Cast: Jacques Spiesser, Ludmila Mikael Director: Georges Perec, Bernard Queysanne "You have no desire to carry on.” "...
Cast: Jacques Spiesser, Ludmila Mikael
Director:
Georges Perec, Bernard Queysanne
"You
have no desire to carry on.”
"You
are alone and drifting."
The Man Who
Sleeps isn’t a film, it’s a spiritual experience. It can’t be called a film in
the traditional sense, it’s more of a video essay in today’s lingo. It follows
a man as he lives his day-to-day life. He’s antisocial and lonely; the images play one after the other, and a voice-over accompanies it. The
voice-over is both ironic and depressing at once.
Shot
gorgeously in black-and-white, The Man Who Sleeps can rank amongst the most
depressing films of all time. The shots are hypnotising and the voice-over adds
to that effect. The film in one word is “hypnotizing”. The film is both
extremely depressing and deeply enlightening as well (Kant’s definition of
enlightenment). The film is a montage of beautiful shots of everyday life, with
the voice-over becoming more and more “hostile” as time passes, which reflects one’s
life. We grow and become more and more hostile with age, don’t we?
Silence can
become overwhelming after a certain point, and this film showcases that
perfectly. The main character never interacts with anybody except for when he
really has to, thinking it would do him good, but the silence after all this
also feels like noise and voices to him, and he tries to block the silence as
well, but we can’t block silence, can we?
The voice-over
in this is basically the man’s maddening thoughts that have consumed him
wholly; he is not the one who controls his thoughts, it’s the other
way around. The maddening isolation eventually takes a toll on him, it would no
matter what he tries to do.
The man
doesn’t feel like he belongs in this world — don’t we all, deep down, feel the
same way. We all feel out of place at times, some more than others, and
this film brilliantly captures that. We’re all trying to find something that
makes us feel we belong with others, and most of us can’t; the man can’t find
anything that makes him feel like he belongs.
Alienation
brings about a fact that most of us wouldn’t realize normally, that nobody
actually cares; the man realizes this, and isolates himself more and more —
nobody would want to interact with others if he/she realized that nobody cared
about him/her, would they?
The Man Who
Sleeps was released 50 years ago on June
24, and it will always be a constant reminder that we need people to survive in
this, sometimes, cruel world.
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.
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