Dream of a Rarebit Fiend

Edwin S. Porter brings Winsor McCay's wildly inventive comic strip to life in this delirious early trick film. A man overindulges in Welsh rarebit and is plunged into a cheese-fueled nightmare: the city spins around him, lampposts dance, his bed sprouts wings and sails over the rooftops of New York. Porter deploys every optical effect at his disposal — double exposures, revolving sets, superimpositions — and the result is a miniature masterpiece of hallucinatory comedy. It's a direct ancestor of every surreal dream sequence that followed, from Buster Keaton to Michel Gondry.