The Science Of Sleep

[tpfkabi]

I agree, this felt very Godard/New Wave to me. I don't know if it's as simple as it having subtitles and some French in it, or some of the handheld camera work in location settings (or at least what seemed to be to me, though I didn't really pay close attention).

**potential spoilers**


I totally missed him lying about living far away, so I was kinda scratching my head for awhile.

I'm not sure a girl would be so forgiving about finding a guy inside her apartment uninvited in that fashion.

I'm still not sure if Stephanie really was dancing with another guy at the party (in the white dress i would have like to see more of - or would that be less actually).

[Gold Trumpet]

The New Wave/Godard feeling about it comes in its free form of story and making professional actors look and act like standard people. The difference with Godard is that he also exhibited criticism of genres, structures and other things in his movies. The Science of Sleep exists solely for its characters.

My feelings about the film were conflicted. On one hand, I was engrossed. The way the film stripped artificial barriers between me and the story was refreshing. There wasn't a story. It was a series of personal moments that were agonizing for how honest and brutal they were. Films like this and others like A Woman Under the Influence are good reminders of the artificiality of most movies. The reason why most dramas can still be escapist entertainment is because they represent the discomfort of real life only in snippets.

Most films do not succeed on discomfort alone. I know a lot of people that do like A Woman Under the Influence, but I know many more that don't. The sugar coding to appease the audience in Science of Sleep is in the filmmaking. It is wonderfully imaginative in a way that never dulls. Even as the movie becomes tiresome with its characters, the movie is still offering new peepholes into the imagination of Gondry. I think he was hard press to edit his film because he didn't want to lose some sequences.

But the film didn't sit right with me afterwords. It was unapologetically dedicated to personal experience and the power of dreams to dig at our agonies and fears. The film became repititive with problems and situations because real life is repititive. Real life is a cluster of feelings and emotions. This film was exactly that. The dreams gave the film loose ends with what and wasn't reality, but it still kept all the emotions at the surface level. It didn't dig deeper.

Antonioni's La Notte was also a personal experience on film, but it had a filmmaker at the top of his philosophical and artistic identity. It was large work that fit into the line of other works on society without God such as ones by Ingmar Bergman. Art, no matter what the details are, should be the criticism of life. Replicating reality (or dreams) isn't the same.

With that, the Godard reference to Science of Sleep becomes important. Susan Sontag in the sixties said that Godard's films marked a new benchwork in cinema that usual critical standards could not apply to his films. His work operated on a new level of connection to the audience that was in revolt to everything done beforehand. The Science of Sleep des not have all the Godard hallmarks, but does how a daring to be limitless in its disegard for convention. This film isn't very old and I already know a lot of people that don't just love it, but believe in it like it is their bible to how storytelling should be.

That is to believe in a film to exist only in an emotional capacity. Of course I don't believe it and as much as I was engrossed by this movie, my feelings were being double checked by my brain afterwords. Now after a few days of consideration, I feel a mixed result. There is quality filmmaking and storytelling, but the film doesn't know when to stop and when to dig for more.

As for Sontag, she never backed off her defense of Godard, but she checked her beliefs against moral authority and classical standards of logic in criticizing art and finally agreed with them once some very bad stuff was being accepted.

[polkablues]

But the film didn't sit right with me afterwords. It was unapologetically dedicated to personal experience and the power of dreams to dig at our agonies and fears. The film became repititive with problems and situations because real life is repititive. Real life is a cluster of feelings and emotions. This film was exactly that. The dreams gave the film loose ends with what and wasn't reality, but it still kept all the emotions at the surface level. It didn't dig deeper.

That seems to be one of the problems with art that is truly autobiographical.  The best narratives are able to create a sense of universality through their specificity, but sometimes the specificity becomes so overwhelmingly specific that it ends up becoming a distancing mechanism, severing the audience from their identification with the characters.  Not that there's any inherent problem with that approach, except that in the case of Science of Sleep, I think it creates a degree of disconnect between the artist's intention and the audience's actual response to the film.  Like Gondry had all this emotional shorthand worked into the film that we, the viewers, were not privy to.

[tpfkabi]

This has the most hard to understand commentary I've ever heard. First, Gondry's English is hard to understand, and then they frequently speak in other languages.

[Gold Trumpet]

But the film didn't sit right with me afterwords. It was unapologetically dedicated to personal experience and the power of dreams to dig at our agonies and fears. The film became repititive with problems and situations because real life is repititive. Real life is a cluster of feelings and emotions. This film was exactly that. The dreams gave the film loose ends with what and wasn't reality, but it still kept all the emotions at the surface level. It didn't dig deeper.

That seems to be one of the problems with art that is truly autobiographical.  The best narratives are able to create a sense of universality through their specificity, but sometimes the specificity becomes so overwhelmingly specific that it ends up becoming a distancing mechanism, severing the audience from their identification with the characters.  Not that there's any inherent problem with that approach, except that in the case of Science of Sleep, I think it creates a degree of disconnect between the artist's intention and the audience's actual response to the film.  Like Gondry had all this emotional shorthand worked into the film that we, the viewers, were not privy to.

It's funny that with a debut like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, written by a superstar screenwriter who already had an identity, everybody could still tell a lot of the director was in the story with how the filmmaking was.

My worry after that movie is that Michel Gondry would find no end to dig at his emotional history. Science of Sleep proved that, but I don't know how he'll be able to handle it later on. I think his next project will be his attempt to mend his style to a good Jack Black vehicle (if it gets wide release) but I'm afraid he will get too repititive too quickly.

[Pubrick]

It's funny that with a debut like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, written by a superstar screenwriter

his debut was Human Nature (hence the joke in this forum's description), also by kaufman.

[Gold Trumpet]

It's funny that with a debut like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, written by a superstar screenwriter

his debut was Human Nature (hence the joke in this forum's description), also by kaufman.

Wow, completely forgot that one.

[bonanzataz]

It's funny that with a debut like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, written by a superstar screenwriter

his debut was Human Nature (hence the joke in this forum's description), also by kaufman.

Wow, completely forgot that one.

you and everybody else except for bigideas apparently.

[Pubrick]

It's funny that with a debut like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, written by a superstar screenwriter

his debut was Human Nature (hence the joke in this forum's description), also by kaufman.

Wow, completely forgot that one.

you and everybody else . except for bigideas apparently.

i'm not bigideas.

[tpfkabi]

It's funny that with a debut like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, written by a superstar screenwriter

his debut was Human Nature (hence the joke in this forum's description), also by kaufman.

Wow, completely forgot that one.

you and everybody else . except for bigideas apparently.

i'm not bigideas.

everyone can dream though....

i actually do quite like Human Nature and don't understand it's dismissal (i guess no one wants to see a grown woman in full body hair?). i may or may have not written about it on this forum. probably somewhere where there are massive cobwebs and dustbunnies.

[bonanzataz]

i thought your avatar was from the movie. i... i guess, i'm... wrong?

i kinda liked the movie too. it was just a LITTLE boring. it felt like anybody would produce anything by kaufman at that point so he just took out a script he had written a decade earlier and was like, eh, fuck it. there was some decent stuff in there, just nothing i'd really ever want to see again.

[tpfkabi]

i thought your avatar was from the movie. i... i guess, i'm... wrong?

oh, you're right! i forgot. i got rid of the Eisley one and brought back an old one.

here's a SoS related tidbit:

in SoS, a character's feet are in a fridge
and in Gondry's Knives Out video, Thom Yorke's feet are in an oven.

[72teeth]

in SoS, a character's feet are in a fridge
and in Gondry's Knives Out video, Thom Yorke's feet are in an oven.

oh fuck.... he's turning into quentin...