1974 ‘Un homme qui dort’ Directed by Georges Perec, Bernard Queysanne
A young student decides to have no more interaction with the world than is needed to minimally sustain life. His increasingly automaton-like behavior is coupled with a strange clarity of insight about the world around him.
A Man in a Dream, Un hombre que duerme, الرجل الذي ينام
"You don’t need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, simply wait. Don’t even wait. Be quite still and solitary. "
- Franz Kafka
You'd think that with no plot or character development -- or rather, a weak narrative structure and a poorly delineated character, that The Man Who Sleeps wouldn't be such a good film. The original source, the 1967 novel by Georges Perec, didn't even cause much of a stir and neither did this 1974 adaption that was directed by a lesser known man by the name of Bernard Queysanne. Ironically, even with all that I've stated holding it back, it's the opposite that holds true in that it is actually…
Solitary states via the vessel of surrealist structuralism; a dizzying, maddening film building upon an ever-growing sense of chaotic alienation and intense isolation, until even silence as well is eventually overwhelmed by the claustrophobia of having to function and blend and move adaptively amongst all of the movement surrounding you. Until the voice within your head that echoes over all of the extraneous voices you're meant to hear and know, pushes you further and further down, toward a space in which solace cannot be found even in the landscape -- not even in a sense of place, because that sense of place would only envelop you and pull you a greater distance from a notion of self-identity. And so you're…
"...thus begins and ends your kingdom..."
I couldn't in a million years, even if I tried, get across just how insanely personal this felt to me. But all of this; the feverish isolation, the breakdown of reality, the feeling of being a rat trapped in a maze with no escape, so completely captured the destructive feeling and hopelessness that accompanies depression and loneliness. This may be the finest film I've ever seen about those two experiences. What I do know is: its the most raw film about the two.
When the credits faded on screen at the very end, I felt my body loosen, as if I had mercifully been snapped out of a trance. It was trippy.
An unbelievable feat in hypnotic existentialism, The Man Who Sleeps is nihilistic poetry that grabs hold of you, and refuses to let go even after the film’s completion. This type of movie rarely works on me, but when it does holy shit it works, and this film is a prime example.
Also, I could see people comparing this to It’s Such a Beautiful Day.
MID 9
A french woman with a fetish for metaphors rattles on incessantly about disconnection and alienation in 1000 different flowery ways while images of a man walking, staring at things, and sometimes doing daily activities flash in the background to the sound of angry xerox machines. The only visual representation of thematic was empty scenery, low contrast bleak grey, and the main character being the focus of the shot due to lighting choice and blur. This seems awfully elementary even though the prose is trying to a dreadful degree to seem profound in scope of content. The most frustrating thing about this film is that it is able to use its themes to justify and excuse these poor choices because it portrays lack of care by not caring. I won't be fooled so easily.
There was an apathetic apocalypse today, or maybe it was yesterday, I don't know. It went like this: He played intricate seldomly-won solitaire with his shadows and tried to not let time into his room. Time played tricks by knocking all around his walls, checking for hollow crevices, seeping through forgotten fractures, whispering malevolent things to the ghosts in the floorboards, perpetually returning to his door to offer a new alluring deal. Time bided its time by tearing apart empires and homes and the dreams of mankind. It came with no warning and wanted no reprieve. Being apathetic had never been so exhausting. But by the time the first bombs fell they we both already bored. The man rushed into…
You search for a movie. Try Netflix first. The dense vacuum of content, most of which you’ve never heard of, sucks you into a frozen state of scrolling insomnia. You move over to Amazon. Time is ticking too fast. You look at the clock and find that two hours have gone. The moon is descending the sky now. Its pale glow casts a murky beam into the shadows of your dilapidated living room. The plates on the sink gather bacteria from three days prior, a fuzzy patch of greyish hair sprouting toxins into the oxygen you breathe daily. You look up to the sky. The clouds are black with rain, and even when the sun shines it’s a sting to…
An intense experience, certainly, and a beautiful one, eerily crafted in greys and blacks and washed out whites that make the city seem like a dream, this film, directly and bluntly about disconnection, seems to posit that communication is central to understanding, to normality. As we watch the man remove himself (while still remaining in the crowd, as it were), by shutting down most communication, everything becomes more and more unreal, and the feeling that nothing is as it seems, that the world is vast and imposing, that there is a gap between all the souls around us becomes more and more palpable. Without connection, the man simply loses his anchors with reality.
البارحة أخبرت صديق لي أنني لا أرغب في فعل أي شيء سوى الجلوس في غرفتي , لا أريد الخروج ولا أريد أن أتحدث , أقرأ أو أشاهد أفلام أو حتى لا أفعل أي شيء
ولأن تقريبًا وبصدق الشيء الوحيد الذي أنا محظوظة به في حياتي هو أنني بنسبة كبيرة عندما أشاهد فيلمًا كأن الفيلم هو الذي يختارني أن أشاهده وليس العكس , أفلامي تشبه أيامي وفي وقتها تماما,
هذا الفيلم
لا وجود للآخرين لا وجود للعلاقات من أي نوع لا وجود للسياسة ولا للإله و الدين لا وجود لأي تعقيدات خارجية لا وجود حتى للدموع, لا شيء سوى نفسك
تقف وجهًا لوجه أمام نفسك ولاعوائق حتى تشعر أنك تكاد تتلاشى في هذا العالم
وبرغم من أنه لا يوجد سوى أنت…
