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17 - Dorothy's Dream: Mindscreen in The Wizard of Oz

from PART V - LITERATURE AND NARRATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2013

Bruce Kawin
Foreword by
Howie Movshovitz
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Summary

This article was written for the book Film Moments, edited by Tom Brown and James Walters and published in 2010. The editors wanted film scholars to write short pieces about significant and memorable moments in films, preferably only as long as a shot, a scene, or a brief sequence. I had been referring to the dream sequence in The Wizard of Oz for years, but a hard look at this 16-second shot made the whole sequence finally clear. I apologize to the reader of this volume for defining mindscreen again in this piece, but the argument demanded it. The Wizard of Oz is not just a ready example, but one of my favorite movies.

In L. Frank Baum's original novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Dorothy actually travels to Oz, when the cyclone picks up her house, and back to Kansas; Aunt Em and Uncle Henry have built a new house by the time she returns. In the Oz movies made by Baum and others from 1910 to 1933, either a cyclone blows Dorothy to Oz or she is already there. MGM's The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939) is the first movie to present the trip to Oz as a dream.

It is often said casually that the Kansas sequences are in black and white and the dream is in color. To sort this out, it is profitable to examine the dream sequence as a mindscreen whose offscreen narrator is the dreaming mind of Dorothy (Judy Garland) and to establish just when the dream begins.

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Selected Film Essays and Interviews , pp. 167 - 172
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2013

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