomes increasingly abstract, pushing the boundaries of traditional narrative and fully immersing the viewer in the disorienting and often terrifying logic of the unconscious. The non-linear storytelling, surreal events, and ambiguous symbolism in this film directly mirror the fragmented and elusive nature of unconscious thought.

Inland Empire (2006)

Lynch further explores fractured identities and dreamlike realities in Inland Empire (2006). This later work becomes increasingly abstract, pushing the boundaries of traditional narrative and fully immersing the viewer in the disorienting and often terrifying logic of the unconscious. The non-linear storytelling, surreal events, and ambiguous symbolism in this film directly mirror the fragmented and elusive nature of unconscious thought.

Carnival of souls

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Horror, by Herk Harvey, United States, 1962.
Mary Henry emerges unscathed from a car accident that killed her two companions, and sets off on a strange adventure in Salt Lake City, where she finds herself drawn to a dilapidated lakeside pavilion and haunted by a ghostly figure (played by same director). A low-budget ($ 30,000) horror masterpiece that went unnoticed at the time of its release, it has become a cult film in the United States since the late 1980s. Sounds and images that have inspired directors such as George Romero and David Lynch (the masked man from "Lost Roads").

LANGUAGE: english
SUBTITLES: italian

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El Topo (1970)

Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean-French filmmaker, is renowned for his use of surreal and often shocking imagery, spiritual symbolism, and ritualistic narratives to explore themes of transformation and the subconscious. El Topo (1970) delves into psychedelic and spiritual journeys through the often-transgressive landscape of the unconscious. Jodorowsky’s films are intensely symbolic, aiming to provoke a visceral and spiritual awakening in the viewer by directly engaging with the hidden depths of the mind. His use of dreamlike sequences, bizarre imagery, and allegorical narratives creates a cinematic experience that bypasses rational thought and taps into deeper psychological and spiritual levels.

Santa Sangre (1989)

Santa Sangre (1989) stands as another example of Jodorowsky’s unique blend of surrealism and psychological exploration. This film combines elements of horror, melodrama, and the bizarre to explore themes of trauma, obsession, and the dark undercurrents of family relationships. The film’s unsettling imagery and the protagonist’s fractured psychological state vividly reflect the distorted and often disturbing content of the unconscious.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) delves into the intricate relationship between memory, love, and the subconscious attempt to erase unwanted experiences. Michel Gondry’s film beautifully visualizes the fragmented and emotionally charged landscape of memory as a man undergoes a procedure to have his ex-girlfriend erased from his mind. The film’s innovative use of visual effects and non-linear storytelling directly reflects the subjective and often chaotic nature of memory and the unconscious, raising profound questions about identity and the significance of our experiences.

Paprika (2006)

Satoshi Kon’s animated masterpiece, Paprika (2006), offers a vibrant and imaginative depiction of dreams and the blurring boundaries between reality and the unconscious. The film follows a team of scientists who have developed a device that allows them to enter people’s dreams, leading to a series of fantastical and often unsettling events when the device is stolen. Kon’s animation allows for a literal and visually stunning representation of the dream world and its powerful influence on waking reality, creating a conceptually rich exploration of the potential dangers and wonders of the unconscious.

Dementia

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Horror, noir, by John Parker, United States, 1955.
It's night. A woman suddenly wakes up from a nightmare in a seedy hotel in the Los Angeles suburbs. She leaves the room and wanders the neighborhood. She meets a dwarf who sells newspapers with the title "Mysterious Stabbing". In a dark alley, a drunkard harasses her and a policeman rescues her. She then she meets a smartly dressed man with a thin mustache. The man gives her a flower and convinces her to get into the limo with a rich fat guy. As they drive through the city, the man thinks back to his childhood trauma and the violent father who stabbed him with a knife after he shot his unfaithful mother. The rich man takes her to have fun in several nightclubs and then to her apartment. He first ignores the woman while she gorges herself with a big meal. She seduces him, and he approaches her excitedly.

A visionary and hallucinatory nightmare, without dialogue, during a night of a lonely woman in Los Angeles. Between horror, film noir and expressionist film, initially conceived as a short film by Parker based on a dream told him by his secretary, Barrett, who also became the film's interpreter. The film was blocked by the New York State Film Board before being released in theaters in 1955. Later Jack H. Harris bought it and created a new version, with a different cut of editing, also adding a voiceover. and changing the title. This is the original version.

Without dialogue

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Come True (2020)

Come True (2020) presents an atmospheric and unsettling exploration of shared nightmares and the collective unconscious. This independent film follows a teenage runaway who participates in a sleep study, only to find herself trapped in a nightmarish world that seems to be connected to the dreams of others. The film taps into contemporary anxieties and the intriguing possibility of shared unconscious experiences, creating a visually striking and thought-provoking narrative about the darker aspects of the inner world.

Repulsion (1965)

Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) offers a claustrophobic and deeply disturbing portrayal of a young woman’s descent into madness and the terrifying externalization of her inner fears. Set primarily within the confines of an apartment, the film uses a subjective perspective to powerfully convey the protagonist’s deteriorating mental state and the increasingly nightmarish manifestations of her unconscious anxieties. The film’s oppressive atmosphere and its focus on the protagonist’s isolation directly reflect the disintegration of her conscious mind and the emergence of deeply repressed fears.

The Science of Sleep (2006)

Michel Gondry returns to the exploration of the permeable boundaries between dreams and waking life in The Science of Sleep (2006). This whimsical and visually inventive film reflects the inner world of a young man who struggles to distinguish between his dreams and reality. Gondry employs his signature imaginative style to create a lighthearted yet still insightful exploration of the creative and sometimes chaotic nature of the unconscious, where the lines between the tangible and the imagined constantly blur.

Un Chien Andalou

A seminal masterpiece of Surrealism, this work by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí is a sequence of shocking images devoid of narrative connection, born directly from the artists’ dreams. Conceived as a violent attack on bourgeois complacency, the film rejects all rational logic to explore the deepest and most irrational drives of the human psyche, following only the logic of the unconscious.

Un Chien Andalou is the foundational text of psychoanalytic cinema. Every image is a raw, uncensored manifestation of the Freudian Id. The famous opening scene, with the razor slicing an eye, is not just an image of gratuitous violence but a declaration of intent: to destroy the conventional, passive way of “seeing” to force the viewer into a new, psychoanalytic perception that looks beyond the surface. The ants swarming from the hand, the pianos dragged with donkey carcasses and priests, represent sexual desire, fear of castration, and the dead weight of social and religious repression. The total rejection of narrative is its greatest achievement: a perfect implementation of dream logic and a direct assault on the Ego’s need for order.

Haxan

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Documentary, by Benjamin Christensen, Sweden, 1922.
Desecration of tombs, torture, demon-possessed nuns and witches' sabbath: Haxan, Witchcraft Through the Ages is an incredibly original and unconventional film that has become legendary over time. Between documentary and dramatic fiction, the film guides us through the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered from the same ills as the mentally ill of the modern era. A frightening and at the same time humorous gothic horror, with the creation of documentary and non-fiction sequences that anticipate the innovations of the Nouvelle Vague. Something absolutely unique in the history of cinema.

Food for thought
In Sanskrit Devil and Divine come from the same root, dev. Madness is the dark side of man and it is as natural as the bright side. When you are able to tell a madman that not only is he mad but that you are too, a bridge is immediately created, and it is possible to help him. The nature of life is neither logical nor rational. Life is illogical, wild and contradictory.

LANGUAGE: English, Swedish
SUBTITLES: Spanish, French, German, Portuguese

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Meshes of the Afternoon

A cornerstone of American experimental cinema, Maya Deren’s film follows a woman in a cyclical, dreamlike narrative within her own home. Everyday objects like a key, a knife, and a flower become charged with symbolic menace as the dream transforms into a paranoid exploration of identity, subjectivity, and death, where the boundaries between dreamer and dreamed dissolve.

This work is an archetypal example of the “trance film,” a genre dedicated to representing subjective, inner experience. The film’s structure, based on repetition and variation, mirrors the obsessive and associative nature of the unconscious. The domestic space, usually a place of safety, becomes a map of the protagonist’s psyche. Each room and object corresponds to a different facet of her unconscious, and her looped journey is an attempt to integrate these fragmented parts of herself. The presence of multiple versions of the protagonist is the visualization of a fractured identity, an Ego that can no longer contain its inner anxieties.

8 ½

Federico Fellini’s masterpiece is the portrait of a director in the midst of a creative and personal crisis. Guido Anselmi, the director’s alter ego, retreats to a spa to escape the pressures of his next film, only to be besieged by memories, dreams, and fantasies. The film masterfully blends reality with the oneiric world, exploring memory, desire, and the chaos of the creative process.

8 ½ is a dizzying descent into an artist’s unconscious. Fellini, deeply influenced by Jungian psychoanalysis, uses stream of consciousness to represent Guido’s struggle with his inner archetypes. The female figures populating his dreams and memories embody the Anima, the representation of the feminine unconscious in the male psyche. The film does not follow a linear plot but moves through free association, just like a dream or an analysis session. The famous “harem” sequence is a powerful materialization of Guido’s fantasies, an attempt to resolve the conflict between desire and guilt, between idealized purity and earthly carnality.

Persona

An enigmatic masterpiece by Ingmar Bergman, the film tells the story of an actress, Elisabet, who suddenly stops speaking, and the nurse, Alma, assigned to care for her in an isolated island villa. In the silence and isolation, the identities of the two women begin to merge and blur in a profound and disturbing exploration of the self, the social mask, and the porous boundaries of the human psyche.

Bergman doesn’t just tell a story about the collapse of identity; he structures the film itself to undergo a similar breakdown. The title refers to the Jungian concept of the “persona,” the mask we wear for the world. Elisabet’s mutism is a radical rejection of this mask, a psychological collapse that forces Alma to confront the fragility of her own identity. The famous shot of the overlapping faces is the film’s central thesis: the dissolution of the boundary between self and other, between Ego and Shadow. The metacinematic frame, with the projector breaking at the beginning and the film burning at the end, suggests that the narrative itself is a fragile “persona,” a mask hiding the chaotic, unconscious mechanics of cinema.

Last Year at Marienbad

In a luxurious and labyrinthine baroque hotel, a man approaches a woman, insisting that they met and had an affair the previous year. She remembers nothing. Alain Resnais‘ film is a hypnotic and mysterious exploration of memory, perception, and the subjective nature of reality, where past, present, and imagination merge into a timeless mental architecture.

Last Year at Marienbad is a film about the construction of reality through memory and desire. The narrative offers no objective truth but presents reality as a mental construct, malleable and uncertain. The hotel itself, with its endless corridors and geometric gardens, functions as a metaphor for the mind, a labyrinth of potential memories and forgotten paths. The viewer is placed in the same position as the woman: forced to navigate a stream of contradictory statements and images, never able to distinguish authentic memory from imposed fantasy. The film is a radical investigation into how the unconscious can shape and even create our past.

Testament of Orpheus

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Drama film, by Jean Cocteu, France, 1960.
In his latest film, the legendary Jean Cocteau is a poet who travels through time in search of enlightenment. In a mysterious wasteland, he meets lost souls that result in his death and resurrection. With an exceptional cast including Pablo Picasso, Jean-Pierre Leáud, Lucia Bosè, Yul Brynner, Brigitte Bardot, Testament of Orpheus closes Cocteau's extraordinary research on the relationship between art and life.

LANGUAGE: french
SUBTITLES: english, italian

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Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

A gothic and surreal fairy tale from the Czechoslovak New Wave, the film follows thirteen-year-old Valerie through a week of fantastical and disorienting events that coincide with her sexual awakening. Her world becomes populated by vampires, lecherous priests, and mysterious figures in a dreamlike whirlwind that blends love, fear, eroticism, and religion, exploring the anxieties and wonders of adolescence.

This work uses dream logic to represent the psychological transition from childhood to adulthood. Valerie’s world is a landscape of the unconscious, where fears and desires related to sexuality and the changing body take the form of mythological creatures and fairy-tale archetypes. The vampire, who is both a father figure and a seducer, embodies the ambivalence of Oedipal desire. The narrative proceeds through visual and symbolic associations, not causality, perfectly reflecting how an adolescent’s psyche processes the profound and often frightening transformations of puberty.

The Holy Mountain

A psychedelic and spiritual odyssey directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. A thief, resembling Christ, is guided by an alchemist on a journey to the Holy Mountain to obtain the secret of immortality. Along with seven other powerful figures, representing the planets and society’s vices, they must undergo a series of bizarre and surreal rituals to shed their egos and transcend material reality.

The Holy Mountain is a filmed alchemical ritual, an attempt to use cinema to induce a psychological transformation in the viewer. Jodorowsky draws heavily on the symbolism of alchemy, tarot, and Eastern philosophies to create a visual experience that aims to bypass the rational mind and speak directly to the collective unconscious. The protagonists’ journey is a metaphor for the Jungian individuation process: a path of integrating the Shadow and overcoming social conditioning to reach a higher Self. The metacinematic ending, which reveals the film set, is the final stage of transmutation: breaking the illusion (of cinema and reality itself) to embrace “real life.”

Eraserhead

David Lynch’s debut film is a surrealist nightmare in black and white. The meek Henry Spencer navigates a desolate industrial landscape, facing a tormented relationship and the terrifying responsibility of caring for his monstrously deformed baby. It is a total immersion into a mental state of anxiety, fear, and isolation, where external reality is a direct projection of inner horror.

Eraserhead is perhaps the purest cinematic representation of an anxiety state. The entire film operates according to dream logic, where the external world is the physical manifestation of Henry’s unconscious terror, particularly his fears related to fatherhood, sexuality, and biological decay. The industrial landscape is not a social commentary but a metaphor for the internal mechanics of a traumatized psyche: the hissing pipes and creaking machinery represent the involuntary and terrifying processes of the body. The “baby” is the ultimate symbol of repressed guilt, the creative burden, and the horror of the biological imperative.

Stalker

In an undefined future, a guide known as the “Stalker” leads two clients, a Writer and a Professor, through a mysterious and forbidden territory called the Zone. At the center of the Zone is said to be a Room capable of granting the innermost desires of those who enter. The journey, however, is more a spiritual and psychological path than a physical one, testing the faith, cynicism, and true nature of the protagonists’ desires.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Zone is a landscape of the soul, a physical space that reacts to and conforms to the psychological states of those who traverse it. It is not a place of sci-fi wonders but a mirror reflecting the characters’ unconscious. The Room does not grant what is asked, but what is truly desired, deep down, forcing the characters to confront the terrifying possibility of not knowing themselves. The film is a profound meditation on faith, despair, and the unknowable nature of human desire, suggesting that the most important journey is the one within one’s own psyche.

The cabinet of Dr. Caligari

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Horror, fantasy, by Robert Wiene, Germany, 1920.
The symbolic film of cinematic expressionism. Francis tells a story to a man: in 1830, in a small town, a guy named Caligari, plays the barker at the fair to present the attraction of him, a sleepwalker that he holds under hypnosis in a coffin. The doctor argues that the sleepwalker is able to know the past and predict the future. Unreal atmospheres and deformed sets, stylized acting, split personality, confusion between dream and reality.

Food for thought
Personality from the Greek person means mask. Person comes from the word personality. Individuality is a gift of existence, personality is imposed by society. Personality follows the flock of sheep, individuality is a lion moving on its own. Until you let go of your personality you won't be able to find your individuality.

LANGUAGE: German
SUBTITLES: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese

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Altered States

An obsessed scientist, Eddie Jessup, studies altered states of consciousness using sensory deprivation tanks and powerful hallucinogenic drugs. His experiments lead him to regress physically and mentally, first to a state of primitive man and then to pure primordial energy, in a terrifying exploration of the boundaries between science, mysticism, and the collective unconscious.

Directed by Ken Russell, this film is an explosive foray into the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious. Jessup’s regressions are not mere hallucinations but real journeys through humanity’s genetic and evolutionary memory. Sensory deprivation and drugs act as catalysts to unlock the archetypes and primordial memories buried in every individual’s psyche. The film uses a psychedelic visual language and powerful body horror to represent the terrifying idea that our individual identity is just a thin layer over an abyss of shared biological and psychic history.

Alice

Jan Švankmajer’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic is a work of stop-motion surrealism that shuns any sanitized depiction. Told entirely from a child’s perspective, her descent down the rabbit hole is a journey into a tactile and unsettling world populated by creatures made of everyday objects, taxidermied animals, and bones, reflecting the bizarre and sometimes cruel logic of childhood imagination.

This is not Disney’s Wonderland, but a landscape of the childhood unconscious. Švankmajer uses animation to bring objects to life in a way that perfectly captures how a child perceives the world: a place where the boundary between animate and inanimate is fluid. The white rabbit losing its sawdust and sewing itself back up is a powerful image of fragility and mortality, seen through a child’s eyes. The film celebrates the wild and untamed nature of imagination, showing how a child’s dreams can be a mixture of wonder and terror.

Jacob’s Ladder

A Vietnam veteran, Jacob Singer, is tormented by fragmented flashbacks of his war experience and the loss of his young son. His reality in New York begins to crumble, populated by demonic visions and inexplicable events that blur the lines between past and present, sanity and madness. Jacob struggles to understand what is real as his life becomes a psychological labyrinth.

Adrian Lyne’s film is a powerful representation of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), where trauma is not just a memory but an active force that warps the perception of reality. The non-linear narrative structure and Jacob’s hallucinations reflect the mental state of a person whose psyche is fractured by grief and guilt. The demonic figures can be interpreted as manifestations of his unresolved trauma. The film masterfully explores ambiguity, leaving the viewer, like Jacob, unsure whether what he sees is the result of a government conspiracy, a mental breakdown, or a spiritual experience on the border between life and death.

Naked Lunch

Inspired by William S. Burroughs’ “unfilmable” novel, David Cronenberg’s film follows Bill Lee, an exterminator addicted to his own bug powder. After accidentally killing his wife, he flees to a surreal place called Interzone, where typewriters transform into talking cockroaches and reality dissolves into a paranoid nightmare fueled by drugs, writing, and conspiracy.

Cronenberg doesn’t adapt the novel but explores its psychology, merging Burroughs’ life with his work. The film is a radical depiction of how addiction and the creative process can alter the perception of reality. Interzone is a projection of Lee’s mind, a landscape of the unconscious where paranoia, repressed sexual desire, and guilt take grotesque, organic forms. Writing is not an act of control but of submission to unconscious forces, symbolized by the insect-typewriters that dictate Lee’s own story to him.

The conquest of the Pole

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Short film, adventure, fantasy, adventure, by Georges Méliès, France, 1912.
Perhaps the best film made by Méliès, full of extravagant special effects. Professor Maboul, played by steeso Méliès and six other people try to reach the North Pole. While the man uses a plane and crosses the constellations, the others travel by car. Once they reach the Pole they will encounter a terrible and gigantic ice monster.

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Pi

In his low-budget, black-and-white debut, Darren Aronofsky tells the story of Max Cohen, a solitary and paranoid mathematical genius who believes that everything in nature can be understood through numbers. His search for a mathematical pattern in the stock market leads him to discover a mysterious 216-digit number, which attracts the attention of a powerful Wall Street firm and a group of Jewish Kabbalists, pushing him to the brink of madness.

Pi is a psychological thriller about the thin line separating genius from insanity. The grainy, high-contrast photography and the pounding soundtrack immerse us in Max’s obsessive and paranoid mind. His world is a reflection of his internal struggle: a desperate attempt to impose a rational order (mathematics) on a chaotic universe. His hallucinations and excruciating headaches are the physical manifestation of the conflict between his search for transcendence and the limits of the human mind. The film suggests that the obsession with absolute knowledge can become a form of self-destruction, a path leading not to enlightenment but to the disintegration of the self.

Waking Life

A young man finds himself trapped in a state of perpetual lucid dreaming, unable to wake up. He wanders through a series of dreamlike encounters with philosophers, artists, and ordinary people, who discuss topics such as reality, free will, consciousness, and the meaning of life. Made with the rotoscoping technique, which digitally animates live-action footage, the film has a fluid, dreamlike aesthetic that perfectly mirrors its content.

Richard Linklater’s film is a philosophical inquiry into the nature of consciousness, presented through the lens of lucid dreaming. The rotoscoping animation visually dissolves the boundaries between characters and their environment, creating a world in constant flux, just like the mind in a dream state. The protagonist is not an active hero but a receptacle for ideas, an embodiment of consciousness exploring itself. Waking Life suggests that life itself might be a dream from which we must “wake up,” not in a literal sense, but by reaching a higher level of awareness and authenticity.

Paprika

In the near future, a revolutionary technology called the DC Mini allows psychotherapists to enter their patients’ dreams. When the device is stolen by a “dream terrorist,” reality and the dream world begin to merge into a spectacular and surreal chaos. Dr. Atsuko Chiba and her dream alter ego, the vibrant Paprika, must navigate this mental landscape to stop the destruction.

The late Satoshi Kon’s final masterpiece is a dizzying celebration of the power of dreams and cinema. The film explores the idea of a collective unconscious that can be hacked and manipulated, where individual dreams spill into one another, creating a chaotic and unstoppable parade. Kon uses the medium of animation to push the boundaries of visual representation, creating dream sequences that would be impossible in live-action cinema. Paprika is also a metacinematic reflection: the dream, with its time jumps and transformations, is the very essence of editing and cinematic language.

Dogtooth

Three teenagers live in complete isolation in a country villa, having never set foot outside the family fence. Their parents have constructed an alternate, distorted reality for them, teaching them incorrect meanings for words and instilling in them a fear of the outside world. This fragile balance is threatened when the father introduces an outsider to satisfy his son’s sexual needs.

Yorgos Lanthimos‘ film is a chilling allegory about psychological control and the construction of reality. The family is a totalitarian microcosm, where language is used as a tool of power to manipulate perception and limit freedom. The cold, detached directorial style, with its static and symmetrical shots, amplifies the unsettling and claustrophobic atmosphere. Dogtooth explores how extreme isolation can deform the human psyche and raises profound questions about the nature of education, parental power, and rebellion as a necessary act for the discovery of the self.

The Dream of Homer

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Documentary, by Emiliano Aiello, Italy, 2018.
What makes those who live without seeing dream? What kind of images and figures populate your imagination and dreams? The Dream of Homer is a documentary on the dreams of Rosa, Domenico, Gabriel, Daniela and Fabio: blind from birth, united by their condition and the habit of narrating their dreams to a tape recorder, an oral diary that each of them records every morning after getting out of bed.

LANGUAGE: italian
SUBTITLES: English

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Enter the Void

Shot entirely from a first-person perspective, the film follows Oscar, a young American drug dealer living in Tokyo. After being killed in a police raid, his spirit detaches from his body and floats above the city, observing his sister’s life, reliving traumatic memories, and embarking on a psychedelic journey through death, memory, and reincarnation, inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Gaspar Noé’s work is an immersive and sensory cinematic experience, an attempt to simulate a psychedelic and out-of-body experience. The use of the first-person perspective and strobing neon lights creates a state of visual trance, dragging the viewer into Oscar’s stream of consciousness. The film doesn’t just represent a “trip”; it explores how trauma, particularly the death of his parents, shapes the psyche and desire. Oscar’s journey is a desperate search for connection and a return to a pre-traumatic state, a cycle of death and rebirth that reflects the inescapable nature of our psychological patterns.

Antichrist

After the tragic death of their only child, a couple retreats to an isolated cabin in the woods called “Eden” to process their grief. He, a therapist, tries to treat his wife with exposure therapy, but their stay in the wilderness turns into a psychological and physical nightmare, unleashing violence, internalized misogyny, and primordial horrors.

Lars von Trier’s controversial film is a brutal descent into the abyss of grief and guilt. Nature is not an idyllic backdrop but the external manifestation of the protagonists’ tormented psyche, a place where chaos and cruelty reign. The film explores how extreme pain can cause the mind to regress to a primordial, savage state. Through powerful and often disturbing symbolism, Von Trier tackles themes like internalized misogyny (the woman who comes to believe her nature is evil) and the failure of male rationality in the face of the chaos of emotion.

Beyond the Black Rainbow

In a retro-futuristic research institute in 1983, a young woman with psychic powers is held captive by a deranged scientist. Her mind is controlled by a sinister technology that induces trance states. The film is a hypnotic and feverish visual experience, an immersion into a psychedelic aesthetic that blends science fiction, horror, and a critique of New Age culture.

Panos Cosmatos‘ work is a “trance film” that puts the viewer in the same altered state as its characters. The visual style, with its saturated colors and slow, meditative pace, is designed to be oppressive and disorienting. The Arboria Institute, with its promise of inner peace through mind control, is a metaphor for ideologies and therapies that seek to suppress the unconscious rather than integrate it. The film is a surreal journey into the failure of a utopia, where the search for transcendence turns into a psychological prison.

Melancholia

Divided into two parts, the film follows two sisters, Justine and Claire, as a mysterious planet named Melancholia approaches Earth menacingly. The first part focuses on Justine’s catastrophic wedding reception, where her profound depression sabotages the event. The second part shows how, in the face of the impending apocalypse, the roles are reversed: the rational Claire collapses into panic, while Justine, already accustomed to despair, finds a strange calm and clarity.

Lars von Trier uses the apocalypse as a powerful metaphor for depression. For Justine, the end of the external world is nothing more than a reflection of her inner world, already devastated. The film explores the concept of “depressive realism,” the idea that depressed people have a clearer, less illusory view of reality. While the “sane” world clings to false hopes, Justine accepts the inevitable with a kind of nihilistic grace. Melancholia is a visually sumptuous and psychologically profound representation of how a mental state can radically alter the perception of existential reality.

The Lost Poet

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Drama, by Fabio Del Greco, Italy, 2024.
Dante Mezzadri wants to see an old friend, nicknamed the Iguana, whom he has lost sight of for many years, and who has managed to turn their shared youthful passion for poetry into a job, becoming a famous writer and poet. The man escapes from his bourgeois life and his wife to live homeless on the Roman coast, printing and trying to sell his poetry collections. At night he sleeps in a park of old carnival floats, inside a papier-mâché tank, and waits for the opportunity to meet his old friend, who however never shows up for appointments in the places they frequented when they were young, now in ruins. Dante's poetry books do not interest anyone and to support himself he is forced to "change product": he starts selling the infamous "cannibal pill" on behalf of young drug dealers, a new drug that sells like hot cakes and causes sensory and consumerist ecstasy. However, he realizes that this powerful drug is very dangerous for those who take it, he comes into conflict with his ethical conscience and throws all the pills into the sea. However, the dealers want to collect their money.

Shot over a period of 2 years, the film is a reflection on the cultural and artistic rubble of the society in which the protagonist lives, in an increasingly mechanized, consumerist and arid world. Dante Mezzadri is yet another human being who has renounced his inspiration and his creativity, but unlike many he is not willing to give his life to a system that distances him from his true identity. The physical world around him, however, seems constructed in such a way that it seems impossible to escape from this "invisible cage". The enthusiasm of the people he meets is ignited only by sensory gratification, by unreal visions of personal affirmation and success, by "metaverses" that offer an escape into an illusory and destructive reality. The poet's house on the coast, where he met with his friends as a young man, is just a pile of abandoned rubble. What happened to all those who wanted to become poets and ended up becoming something else? Are there internal forces with which that house can be "rebuilt"?

LANGUAGE: Italian
SUBTITLES: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese

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Berberian Sound Studio

A timid English sound engineer, Gilderoy, travels to Italy to work on the mixing of a “giallo” horror film. Far from home and immersed in an increasingly hostile and surreal work environment, Gilderoy is forced to create gruesome sounds for torture scenes he never sees. Slowly, the boundary between his work and reality begins to dissolve, dragging him into a psychological nightmare.

Peter Strickland’s film is a masterpiece of psychological horror that explores the power of sound to influence the mind. We never see the violence of the film-within-the-film, but we hear it through Gilderoy’s work, forcing the viewer to use their own imagination to create the horror. This dissociation between sound and image mirrors the protagonist’s psychological fragmentation. The recording studio becomes an arena of his psyche, where his anxieties and repression are amplified and distorted until he loses his grip on reality.

Climax

In the mid-90s, a dance troupe gathers in an isolated building for a rehearsal. After an electrifying performance, they celebrate with sangria that, unbeknownst to them, has been spiked with LSD. What begins as a joyous celebration quickly descends into a paranoid and violent nightmare, a collective descent into chaos and primordial hysteria.

Gaspar Noé orchestrates a visceral representation of the collapse of social order and the liberation of the darkest drives of the unconscious. The drug acts as a catalyst that dissolves the inhibitions of the Superego, allowing rivalries, jealousies, and repressed desires to explode without control. The camera, with its long takes and fluid, disorienting movements, immerses us in the collective experience, making us feel part of the trip and the descent into hell. Climax is a terrifying exploration of how the fragile facade of civilization can crumble, revealing the animal hiding beneath the surface.