Opening Minutes Open Our Eyes ... Alejandro Amenabar's Abre los ojos
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In its first few minutes, Abre los ojos orients the viewer towards its being read as dream. With the exception of 45 seconds/6 minutes at the narration-producing alarm clock level, everything in the film is dream, and some of the dream material is induced dream/ nightmare within dream. The whole of a manipulation of time periods varying from 6 minutes to over 150 years, internal shifts in temporal linearity, different narrative levels, and the alternate compression and expansion of temporal equivalents produces a relativization of time explainable only in terms of dream. Multiple examples of the Freudian concept of 'day residue' work as triggers of dreams or dream sequences within the filmic discourse in which the separation between different levels of dreams is presented in such a way as to resemble the difference between waking life and dream. Amenbar does not offer the viewer answers to questions or solutions; he questions and scrutinizes.
