How do filmmakers address sleep, one of the most mundane everyday events? Although almost every movie includes at least one sequence of waking up (whether it’s believable or not, feverish or not), only a few of them focus on sleep as the main topic in the film. And why is that? Nobody wants to hover on the face of an actor who doesn’t use his body or eyes, an actor who, in fact, plays nothing. However, the list below proves the opposite, assuming that while resting, human bodies are fragile and immobile, that sleep is an intimate experience, but also a very meaningful little door with the subconscious of each individual.

1. Two night birds – On Body and Soul – dir. Ildikó Enyedi, 2017

In On Body and Soul, Maria and Endre, two co-workers at a Hungarian slaughterhouse, meet every night in an unusually common dream, where they are stag and deer. Here, sleep is a common ground, extra orbem, where each of them can become someone else – two souls with nothing physically in common, who have never spoken before, can share the same experience night after night. In fact, Ildikó Enyedi speaks rather of an ethereal and spiritual world that completely contradicts the carnal reality around the protagonists (full of carved animals, blood, grotesque).

2. Sleep as a Transcendental Experience – Cemetery of Splendor – dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015

In a film almost impossible to categorize (is it magical realism, is it Sleeping Beauty?), some soldiers are overtaken by an unusual narcoleptic disease that leads to a day and night stillness, as if they are trapped in a spell. The nurses treat them with photo-therapy, talk to them and keep them company, the goddesses flutter among the living and talk with an elegance about tea. A film which gives the sensation of a vegetative drowsiness while watching it, a gentle and warm world of all possibilities. Like any film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Cemetery of Splendor doesn’t hold narrative logic in high regard, but rather focuses on the dream experience itself, with its contradictions and miracles. The bodies of the soldiers, once lying down asleep, are like an open door to the spiritual world – it is the place where the spirits of the dead come out into the world and wander openly, sharing light.

3. Virtual reality and dream-related gadgets – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – dir. Michel Gondry, 2004

What would it be like to get ready for bed, put on your favorite pajamas, have some music in the background and fall asleep just as usual, but to wake up the next day without any recollection whatsoever of the greatest failure of your life, of the man you lost because of some nonsense, etc.? A team of tech goblins enter people’s homes and release them from suffering with the help of a wonderful device. But what do you do if, during the process, while your memory is erased, you change your mind? Michel Gondry’s fantasy-surrealist topic (a filmmaker with a fascination for the dream world, see La science des rêves) is both very present-day (in an era where technology is increasingly invasive and is gradually replacing us) and human: you can no longer remember that you had a life with someone and still look for him, in an unconscious way.

4. Experiences arising from insomnia – Sleep deprivation – All These Sleepless Nights – dir. Michał Marczak, 2016

Although cinema often uses insomnia as a derivative engine for mindfuck films (Fight Club, The Machinist, Inception), I chose a slightly more common example: three friends who spend their nights choosing deliberately not to sleep for the sake of not missing anything out. An ongoing party, an exploration of the empty streets, of the devoid of people city, with a light that changes its tones from one hour to another. A Peter Pan syndrome which allows you to stop time for a little bit, as if being awake means not getting old anymore but, on the contrary, gives you the chance to experience as much as you can.

5. The trivialization of sleep – Hyperreality – Sleep – dir. Andy Warhol, 1965

For five hours and twenty minutes, the viewer watches in real time the restful and amorphous sleep of John Giorno, Andy Warhol’s partner. Changing the framing from time to time, but without suggesting in any way a temporal ellipsis, Warhol forces the viewer to enter a documentary which doesn’t imply anything else – everything is in sight. Unlike Akerman’s hyperrealism in Jeanne Dielman, Warhol doesn’t fill the image with some deep meaning but, on the contrary, the search for meaning is addressed in an ironic way – that type of cinema that hides clues which you can discover later. Here, the exceptional nature of the experiment turns it through slow buildup into a tedious experiment – no matter how fascinating and fetish-like the act of watching a stranger sleep would be, it eventually becomes wearisome. Falling asleep while watching the movie would be nothing but an extension of the act of watching – it would actually be the meta experience that the film proposes. If we were to watch our partners sleep, we would finally doze off in the process, and so, we would catch up to them.

Georgiana Mușat

Journalist and film critic, with a master's degree in film critics. Collaborates with Scena9, Acoperișul de Sticlă, FILM and FILM Menu magazines. For Films in Frame, she brings the monthly top of films and writes the monthly editorial Panorama, published on a Thursday. In her spare time, she retires in the woods where she pictures other possible lives and flying foxes.