The nightmare is a manifestation of intangible fears. The worry that as I get older there are less opportunities to reboot. Less options to launch a great career, a great romance, or find some meaning in life. Fear that I will live my life in a liminal space never really getting started.
The actual nightmare happened much the same way as in the film. I awake in my childhood bedroom. The bed’s too small, stuffed animals are everywhere. I’m obviously still dreaming. I wake a second time, in a more mature form of my childhood room. I must be home for the weekend at my parents’ house. Except, they sold that house nearly 15 years ago. I can’t possibly be here.
The nostalgic dream ramps up to a nightmare. I wake in my apartment, but my body feels constrained to sleep. With each new loop, I am desperate but find it harder and harder to shake off sleep. I pull, claw, and scream for help, but cannot return to reality. I am terrified. Am I doomed to live in this loop forever as it gets shorter and shorter, becoming more constrained, losing hope?
While the project was conceived before covid 19, it has been propelled by the global pandemic. I wrote the script in March during the early days of “safer at home.” What originally felt like a unique personal experience became universal as we were all forced to limit our lives to the essentials. Wake expresses the frustration of living in a post-covid pre-vaccine world – a world on pause.
In Wake, it’s Emily who is trapped. She is smart, moderately accomplished, friendly, hardworking and waiting. The audience joins her as she is trapped in a loop of dreams that range from uncanny to terrifying.
Influences
Wake is influenced by structural and experimental films of the 1960s. Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) uses uniquely cinematic techniques to evoke a visceral reaction in the audience. Exceptionally slow camera movement, non-diegetic sound, and offscreen space take a nearly plotless film and induce physical discomfort in the viewer. Wake will use similar techniques, particularly the use of intensifying non-diegetic sound, to transfer Emily’s slackening grip on reality from the screen to the audience.
Wake is an 10 min short film based on an actual nightmare. The film uses a nonlinear experimental framework and rhythmic sensibility to recreate, through the cinematic experience, my own feelings of hopelessness and desperation during the dream.
Another heavy influence is Academy Award winning director Hilary Harris’s 9 Variations on a Dance Theme (1966). Through repetition and alteration Harris warps the viewer’s perception of an unemotional dance phrase. Technical interventions from camera movement and editing impose sentiment and commotion on the objective and dispassionate dance. Wake will also begin in an observational mode and layer camera movement and editorial intercessions with each new morning until chaos and discontinuity rule.