Text

E-book At the Edges of Sleep : Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators

---

Penilaian

---

The 2018 International Film Festival Rotterdam included among its programs a specially commissioned work by Apichatpong Weerasethakul that resists ready classification. SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL, presented by the festival organizers as an “immersive one-off filmproject,” cannot be described simply as a film or straight-forwardly as an installation, despite having the characteristics of both categories. Its filmic component consisted of a found footage montage, compiled from the collections of the Netherlands’ two largest film archives, the Eye Filmmuseum and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Landscape imagery—of earthly terrain, sky, and bodies of water (in a nod to the maritime siting of the festival)—dominated the visuals. Accompanying the images was a dense soundtrack of natu-ral ambient noises, such as the lapping of waves and the soughing of leaves stirred by wind. These sounds were created from field recordings made in Thailand by Apichatpong’s frequent collaborator, the sound designer and artist Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr. The fragments of footage, which ranged from the earliest years of moving pictures to more recent aerial drone imagery, unreeled like a series of shifting views from a journey across places and periods, animated pages from an album of nature and history.This found footage film, with a total length of twenty hours, was screened for several days, but not in one of the many commercial movie theaters in central Rotterdam dedicated to the festival. Rather, it was exhibited in a customized screening environment designed by Apichatpong and installed in a cavernous double-story hall inside the city’s former Chamber of Commerce. The film was projected on a large, perfectly round screen hung at one end of the hall, in front of a wall of windows. At the opposite end of the hall was a balcony with rows of seats, approximating the arrangement of a conventional screening venue. In the ample space between them was an intricately interlocking platform on which eight beds were arranged at varying heights diagonal to the screen. These could be reserved on a nightly basis (for a fee of 75€) by those wishing to experience the entirety of the piece’s duration. Each was equipped with a nightstand, a bed made up with fluffy pillows and duvets, and even slippers and toiletries for the occupants. Thus, in addition to being a film and an installation, the work also fit the description of “an actual, operational hotel. SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL’s unusual exhibition architecture provided a spring-board from which to launch a variety of modes of spectatorial engagement. For part of the running time, viewers could drop in and exit at will to take random dips into the stream of images, behaving as they might in a gallery or, considering the archival content of the projection, in a movie theater from an earlier historical era when films were commonly shown on a continuous loop. Or, taking a seat in one of the balcony rows at the rear of the hall, they could fall back on the comportment of a traditional moviegoer. At a certain point in the evening, however, the hall was closed to all except those with reserved bunks, thus setting a limit on this come-and-go permissiveness. Eventually the need for rest would drive the remaining visi-tors to their beds for the long stretch of the night. As if to lead the audience toward the shores of slumber, the film presented images of sleeping figures with increasing frequency as night fell: a dormant octopus, calling to mind the underwater views of Jean Painlevé’s natural science films; sailors sleeping on a boat; workers taking a nap outdoors somewhere in Southeast Asia, likely sourced from a Dutch ethnographic film; men dozing on a beach in Northern Europe, still wearing their suits and hats as they recline on the sand. Interspersed among such nonfictional scenes of sleep from early cinema were their fictional counterparts, a catalog of bedside scenarios transpiring within domestic dramas, as well as trick films in which the bedrooms of unfortunate would-be sleepers are invaded by mischievous creatures.

---

Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

-

No. Panggil

778.53 JEA a

Penerbit

USA : University of California Press., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

282 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780520384521

Klasifikasi

778.53

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Cinematography

Info Detail Spesifik

-

Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

-

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

Komentar

---

Anda harus masuk sebelum memberikan komentar