http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4WJlLNIsyY&noredirect=1
I love the opening to this movie, which is overall an incredible film you should all take the time to watch at some point. One of the things that makes this movie so remarkable is the way it uses film, a medium generally confined to representing objective, surface reality, to represent the inner-life of its protagonist. We get a sense of how the director, Francis Ford Coppola, manages this feat in the opening here. The film opens on a long shot of a jungle, which gets obscured by an orange mist and the rudders of a helicopter. The viewer might think this is an establishing shot, and that the action of this first scene will take place in the jungle before us. However, as the song “The End” by The Doors begins playing, and we see the jungle explode, something seems dream-like about the scene, since we cannot hear the explosions. In the next moment, we see the protagonist’s inverted face with the ceiling fan he is looking at superimposed over it, and we realize the first shot of the jungle represents the character’s imagination and that the ceiling fan reminded him of the helicopter blades we heard in the first moments of the film. The exploding jungle is the image he associates with helicopters and the song represents the feelings these memories evoke. The sense that the jungle images are the protagonist’s inner-thoughts is reinforced as the scene proceeds and we see his face superimposed over the jungle he is imagining.
Coppola’s representation of his character’s consciousness accords with several aspects of William James’ description in “The Stream of Consciousness.” Consciousness is personal, since the memories evoked by the ceiling fan are the product of the character’s particular history. It is also continuous, indicated by the superimposition of images–we don’t have a shot of the character thinking, followed by a break and then the images he is imagining, but rather we see the object that sparked his memory–the fan–simultaneously with the memories it evoked–the exploding jungle. And the strong emotional content of the scene–represented through the music, the slow-panning of the camera and the actor’s unmoving face–invokes James’ contention that consciousness is always imbued with the emotions. Finally, Coppola does a good job of representing the way we are conscious of several things on different levels at once–so here it is the ceiling fan, the character’s memories, and the mess in the hotel room around him.
This scene was the first thing that came to mind when I tried to think of a representation of consciousness. What did you come up with?