Continuing Education

From its very inception, cinema has been invested in its unique ability within the arts to represent dreaming. And both dreams and cinema share an important yet puzzling position within philosophy, often engaged with, but just as often in a way that seems to make philosophy itself insecure. At the start of this course, we will attend to some of the fundamentals of the philosophical study of dreaming and cinema by looking at some foundational texts considering aesthetics and dreams. The main body of the semester will then explore specific themes that are central to the study of both dreams and cinema. We will read texts by philosophers such as Lessing, Aristotle, Freud, Bergson, Klein, and Deleuze, and watch films by artists such as Bergman, Kubrick, and Jane Campion, among others. Each week we will watch one film and read various philosophical texts to try to think about dreaming and movies together. We will endeavor to use philosophy to examine these important phenomena in our daily life, but also to ask what our dreams-waking or sleeping-do to the discipline of philosophy and how we understand who we are.
Note: This course is held on campus at SVA.