pleasures of another land: on film and dream.

i waste a tremendous amount of time dreaming and writing, and days like today, or mornings like this morning, when everything is very bright and green, when the bark on the trees still appears wet from its own night dreams, i wake and feel this aching pain that starts in my belly and makes me feel like the dullest person in the world. i waste so much time dreaming and writing, and each, for the most part, i only discuss with myself. maybe dreams are like space and they are mostly only for the dark parts of the self. yesterday i watched a movie called david and lisa (1962) that was this strange love story about two people that meet in a student mental institution (sort of like a sleep away school). Lisa is a schizophrenic and David won't let anyone touch him.

the male lead, keir dulla, went on to play astronaut david bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

anyway, in the film david and lisa, david has this constant dream of this enormous clock, whose minute hand is this tremendous, heavy scythe, which he controls by pulling down on the minute hand with all of his might. and the numbers on this enormous clock are not numbers at all, but human heads. it is always one head, one person's head on the clock 12 times. so throughout the night, he decapitates a person 12 times. the person changes throughout the dream, throughout the nights of the dream, but the sentiment is always the same.

i suppose these scenes were so profound to me, as to probably most everyone else in the 60s and so on, because though my dreams are not as violent or controlled and maybe not even as easy to read as david's, they still adhere to that spacious worship of the self as being. lately, though i have been dreaming often enough to focus on such, i have only been sleeping in, at most, five hour spans. and my dreams repeatedly keep this ditto image, this cut copy feeling. 


last night i dreamt that all five foot three of me was a photograph in an enormous envelope under an ex lover's bed. and though i was never pinned to the walls and i could not see the shadows beyond the paper containing my face, i could hear the muffled sounds of the world around me. 

the relation of this could be the late night last night with the girls, drinking butter beer and talking about films, talking about being buried alive (which megan brought up, though i cannot remember why) and all of the films that adhere to that fear. not talking directly about life being but a dream at all but talking about the visual media and movement of such and i suppose, pulling those parts into the dark rooms of our hearts. so here is the final scene of all of the beauty, which i did a rather one-woman impersonation of late last night in kim's living room (which only danielle probably got because she has seen the film); and my poor ditto of the scene did nothing more than pin a soft focus to the fragility of life, which we all agreed upon, in a strange solemn moment.


so here is the scene. the opening sequence of on of the greatest films of all time that no one knows about. 2000's Hungarian film Werckmeister Harmonies, directed by the profound Bela Tarr.