AUP student taking a photo of the Seine during Orientation.

Communication, Media and Culture

Film Screening: Sleep Has Her House

Room M013 - Monttessuy Centre for the Arts, 9 bis Rue de Monttessuy, Paris 75007
Thursday, November 21, 2024 - 18:15 to 21:30

The Film Studies program is delighted to announce the screening of Sleep Has Her House, with the presence of its director Scott Barley on Thursday November 21. The screening will take place in the Olivia De Havilland Lecture Theatre in Monttessuy Center for the Arts and will begin promptly at 19h. A drinks reception will be served from 18h15. Guests outside of AUP should register at the bottom of the page by filling in the form.

Sleep Has Her House is a 2017 experimental film directed, produced, photographed, scored, and edited by Scott Barley in his feature-length debut.

Eschewing the primary filmic elements coded for sense-making (narration/dialogue, anthropocentric narrative progression, symbols, human figures, spatial and temporal unity) a more intense, sensual, personal and meditative experience unfolds, akin to a shamanic journey. Sensory impressions function as the film’s organising principle, as underexposed images drift in and out of a connecting blackness that ends in cataclysm. Through its unique production process, nature is rendered uncanny and unknown. Removed from any clear structure of interpretation, the viewer is left to delve through the natural world—and their own consciousness—anew.

Made alone between 2015–2016, Sleep Has Her House unfolds through long takes, composed of dozens of layers of iPhone 6 footage, still photography, paintings and hand-drawn images that are combined seamlessly together.

The film received the Jury Award for Best Film at Fronteira International Documentary & Experimental Film Festival, Brazil. It later received nominations in Sight and Sound’s 2017 and 2018 annual best film polls.

In 2020, film historian, and Jean-Luc Godard's collaborator for Le Livre d’Image (Cannes Film Festival’s Special Palme d'Or Winner) Nicole Brenez cited Sleep Has Her House as one of the ten best films of the decade, after previously writing that “[Barley’s] films renew our conception of visuality”, and describing him as “one of the most gifted visual poets of his generation.”

In 2022, Sleep Has Her House was included in the decennial Sight and Sound poll of The Greatest Films of All Time, receiving votes in both the Critics’ and Directors' polls as one of the ten greatest films ever made.

The film is dedicated to the late French filmmaker and friend, Philippe Cote, who passed away in 2016. The revised edition, completed in 2023 is also dedicated to American filmmaker, mentor, and friend, Phil Solomon (1954—2019).

Still from Sleep Has Her House

Filmmaker’s statement:

I believe that absence can be one of the most potent forms of presence. My practice addresses the anthropocene through a conspicuous absence: there is no human presence. Instead, attention is redirected to landscapes, and the earth’s intricate web of life. Animals, plants, and weather become the focus, serving as a reflection on the delicate balance that sustains life on our planet. I focus on these voices of nature—which through folly are ignored or silenced—allowing the audience to bear witness to nature’s sublimity, vulnerability, and resilience. Simultaneously, this invites viewers to contemplate their own place within the natural world, and to consider the impact of our actions on a broader ecological scale—in a manner that is neither dogmatic or didactic, but rather experiential, sensory and uniquely personal.
 

Still from Sleep Has Her House

By omitting human presence and employing long-takes of the natural world in a meditative form, I aspire for a space where the viewer is an active participant, projecting their own consciousness onto the film in a deeper way than convention permits. Boundaries between film-object and experience dissolve. Narrative becomes symbiotic, especial and participatory, akin to meditation, where there is potential for transformation, where the experience may elicit emotional and spiritual resonance, fostering a deeper connection with selfhood and our world at large.

My approach is minimalist and eco-conscious. Since 2015, I’ve worked alone, using only my iPhone and natural light. Prior to filmmaking, I painted. I superimpose my drawings and paintings into dozens of stacked layers of iPhone footage. Part of my attraction to digital is in aspiring for texture and tactility in a flat medium where such qualities are avoided by convention, or simply do not exist. I amplify digital aberrations such as noise and low-light artefacts to engender a haptic, uncanny vision of reality’s deep strangeness.

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