The Renewed Rhetoric of Subconscious Images
Dr. Mohammed Sameer Abd Elsalam
Literary Critic and Art Critic
Throughout my creative and critical path, I was and still am interested in the deep subconscious images that are now known in studies of consciousness and the first-person conscience as the successive images that come within a dream or are restored within a conscious meditative state that mimics the deep levels of the subconscious. I emphasize here that these intermittent images may be connected to levels of mental representation and other states of consciousness. They may be subject to conscious processing and the construction of abductive or inductive arguments, reaching the stage of meta-cognitive observation that reconstructs impressions and feelings about the self according to context indicators. Consciousness studies and new meta-cognitive studies confirm these processes. Therefore, expanding the establishment of semiotics for subconscious images in the new experimental cinema may enhance the establishment of complex and rich critical and semantic connections between intermittent subconscious images and other cognitive and meta-cognitive processes.
Today, I return to experimental cinema and discuss this experimental film entitled Wake directed by Lauren McDermott. The film’s pictorial discourse is based on a group of intermittent dreamy images that precede the act of waking, and which belong to the deep level of the subconscious. We see a dictionary of internal visual data, such as possible spaces in consciousness and subconsciousness, a negative image of a group of pigeons, and a character with a creative mystery wearing a black uniform. We see a group of images that cannot be understood within the dreamy pictorial discourse except through the possible semantic relationship between creation and re-creation. Formation, incarnation, and deconstruction together.
I believe that the mysterious character wearing black represents an experiential personal reference that suggests a ghostly appearance, a gothic appearance, or a transformative, dreamlike appearance that possibly refers to the self or the other. As for the negative images of birds, they confirm the interstitial stage between incarnation, ghostly presence, or re-creation. The aesthetic-spatial space of the camera was ultimately based on the inner eye that was observing the dream and the eye that was preparing to observe the outside world in a single experimental formation. This suggests the ongoing debate between dreamy images and reality images after the stage of the act of awakening.
From a cognitive-pragmatic methodological angle; Mental representations will be based on the ambiguity of self-appearance and its possible transformations, and the logic of the dream will be compatible with the current cultural context filled with the reproduction of overlapping, accumulated and contiguous images across the ages, and through reproduction techniques and esoteric contemplations.
Therefore, the main representational speech act confirms the relationship between the unconscious internal visual data and the abundance of possible metaphorical images and spaces in our current context, and the expressive speech act will reinforce the relationship between the inner eye and outer eye; As for the directive speech act, it relates to a wealth of questions about the relationship between unconscious images and their dense counterparts, or about building possible semantic connections between those images in the future.
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The link to the film:
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