It is not as mirrors reflect us but, rather, as our dreams do, that movies most truly reveal the times. If the dreams we have been dreaming provide a sad picture of us, it should be remembered that – like that first book of Dante’s Comedy – they show forth only one region of the psyche. Through them we can read with a peculiar accuracy the fears and confusions that assail us – we can read, in caricature, the Hell in which we are bound. But we cannot read the best hopes of the time.
