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At the Edges of Sleep

2022; University of California Press; Volume: 76; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/fq.2022.76.2.109

1533-8630

Bruno Guaraná,

Cinema and Media Studies

BOOK DATA Jean Ma, At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators, Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. $34.95 paper; open access e-book. 280 pages.You know the feeling. You have lovingly dedicated a part of your day to uninterruptedly watching a film, but sometime before it is over you realize you haven’t been watching it. You try, but your body eventually succumbs to an uncontrollable somnolence. You doze off a few times, perhaps even fall completely asleep. Maybe a snore wakes you up and now you are trying to catch up on what you’ve missed. By now, of course, you are no longer the model spectator you had wanted to be.As Jean Ma breathtakingly demonstrates in At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators, all is not lost for the sleepy spectator. Throughout her book, she contends not only that somnolence is a part of spectatorship, but that film theory should take it seriously and wrestle with it—and, finally, that it may even be a desirable form of spectatorship. In fact, somnolence may be exactly what a film intends to create in its viewers, conjuring the sleepy experience as a respite from the 24/7 capitalist regimen of productivity, offering them an opportunity to claim autonomy over the film’s intentions.Such is the case with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL, an installation commissioned for the International Film Festival Rotterdam of 2018 that, as its title implies, invited viewers to sleep. The setup consisted of a single large circular screen and eight bunk beds spread out across the main floor of a dark venue. On the screen played a twenty-hour compilation of archival footage from Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Patrons, coming and going at will, could view the continuous screening much like gallery visitors—or like spectators in the early years of cinema, as Ma notes. However, to attend the full screening, spectators needed to book a bed in advance, from which to view the film’s sleep-inducing images. Overnight guests were then invited to record their experiences in a sort of communal dream journal. Challenging common sense, the work suggests that, for Apichatpong, sleep creates rather than hinders action and signification.For Ma, to engage in Apichatpong’s kind of drowsy spectatorship is to liberate oneself from the directives of the text and its systems of meaning. By opening unpredictable fissures—narrative, aesthetic, logical, and chronological, to name a few—somnolence demands a subjective, individualized suturing that contradicts the model of the powerless spectator. Underscoring an affinity between sleeping and filmgoing, the spectator occupies a narrow state between wakefulness and sleep—awake enough to watch, but somnolent enough to be taken by the film—or, as Ma suggests, at the edges of sleep. In other words, in the preferred state of spectatorship, somnolence is, in many respects, not avoided but induced by cinema. For psychoanalytic film theory, the state of watching is akin to a psychic regression during which spectators fully submit to the images unfolding before them—a process that engenders identification and, thus, pleasure. What happens, then, when spectators fall asleep, effectively escaping the reach of arguably the most robust spectatorship theories to date? Have they also freed themselves from the threat of the apparatus, or have they fallen deeper into a regressive state?If film theory has employed such a construct in order to critique the narcotic or sedative effects of filmgoing, Ma puts forth the argument that film theoreticians “need not automatically call for the corrective of a more critically awakened viewing practice” (125). The stated goal here is to emancipate the sleepy spectator “from a recuperative logic that insists upon critical vigilance as its highest priority” (128). As it turns out, to sleep—or to linger at the edges of sleep—is to reclaim one’s autonomy as a spectator, to reconfigure the terms of spectatorship, and to selectively, even critically, engage with the cinematic experience.The gist and genius of At the Edges of Sleep lie in its paradigm-shifting reconfiguration of spectatorship to accommodate the somnolent viewer, more grounded in phenomenology than in psychoanalysis or cognitivism. In Ma’s formulation of spectatorship, the text and the circumstances of reception are key components. Central to her endeavor is the figure of Apichatpong as filmmaker, visual artist, and theorist of sleepy spectatorship, persistently engaging with it across his work and even, on several occasions, equating cinema to sleeping. For Ma, there is no better interlocutor on sleep than Apichatpong, and there is no better framework for analyzing his oeuvre than that of sleep.The book’s unconventional structure—eleven short chapters that overlap in multiple ways—allows for a highly rewarding reading experience. Passages will seem familiar and innovative at the same time, unexpectedly speeding up or slowing down, sometimes cutting off soon after an engrossing crescendo. As if speaking to the reader in short breaths, Ma shapes the book in such a way that it bears, in the author’s words, “the imprint of sleep” (17). Its narrative spirals out and away from SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL—a fitting and fascinating starting point—but then returns to other works by Apichatpong, addressing and uncovering his multichannel installations, short and feature films, fiction and nonfiction, narrative and experimental works, and moving beyond him.In the first of the book’s detours away from Apichatpong, Ma recovers different representations, articulations, and incorporations of sleep throughout cinematic history, highlighting the (somewhat surprising) ubiquity of sleeping characters in the medium. More than a motif, sleep has been employed as a narrative and aesthetic device, as in several films by George Méliès, such as The Inventor Crazybrains and His Wonderful Airship (1905) and A Grandmother’s Story (1908); the prelude to Edwin S. Porter’s The Life of an American Fireman (1903); Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939); and Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). In Ma’s words, the abundance of examples highlights the “oneiric properties of the filmic image, its operation according to another order and logic” (61–62), and how sleep becomes a portal for boundless narrative and aesthetic explorations of alternative realities.In her analysis of Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015), whose narrative centers on a makeshift clinic hosting Thai soldiers affected by a mysterious epidemic of sleeping, Ma demonstrates how Apichatpong goes against these traditions. Here, as is the case of many of his films and installations, scenes of sleep do not lead to renditions of dreams or alternative reality. Instead, the opacity of the sleeping body highlights those aspects of human experience that remain inaccessible and unknowable to cinema and to the viewer. Blurring the boundaries between consciousness and sleep, Apichatpong revels not only in the narrative and aesthetic possibilities of sleep, but also in its effects on the spectator.Sleep multiplies in other functions throughout Apichatpong’s films. In the ambitious multichannel installation Primitive (2009), a science-fiction premise makes room for documentary images of young men in military garb sleeping inside a red-tinted podlike spaceship. As Ma points out, those images are awash in political registers that must remain obscure under the despotic Thai regime: sleep here stands in for a place of vulnerability and dispossession that recalls the latest coup to have succeeded in the nation. Elsewhere, such as in Apichatpong’s Blissfully Yours (2002) and Tropical Malady (2004), Ma recognizes sleep as giving rise to queer modes of intimacy, enabling characters to engage in nonnormative relations. In the three-channel installation Teem (2007), the filmmaker captures his then-partner, sleeping, with an ever-moving digital camera—a choice that resonates with Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963). These moments prompt Ma to draw inspired parallels between Apichatpong’s films and those of Tsai Ming-liang, positioning the two filmmakers as counterparts in their explorations of sleep in queer and alternative cinemas.Such likeness is not limited to these filmmakers’ strictly cinematic endeavors. Four years before Apichatpong’s SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL, Tsai launched Stray Dogs at the Museum, an exhibition including takes and outtakes from his feature film Stray Dogs (2013) spread across multiple channels and floors in the Museum of the National Taipei University of Education, in Taiwan. Across the large exhibition hall, viewers piled up in different states of sleep, producing alongside the projected images a “convivial disarray and colorful patchwork of sleeping bags and blankets” (196).Like Apichatpong’s installation, Tsai’s Stray Dogs at the Museum (2014) also promotes somnolence, making it (nearly) impossible for viewers to remain awake. Both installations call up other notorious works such as Christian Marclay’s daylong The Clock (2010), Douglas Gordon’s twenty-four-hour-long 24 Hour Psycho (1993), and Gregory Markopoulos’s eighty-hour-long Eniaios (2004). But in addition to merely being too long to be sustained by any one viewer in one sitting, they accommodate their audiences in spaces that welcome sleep. This approach sets those installations alongside a cinema of slowness—as their inactivity rejects the accelerated rhythms of capitalist production—but also apart from it, for, as Ma puts it, slow cinema still “turns to a familiar ideal, that of the active spectator, and advocates for a return to concentration as a privileged form of attention” (181). Highlighting such distinction, Ma names Apichatpong’s and Tsai’s preferred format of public, often overnight, screenings that incorporate sleep and actively disengage viewers’ attention “circadian cinemas.” Compellingly, she contends that circadian cinema “makes a bid for the survival of cinema as a communal experience … without prescribing in advance the relational forms this experience can assume, in full recognition of the ephemerality and unpredictability threading through the social horizon of spectatorship” (208). In other words, in the current crisis of theatrical exhibition, these works can save cinema. But in order to fully appreciate their function and effect, there also needs to be a reexamination of spectatorship, both in theory and in practice.In what she calls “a little history of sleeping at the movies,” evidence for the need to reexamine normative spectatorship appears in an astounding and unlikely collection of Weegee’s photographs taken inside New York movie theaters in the 1940s and 1950s. Ma embraces Weegee’s images portraying a motley audience in different stages of waking as documentary evidence of a wide array of spectatorial states and positions. Indeed, Weegee’s photographs anticipate the phenomenological turn in film theory and film history’s interest in various sites of reception. And, in the diversity of bodies they reveal, they highlight the liveness of the movie theater as a space of friction, in which differences of race, class, age, and gender are anything but irrelevant. A generalized uneven distribution of sleep means that different bodies have different needs for sleep in cinema, mimicking social inequities. This is visible in some of these photographs, which recall that theaters once provided a haven for vagrants and cinephiles alike. As Ma points out, the history of film exhibition in the United States is also a history of gentrification, as theaters became increasingly less welcoming for equitable slumber.Through her focus on somnolence, Ma renders the film audience as a collective, heterogenous group, refocusing on the particularities of the conditions of reception. This, in fact, is crucial and deliberate in the circadian cinemas of Apichatpong, Tsai, and others. Accepting drowsiness as a possible, plausible, and even desirable state in spectatorship means to challenge narrow definitions of reception and to consider new ways of engagement with cinema. As Ma summarizes, “[S]leep does not necessarily diminish the experience of a work, but can deepen the impact that it makes, strengthen its claim on the viewer’s memory, and forge a more intimate bond” (174).Ma’s readers will be encouraged to revel at the edges of sleep and to allow Apichatpong’s trademark sign-off, when introducing screenings of his films, to echo: “I hope you sleep with good dreams.”