WIRED just revisited Wim Wenders’ sprawling 1992 film, set in the near-future of 1999 when a nuclear satellite gone haywire leads to a global unraveling nearly as epic as the directors cut’s five-hour runtime. UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1992) ‘Until the End of the World’ (1992, dir. Though it skews too heavily toward white male pontification, there are many flavors of insight on offer here-and some of the most iconic cinematic representations of lucid dreaming. If you’re itching to transcend the confines of our current moment with a big picture zoom-out on the meaning of life and the nature of reality, now is a great time to revisit Richard Linklater’s loquacious rotoscoped amble through a series of increasingly intense lucid dreams (dreams in which you know you are dreaming.) It’s been almost 20 years since this technically innovative and unapologetically intellectual “experimental philosophical adult animated docufiction” premiered at Sundance in 2001. The documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (available on Kanopy) includes a fascinating section on Tarkovsky’s relationship to his dream life, with diary entries read aloud by his late wife. The final flashback ties all the dream symbols together, reflecting the way in which the dreaming mind recomposites fragments of memories from across our lifetime into novel convalescences. Ivan reaches over the well to grasp at starlight he sees in the water, and in the next shot he’s down in the bottom of the well, capturing that phenomenon in dreams where the setting can change from one second to the next. “It’s deep,” the boy remarks as he drops feather down the deep well. In one dream scene early in the film, Ivan falls asleep on a cot in the army barracks, which then seamlessly transforms into the bottom of a well-an evocative symbol of the unconscious. It’s no small feat to cinematically render the physics-defying, constantly fluctuating movement of characters, objects and locations as we experience them in dreams. The very first scene of titan auteur Andrei Tarkovsky’s debut feature is a sublime dream scene that sets up the film’s entire structure, each act unfolding around a dream of the titular young protagonist. IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (1962) ‘Ivan’s Childhood’ (1962, dir. To illustrate, here’s a selection of films that fully embrace the blurry line between wake and sleep, dream and cinema: The dreaming mind is the original source of jump cuts and match dissolves. When, in fact, movies are straight out of dreams. Here, Cuomo marvels at how his dreams feel “straight out of a movie.” We often compare the vivid stories, emotions and visuals of dreams to cinema. Even the literal fever dream of coronavirus-infected Chris Cuomo made headline news during his brother’s press conference. COVID-19 dream collection projects abound, amassing dream reports for historical documentation of the collective unconscious. Over the last several weeks, tons of articles have detailed the pandemic’s nocturnal impacts: disrupted sleep cycles, prolonged dream-saturated REM states, and dream content riddled with the hyper-specific anxieties of our times. The coronavirus has forced us inside in more ways than one, as we spend less time out in the world with each other, and more time inside our minds. Over the course of just a week, the Google query, “why have my dreams been so weird lately” quadrupled in the U.S. And chances are those dreams are even more unusual than… well, usual. Remember any dreams lately? These days, you’re probably remembering more dreams than you usually do. Sheehan has written the section on “Dreams,” while I wrote about “Insomnia.” So pour another cup of coffee and enjoy!ĭREAMS ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (2004, dir. In fact, Sheehan’s current project, Anybody’s Dream-a new series on dream technology-inspired this week’s theme. The subject of this week’s Film Independent Presents playlist is “dreams and insomnia.” And we have a guest co-blogger to help: writer, filmmaker and former Executive Director of the Northwest Film Forum, Courtney Sheehan. Along with our new virtual screening room, Film Independent Presents continues to recommend great stuff to watch, with weekly streaming video playlists curated by Film Independent Senior Programmer Jenn Wilson.
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