Kinaesthesia (15)

About

BAFTA and Grierson award-winning filmmaker Gerald Fox’s lyrical, inventive documentary KINAESTHESIA explores the world of dreams in Silent Cinema, putting the audience at the centre of the journey.

This unique film tells the story of the birth of cinema and its experimental early decades through the prism of dreams and the way in which pioneering silent film directors created thrilling dream sequences and entire dream films that mirrored the very way we dream ourselves.

We follow this relationship through the eyes of the legendary, late Film Studies professor at Harvard, Vlada Petrić. Here played by Serbian actor (Little Joe, The Zookeeper’s Wife, Jack Ryan) Petrić undertakes his own dreamlike odyssey through disparate landscapes, odd encounters, and spellbinding film clips.

Exploring scenes from French Impressionism (such as Abel Gance, Jean Renoir), German Expressionism (F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang), Soviet montage (Sergei Eisenstein, Oleksandr Dovzhenko), the Avant-garde (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Maya Deren) and popular silent comedy (Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton), Petrić illustrates his theory that these early innovators used all the available devices of cinema to produce sequences that activated the sensory-motor centres in the brain producing Kinaesthesia (the sensation of movement) – just as in dreaming itself.

Accompanied by a stunning, newly composed musical score, Fox’s accessible and often humorous film allows audiences to have the same mesmerising cinematic experience that audiences had all those years ago, consumed by the imaginative power of slow-motion, double exposures, expressionistic lighting, and dynamic montage.

When Images Make the World | Across activism, artificial intelligence, dreams and reenactment, these films explore the unstable relationship between images and truth. Rather than treating the camera as a neutral recorder, they reveal it as a machine that shapes memory, identity, politics and belief. The lens does not merely capture what we see—it teaches us how to see.