The wildly collaborative dream interpretation anthology screens Sun in 4070 Vilas as part of Micro-Wave Cinema
The variable nature of dreams themselves seems to have influenced the transfiguration of this now-cinematic omnibus from what was once proposed as a five-episode web series back in Nov 2014. In the wake of a sold-out theatrical world premiere at SxSW this past Mar and dramatic digital release event in Aug, collective:unconscious secures a FREE public screening in Madison as part of the Micro-Wave Cinema Series on Oct 9, at 7:00p, in 4070 Vilas Hall.
Series alumna Josephine Decker (Butter on the Latch, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely) joins four East Coast US-based independent filmmakers, including Lily Baldwin, Frances Bodomo, Daniel Patrick Carbone, and Lauren Wolkstein, to reciprocally translate each other’s fanciful visions from basic paper prompts to elaborately staged choreography. While the dreamer relinquishes complete creative control to an arbitrarily chosen fellow director, executive producer Dan Schoenbrun helps demarcate, coalesce, and oversee the (re)interpretive short films that are housed under a clever play of the Jungian psychological term concerning shared ancestral memory.
The high-concept of the director utilizing his/her medium as a tool for oneiric analysis is hardly new, but the promise of collective:unconscious is unique. Intermingling through various stages of the creative process closely recalls a jazz ensemble’s collaborative improvisation more than anything typically associated with the history of the anthology film. Therefore, the series of five shorts has rightly claimed a fluidity and energy that David Ehrlich of Rolling Stone characterizes as “unshakably strange… like nothing you’ve ever seen with your eyes open.”
The impression includes the first b/w apocalyptic short, “Black Soil, Green Grass,” where Daniel Patrick Carbone sets soothing pastoral imagery against sounds of inevitable doom from Lauren Wolkstein’s original dream with intelligent “ideas around cultural preservation in a day and age of mass-media dominance” (writes Ben Umstead). But this consciousness is also ingeniously threaded through to the final film, “Swallowed,” (Lily Baldwin taking on Daniel Patrick Carbone’s dream), that boldly approaches a woman’s anxiety about impending motherhood with a dose of surreal horror. Kevin Rakestraw of Film Pulse sees Baldwin channeling Carbone’s unconscious mind through the harrowing subway scene in Possession (1981).
While a full virtual round table of directors during the standard post-screening Q&A will not happen, Frances Bodomo (director of “Everybody Dies!,” from Josephine Decker’s game-show of a dream) will join host/series curator Brandon Colvin after the screening to provide further insight into the links between dream states and the writing and filmmaking processes — particularly, if someone should make a surprise sleepwalking appearance.
- collective:unconscious plays FREE on Sun, Oct 9, in 4070 Vilas Hall at 7:00p. A video Q&A with co-director Frances Bodomo will follow. For more information on the Micro-Wave Cinema Series, visit their Facebook community page.