The mind is latest movie frontier

CEBU, Philippines - For the visually savvy filmmaker, there’s a new frontier with as much cinematic appeal as the old West held for moviemakers half a century ago. With often dazzling results, filmmakers are turning to the mind itself as an uncharted landscape worth exploring.

Movies such as “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” and the new “Inception” turn cameras inward, sending their characters headlong into dream worlds and psyches manifested on screen.

These dreamscapes offer a boundless universe for cinematic bravado where real world rules need not apply. Though Hollywood — the “dream factory” — has a long, intertwined history with psychology, recent movies of the mind suggest a new trend where characters and camera dive headlong into the mind.

Christopher Nolan, who directed and wrote “Inception,” said that the way a dream is formed, to him, “suggests infinite potential for human creativity, an infinite mystery to the way the human mind works.”

“I really think that that’s when the tools of large-scale Hollywood filmmaking are being used to serve their best ends,” he said in a recent interview. “Really, it’s just creating an alternate reality for people to explore that they could never have imagined themselves. With ‘Inception,’ that is certainly my attempt to try and do that.”

And so audiences are treated to startling visions in “Inception”: Paris turning on top of itself; a train suddenly barreling through a downtown street; Leonardo DiCaprio stealthily traveling through another person’s multileveled dream, moving secretly past a peopled subconscious in a wholly fabricated city.