Dr. Mireille Berton
Film Studies and Media Theory, Lausanne

Contact Details

Mireille Berton
Docteur ès Lettres Department of Film History
Faculty of Arts
University of Lausanne

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Homepage: applicationspub.unil.ch/interpub/noauth/php/Un/UnPers.php?PerNum=920957&LanCode=37
Profile cultural dream studies: www.culturaldreamstudies.eu/mireille-berton

Biographical Note

Mireille Berton is a lecturer at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). Her research focuses on the relationship between cinema, sciences of the “mind”, media technologies and the imaginary, and on the cultural history of spectatorship. She has published several chapters in books and articles in journals, including CINéMAS, 1895, Gesnerus, Bianco e nero. Her Ph.D. dissertation was published under the title Le Corps nerveux des spectateurs. Cinéma et sciences du psychisme autour de 1900 (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme 2015). She also co-edited a volume together with Anne-Katrin Weber entitled La Télévision du Téléphonoscope à YouTube. Pour une archéologie de l’audiovision (Lausanne: Antipodes 2009). A study on the representation of spiritism in contemporary cinema and TV series is in preparation.

Cinema and dream  - a history of interferences (1850 and 1950)

Inspired by the New Cinema History, this project explores the interrelations between film history and the cultures of dreams in an epistemological perspective. The examination of the relationship between cinema and dream will focus both on formal and conceptual aspects, on filmic representations and on dream theories using cinema as a model or a metaphor. The combined analysis of representations and discourses will shed light on phenomena related to a new visual culture shaped by modernity. Cinema and cinematic dispositives such as the moving panorama are addressed as “dream machines” and have inspired new theories about the human psyche. Around 1900, the cinematograph became an epistemological model for dream theories conceiving the work of the psychic apparatus as a type of machine projecting sounds and images on a virtual screen. In order to avoid simplistic explanation in terms of influence, both the cinema and the dream will be analysed as elements of a complex set of cultural, historical and social concepts.