Sara Driver’s 1986 film Sleepwalk follows protagonist and copy-shop employee Nicole and her obnoxious roommate Isabelle throughout one night in Lower Manhattan. Nicole is hired to translate an ancient Chinese manuscript, which she soon finds out has the ability to alter her life. As women go bald, people mysteriously die, xerox machines take on minds of their own, and children are accidentally kidnapped, Driver exploits cinematic forms to create a strange world between reality and surreality. Driver deploys a cinematic style—most apparently present in actor direction, editing and narrative flow, and mise en scene—that flattens the film’s representative abilities (character depth, spatial depth, etc) and places spectators at a critical distance from the story and images. Reading this configuration of form through Victor Shklovsky’s notion of estrangement and defamiliarization in “Art as Device,” and through Fredric Jameson’s idea of affect and its relationship to realism, it becomes clear that Driver’s use of contrast serves a dialectical flatness, allowing spectators to realize their own alienated existences.
Shklovsky writes that “after being perceived several times, objects acquire the status of ‘recognition.’” Sleepwalk must contend with this in its internal objects (characters, settings, motifs, narrative) as well as in its grander structure of a film. “Art as Device” begins with the well known and commonly accepted assertion that “art is thinking in images.” He goes on to contend that the purpose of art is “to return sensation to our limbs, to make us feel objects,[...] to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition.”
Cinema is thinking in images, literally. By the time of the release of Sleepwalk in 1986, cinema was no longer a new medium but a pictographic and narrative form that audiences were familiar with; though the medium’s pictorial form inherently promoted artistic and creative engagement with the object world outside of the cinema, repeated encounters with the form naturalized the medium’s ability of enstranging relations between people and things. Furthermore, the proliferation and fetishization of cinema as a capitalistic or intellectual commodity rendered the narrative film into a film object. Thus, art cinema in the 1980s is in a double bind; in order to be good art, art that deals with real objects, Sleepwalk must enstrage both the objects and motifs within the film, as well as the form and narrative of the film itself.
One of the most notable ways in which Driver invokes the style/form and intents of defamiliarization is her direction of actors. Virtually every character in Sleepwalk, besides Isabelle, moves monotonously, emotionally alienated from the actions of the film’s plot. For example, the manuscript Nicole is translating begins to wreak havoc on her life but she barely reacts: when Isabelle’s hair falls out, Nicole calmly suggests that she take her son Jimmy to Atlantic City for the weekend. However, on the way to Atlantic City Isabelle decides to take a pitstop in Chinatown to try to reverse her luck, and Nicole’s son, asleep in the back of the car, gets kidnapped. As Isabelle weeps, telling Nicole what has happened to Jimmy, Nicole looks back at Isabelle with not much change of emotion besides a slight look of panic in her eyes.
This emotional suppression invokes Jameson’s definition of affect as the “registration of bodily event” distinct from emotion; he notes that affect is sensation that supposedly exists beyond language, resists nominalization; it thinks of itself as the asymbolic residue that occurs when representation fails to fully mediate experience. In Sleepwalk this manifests as characters who seem to gesture toward feeling but cannot fully inhabit it: Nicole barely reacts, and Isabelle overreacts. Both responses are empty, alienated. Driver mocks both of her characters through her direction of quality of their actions; in postmodern Manhattan neither emotion or bodily presence seems to be an apt response to absurdity in the real. Nicole’s blankness and Isabella’s melodrama is affect stripped to its barest trace, the ghost of a reaction. This performance mode both heightens and enstranges sensation for the film’s audience: a spectator recognizes that something significant is happening and also is denied a conventional script of emotional identification with a character to process the narrative or form.
As an example of successful art, proper defamiliarization, Shklovsky pays special attention to the Leo Tolstoy’s rendering of naturalized constructions or experiences through unfamiliar frames, through shifts in perspective: In Tolstoy’s story Kholstomer, the horse narrator notes,
“It is not known why this man, and not another, owns a particular field, [...] They love not so much the opportunity of doing (or not doing) something as the chance to talk about a host of things in the possessive language so customary among them: my book, my house, my land. [...] I am now convinced that what distinguishes us from humans and gives us the right to claim a higher place on the ladder of living creatures is simply this: that the human species is guided, above all, by words, while ours is guided by deeds.”
The familiar social structure of property becomes unrecognizable through this alternative perception. Similarly, Sleepwalk presents social institutions—motherhood, work, cities—through a surreal rhythm and distant emotional grammar. Nicole’s failure to respond conventionally to events estranges the work of being a mother, the copy-shop, filled with autonomous Xerox machines both reifies and becomes unmoored from the goals and methods of capitalist efficiency. These sites of social meaning do not collapse but are evacuated of familiarity.
Jameson’s account of realism as a form split between the cognitive mapping of social totality and the immediacy of bodily sensation helps make sense of this. He asserts that realism is always attempting to grasp a totality it can never achieve; it is driven by the simultaneous desire and failure to map the world. Surrealism, then, is a further attempt to represent totality, in that it does not only want to make a coherent language of the real and of the imaginary as well. Sleepwalk knows this dialectic failure: the film performs it. The characters don’t learn, the plot does not cohere, the city does not function.
Jameson notes that “any proposition about affect [...] is a historical one,” in that the sensation has been historically separated from the construction of language and modes of representation. Driver’s cinematic style, its use of high contrast lighting, obscures the particularities of her film’s landscapes. This stylistic trait frequently colors Sleepwalk’s visual language almost as if to say “the history of these spaces is irrelevant to your experience of or relationship to the film and its narrative.” But the question remains, does affect live in the bodies of the characters, and emotional and/or critical thought in that of audiences? Or is it vice-versa? Does Sleepwalk enstrange or aestheticize affect?
Perhaps the scene after Nicole first begins working on the manuscript can mediate this question: Nicole walks home from work. She first encounters a young boy who commands assistance saying: “cross me.” Nicole walks him across the street, but he immediately turns around, running to his initial position. She next encounters a young girl who throws glitter in the air, and then a business man who barks at her like a dog. All of the shots in this sequence are framed somewhere between profile and frontal; Nicole moves through the world diagonally, as do the spectators of the film. The actions do not appear to drive or serve the plot. However, the style, the framing of the narrative, is symbolic, prescriptive, even, of a critical distance. Shklovsky insists that defamiliarization’s purpose, and art’s purpose is “complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and laborious.” Driver here slows perception, arrests narrative momentum, and refuses symbolic resolution. Perceptual resistance nurtured by its flatness, juxtaposed with its diagonality, that creates this effect. Here, affect, or unaffectedness, seems to live in the body of Nicole. She is not confused, she does not interpret. She is unaware and thus accepting of all that is strange. As viewers we try to make sense of this, in that we are void of emotion, cohesion, anything that is conventional given to us in an entertainment film. In fewer words, affect as character response to plot seems to create a critical (emotional?) mode of spectatorship, primed for the realization of strangeness in mundanities.
Driver’s style is organized not around clarity, progression, or coherence. Scenes stall rather than resolve. Dialogue drops into voids. The script trades exposition for recursion, cycling variations on estranged actions: walking down hallways, entering dim shops, brushing hands over paper. Such repetitions become not narrative beats but rhythmic insistences—a chromaticism of plot. Jameson’s invocation of Wagner’s chromaticism is useful here. Wagner’s use of chromaticism—which produces unresolved tensions in the body—only appears to be significant and indicative of a specific temporal or cultural period when placed in relation to older Italian Arias which looked to emotionally engage and effect audiences. It is the same in Sleepwalk. Its style works because it is interpreted as different from and more demanding/commanding of attention from audiences whose emotionally or affectively coded expectations of form and narrative belong to conventional entertainment film, or even traditional, historical art films.
Driver’s Sleepwalk offers a polemic against immediacy, a refusal of the seamless flow between image, language, and emotion that moves and defines realism. The film foregrounds the opacity of experience and its structures of mediation by placing its viewers at critical distance. Its refusal to gratify the viewer’s desire for affect or catharsis stages a confrontation with what spectators have come to expect from narrative cinema: identification, progress, resonance. Sleepwalk is then an aesthetic of deferral, of structural obstruction.
Here, form is the site of resistance. Sleepwalk is not inert nor empty; it is inhabited by distance. The film’s flatness is active, its silence is dense, coded by the absence or inversions of codes. What seems like disaffection is, in fact, a calculated ideological position. Sleepwalk contorts the tools of narrative cinema: the result is a negation of narrativity-as-commodity. In other words, the failure to progress is the point. Driver is not anti-narrative so much as she is anti-resolution. Such a politics of obstruction places the spectator within the film’s machinery, forced to reckon with the conditions of seeing. It is in this refusal of the emotional contract that the film asserts its radicalism. Though we cannot emotionally identify with the character of Nicole, we understand her condition as alienated. This is an ethics of form, one that insists on the discontinuity between image and meaning, character and subjectivity, event and effect. Nicole’s estrangement is both a theme and an operation in which we are its site. This all seems to parallel Shklovsky’s belief that “Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant.”
Perhaps Sleepwalk exists outside of the (false) dialectic of affect and emotion as defined by Jameson, a binary which Jameson himself says is not an accurate representation of the possibilities of responses to media. Sleepwalk is an example of form conditioning critical thought, rather than emotion or sensation, that is much needed in the age of the entertaining arts. In a visual regime that demands our bodies and desires, Driver stages a form of cinema that disorients and holds us at arm’s length in a different kind of proximity: a proximity to truth through that of art and thinking. To valorize disaffection in this way is not to valorize detachment or retreat. Rather, it is to argue that art’s capacity to enstrange is more vital now than ever. Defamiliarization against forms that emotion and/or affect remind us that we are alienated, but that we perform and exploit alienation in ways that resist commodification. Here, refusal becomes the precondition for thought.
Bibliography:
Driver, Sara. Sleepwalk. First Run Features, 1986.
Jameson, Fredric. “The Twin Sources of Realism, Affect, or, the Body’s Present.” In Antinomies of Realism. Verso, 2013.
Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Device.” In Theory Of Prose. Translated by Benjamin Sher. Kalkey. Archive Press, 1991.
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