W9 Sequence Exegesis: The Science of Sleep.

The Science of Sleep can be summed up a film that revolves around the story of a man, Stephane, moving to a new place and having different life experiences such as how he feels about his job and his relationships with people. He takes his horrible life experiences and reflects on them every time by warping himself during his sleep and into his own world of craft and imagination. Through this reflection, he is able to do what he can’t do in real life, such as screaming at his boss and giving the love letter to Stephanie (his neighbour). He gets paranoid of turning his imaginary actions to life as the film progresses further. These struggles are reflected in a way they are exaggerated in all scenes of his imagination.

The film has two main settings that it alternates from which are reality and imagination. The use of materials such as cardboard, egg cartons, curtains, fabric, stuffed dolls, pillow stuffing, cellophane etc., help communicate the overall dreamy mood filled with sparks of freedom in the world of imagination. It is often very cluttered with pieces of material as they represent the messy thought process that goes through ones head.

The following 20-second film cut-off selected to be analysed is between the scene where he’s confusing his love life with reality and imagination. His confession was very sudden when he was transitioning from two places quickly. His co-workers know about this and seem to act as his devils by his side as he listen to each of them from left and right. He enters the red printing room as if he has entered hell facing his awful feelings in reality. He dreams once more, and recollects the most important objects of his love life in the form of fabric. The time machine is introduced as a representation of a machine that is able to move between dream and real life. The amount of clicks and flashes on it continuously build on faster to create an effect of entering the dream world. We, as the audience, enter this world and experience the expectation of how scenarios are played out if a realistic event happened. This is shown particularly using a TV frame to show that it’s kind of like a TV episode of his life evoking emotions and expectations of how he sees the event.