Winner of the 1972 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and the National Society of Film Critics’ best picture prize, Luis Buñuel’s surrealist masterpiece deliciously skewers bourgeois presumption and hypocrisy as a group of well-to-do friends repeatedly attempts to have a meal together, only to be thwarted by events both real and imagined.
While the initial problem seems to be a simple scheduling mistake, the obstacles become increasingly bizarre. The friends make their way to a local bistro, only to learn that the owner has died and his body is lying in the next room. At one dinner party, they are interrupted when army officers unexpectedly arrive for training exercises; at another, a curtain rises, and the group find themselves on a stage before a theater audience. As the characters maintain their elegant style, good manners, and polite social rituals, Buñuel exposes secrets involving adultery, drug trafficking, murder, and political maneuvering.
Buñuel brilliantly interweaves flashbacks, dreams, and dreams within dreams into the narrative of this wickedly funny satire. Joining us before the film to discuss “The Indiscreet Charm of the Vivid Dream” is Robert Stickgold, Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, where he is the director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition. How does the latest scientific research advance our understanding of where dreams come from? How do dreams contribute to the off-line reprocessing of newly formed memories? Is Freud dead?
Dr. Stickgold’s research examines the nature of sleep and dreams from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, with an emphasis on the role of sleep and dreaming in memory processing. He has been published in over 100 scientific publications, including Science and Nature, and his work has been featured in Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times.
a metal buddy of mine expressed interest in this so I figured I'd post it for others to see
