Oneiric Film Theory

Refers to what is described as the depiction of dream like states in film or the use of the metaphor of a dream to analyse film

-Jean Epstein argued films have a dream like quality.
-Raymond Bellour and Guy Rosolato made psychoanalytical analogies between films and dream states - films having "latent" content - used Freuds Interpretation of Dreams

Barthes - viewer as passive. - "para-oneiric" state
" sleepy and drowsy as if they had just woken up" 

breton- 
viewer enters a state between "awake and flaying asleep"

Rene clair referred to these as a dream like state



Esthetique et psychologie du cinema (1963) discusses connection between films & dream state
- jean cocteau - conscious hallucination

filmmakers who have been described as using oneiric theory
- Ingmar bergman - persona
- Luis Bunuel
- Lars Von Trier
- Andrei Tarkovsky
- David Lynch
- Stanley Kubrick
- Orson Welles - The Trial