Let Me Dream Again
Let Me Dream Again
| 01 August 1900 (USA)
Let Me Dream Again Trailers

Possibly the first film to utilize the technique of focus pulling. A man kisses a beautiful and lively woman, then the image blurs and dissolves into a clear image of the man waking up to his nagging wife.

Reviews
Karry Best movie of this year hands down!
Jeanskynebu the audience applauded
MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant
BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.
Michael_Elliott Let Me Dream Again (1900) *** 1/2 (out of 4)Clocking in at less than two minutes, this is a pretty funny movie that shows a middle aged man drinking, smoking and flirting with a beautiful young woman. The man is having a terrific time until he wakes up and realizes that in bed with him is his rather unattractive wife. LET ME DREAM AGAIN is a pretty simple film but for 1900 it was rather clever and used the dream sequence for a great cause. George Melies was using dream sequences to show off horrors and magic tricks but this here was clever use of it because we get a very big laugh. I thought it was rather hilarious when the man woke up and the facial expression when he sees his wife was extremely good.
Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de) I have to say that even with the spoiler in the title I did not see the final plot twist coming and had to laugh quite a bit. Also the actors' face expressions were really spot-on. Early on we see a man and a woman having a great time, drinking, smoking and joking around. Such a fun scene really. But could it all be true? Bummer. The director is George Albert Smith here, one of Britains very early and very prolific filmmakers. The lead actress played in a couple more films and so did the lead actor who was also a fairly prolific filmmaker himself. I thought this started off a bit slowly, but got better quickly and was actually really good at the end. Certainly worth a watch. A contender for best film and best comedy movie of 1900 in my opinion.
MartinHafer The same night I watched this silent short, I also saw a French film called "Rêve et réalité" (1901). It turns out the French movie was a knockoff of this film--with the exact same plot and scenes! While it was common for many of the very early studios to plagiarize each other's work, this one is one of the more flagrant examples. I just hope that LET ME DREAM AGAIN is the actual first film of its kind and not a rip-off of another, earlier film! The story is immensely simple (as was true of nearly all films from this era). An old guy is making out with a pretty young lady and life seems grand--until he wakes up and realizes it's all a dream! The idea is cute, though the execution is a tad primitive and rough. Still, given its tremendous age, it's still pretty watchable today.
Alice Liddel Another familiar trope that will seem poignant to many people. A man is wining and dining a young lady only to wake up beside an old shrew who gives him what for. The master of this dream/reality narrative is Buster Keaton, who developed it with heartbreaking inventiveness.This film is not without interest though. Firstly, the dream sequence is excellently imagined, with the couple dining in the foreground and a blank background creating a suitably unreal effect. The symmetry between couples is effective, suggesting that the wife may once have been like this one, asking us to ponder the processes that led to her 'decline', even the possibility of the husband's malign influence. Of course, this symmetry is actually a representation of rupture, division, disharmony - between dream and reality, the ideal and the mundane, the young and the old, the unattainable and the attainable.The strange thing about the dream is that, firstly, the woman is unattainable in it, she flirts, but she doesn't give herself; secondly, she is dressed in a costume reminiscent of the circus or carnival. Here the dream is something subversive, something that can critique the failures, the repressions, the dissatisfactions of real life. It also points to the use most people make of the cinema, to dream about better lives than our own, lives we can see but cannot have. It is this melancholy vein that helps the film transcend misogyny.