A HYPNOGOGIC CINEMA

One could call all hallucinations and dreams a kind of
or
A cinema of one, the mind being projector, film and viewer all rolled into one.

Indeed if a time does come when cinema is triggered as a virtual reality that exists purely in the mind's eye, the whole history of the moving image will have to be entirely rewritten. No longer will the Lumière brothers be the founding fathers. Their clunky apparatuses and rolls of celluloid will be thrown on the scrap heap of history. Rather it will be the pioneers of mental space, those discoverers of the unconscious who will be celebrated. And the first epic melodramas will not be those of W.D. Griffith but those of the great 19th century somnambulists, who's visions were so vividly recorded by Professor Pierre Janet.
A CINEMA OF DISORDERS
Janet's patients created their own movies in their minds, a sort of delayed afterimage of real traumatic events. It only needed a sign to send them into a trance and the performance began in which they were simultaneously, projector, audience and star, their bodies the apparatus.

" The crises lasts for hours, and they show a splendid dramatic performance, for no actress could rehearse those lugubrious scenes with such perfection…. She poses and wears on her face expressions really worthy of admiration, which remain fixed during several minutes. The train arrives before her staring eyes, she utters a terrible shriek, and falls back motionless, as if she were dead. She soon gets up and begins acting over again one of the preceding scenes. In fact one of the characteristics of these somnambulisms is that they repeat themselves indefinitely. Not only the different attacks are always exactly alike, repeating the same movements, expressions and words, but in the course of the same attack, when it has lasted a certain time, the same scene may be repeated again exactly in the same way five or ten times." (1)

It is this element of exact repeatability that qualify these dramas as cinema, looping over and over again like our philosophical toys, only infinitely more terrifying than the magic lantern characters that so disturbed Proust’s childhood. See: A CINEMA IN MINIATURE
However not all somnambulists specialized in tragedy, there were comedies and cartoons too! "A curious case I have lately observed is that of He. That woman, a hysterical thirty five year old, was taking a walk in the zoological garden during her menstrual period when she was frightened by a lioness that, as was reported, seemed ready to rush upon her." Now in her delirium she transforms herself thus, "she runs on all fours, roars and rushes upon people, trying to bit e them…in a word, she acts a comedy wherein she believes herself to be a lioness. I say that she acts a comedy, for it becomes certain that she studies her part, and that she often replaces real actors by metaphors. For instance, she looks in a drawer for photographs, generally children's portraits, and tries to eat them up." (2)
VIRTUAL REALITIES
Ruiz declares that Janet had discovered a madness for the 21st century and a cinema of the future, "You're dealing with conglomerates of virtual individuals - virtual yet also, real, since each one has its own perception of the world and reacts differently to the same intake…. Every patient has the ability to organize his or her own little world, according to a set of rules provided by professors of dramatic writing, who are consulted on a frequent basis.

If I have gone on at length about this disease, it is because it prefigures an actively imaginary world, partly virtual and partly real. In these worlds, fragments of audiovisual matter from one side of the camera communicate with fragments of people on the other. These fragments live in suspension, caught between two worlds of active shadows." (3) See: A HYPOTHETICAL CINEMA
Proofs, c 1910 By Jacob Mohr
(pencil, pen on office paper)
Born Mannheim-Kafertal, 1884
Last Mentioned Mannheim, 1935
Case no. 41
Occupation; gardener/farmer, hawker
Religion: Catholic
Marital Status: single at time of record
Diagnosis: dementia praecox paranoides
(4)
(1) Janet, Pierre The Major Symptoms of Hysteria. New York: Hafner Publishing Company 1965 p.31

(2) Ibid. p. 28

(3) Ruiz, Raul The Poetics of Cinema France Éditions Dis Voir p.31

(4) Picture and description taken from the catalog of Beyond Reason: Art and Psychosis. Works from the Prinzhorn Collection. Hayward Gallery. London. 1997