relationship with the world, whereby we can select, transform, copy or erase
that which we wish, or do not wish, to see or become part of. Cinema, which
is simultaneously affected by and a witness to this process, is a perfect
medium to observe the effects and ‘reflects’ of technology and its
consequences. The use of the ‘mirror’ or the ‘dream’ as a metaphor to
explain the properties and capabilities of cinema is recurrent in this research.
Indeed, through the existing technology, films can be seen to filter and
condense the social imagination and unconsciousness; and, like a
(occasionally distorted) mirror or a dream, to reproduce our present and
future fears, hopes and confusion.
Cinema not only reproduces the disorientation of reality and unreality
with its exhibition, but it also foregrounds and fetishizes this phenomenon via
a trend of films that have appeared in recent years which aim precisely to
confuse the audience about the reality of their perception. The genre of
Science Fiction (henceforth denoted by the abbreviation ‘SF’) is predominant
in this trend as it hypothetically anticipates what might one day be history.
And this tendency is illustrated throughout this research by way of films such
as The Matrix, Total Recall, The Lawnmower Man, eXistenZ, Videodrome
(Cronenberg, 1983), 12 Monkeys (Gilliam, 1995), Abre los Ojos (Amenabar,
1997), Dark City (Proyas, 1998), and The Thirteenth Floor (Rusnak, 1999).
The films studied here are not exclusively SF films, but they nevertheless
attend to pertinent characteristics of the confusion between reality and
unreality. So films including Memento (Nolan, 2000) and Waking Life
(Linklater, 2001) explore metaphysical or psychological perspectives of this
phenomenon by way of a visually confusing and technically innovative
cinema. Often these films are characterized by a dark, pessimistic aesthetic
that draws upon the use of special effects and other visual innovations with
which the image is created, manipulated, transformed or erased. The ‘bullet
time’ made famous in The Matrix, for example, has today become common in
films such as Wanted (Bekmambetov, 2008), which also makes use of the
zooms (or reverse zooms) which are able to transport us from a general
perspective to microscopic detail, and to show us the world from
unconventional perspectives and angles. What we find in these films is the