"Let Me Dream Again" is what can be considered another one of the many one-gag shorts from this time period. While many comedies of the time were pretty cheap (a gardener getting sprayed by a hose, for example) this gag is actually a lot different. Well, for the time anyway. A year later, it would be outright copied in Ferdinand Zecca's "Dream and Reality", which uses a dissolve to go from dream to reality as opposed to the de-focus effect here.The gag centers around a man who dreams that he's dating an attractive bucktoothed woman, when reality finally becomes clear to him. It's not hilarious but definitely holds up better than watching two bill-posters fighting over a defaced wall. The wife in the 1901 remake was uglier, I have to say. But I like the de-focus better here. Both early films are about equal.

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.

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.

Dreams are closely associative with cinema. That idea isn't really explored here, as the film only consists of two scenes and lasts around a minute. However, it is an early exploration of the film language of how to tell a dream and how to tell, or separate, the inner narrative of the dream from the outer narrative of "reality". Moreover, it's a rather early film to consist of spatially separate scenes, although there had been a few already, including G.A. Smith's own "The Kiss in the Tunnel" (1899).The first scene is the dream and the film narrated by the male character within the dream. He's fantasizing about having an affair with a younger woman. In the second scene, we see him awake in bed with his older, less attractive "real" wife. Smith's transition between shots consists of an in-camera out-of-focusing at the end of the first shot and then beginning the second scene out-of-focus before pulling it within focus. There's also a sort of disrupted match on action, with the actors being within the same position for each scene--the man continuing his embracing action into the second shot. It's a good effect, especially for its continuity and how the focusing is analogous to coming out of a dream and awakening. Ferdinand Zecca, for Pathé, used a dissolve in his remake, "Dream and Reality" (Rêve et réalité) (1901), but, then, he seems to have been using dissolves for all shot transitions at this time.Many of the other early films about dreams don't split the scenes, but the separation of dream world and "reality" is implied by the character going to sleep, weird things happening, and then the actor waking up. These are usually trick shot films, which Georges Méliès largely invented. Edwin Porter's "Dream of a Rarebit Fiend" (1906) is an example. Another way to separate them was with a scene-within-a-scene, accomplished by blacking out part of the set, or masking part of the camera lens, and filming the awake part; then, the effect is reversed and filmed again. Zecca did this in "Story of a Crime" (Historie d'un crime) (1901), and Porter did it in "Life of an American Fireman" (1903) and other films. Smith actually introduced this scene-within-a-scene effect to motion pictures with such films as "Santa Claus" (1898). These early efforts aren't quite as interesting and exciting as, say, "Sherlock, Jr." (1924) or "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004), but they are important for having gotten us started.