A nightmarish yet crafty ode to Man Ray which'll leave your eyes spinning with horrific stimuli
Still deep into the fathoms of my shorts binge, I watched Dream Work (not the output of the entire studio), a nightmarish portrayal of hypnogogic imagery which assaults your eyes before falling into a dream and the foggy delirium that grips you after you awake.
A love letter to Man Ray, the film is a visual feast while a sonic oven fire, with layered and extremely dense islands of superimposed images and sounds. Horrifically grainy black and white film twists and contorts as the forces that keep the celluloid in balance start to tip and cannonball into each other like exploding stars. Negative and positive exposures engaged in a tug of war pull the film apart as hellishly intense double exposures dance across the screen leaving me dazed and confused, exacerbating and picking up force with each iteration of the dream. I clocked some inspiration pulled from Meshes of the Afternoon too with an ever-repeating dream, but this one I much preferred because it doesn’t go easy on the eyes one bit. The sound design is a cacophony of insanity, ringing like a stick of dynamite exploding between two church bells, I was fully convinced that my eyes and ears were malfunctioning.
A dazzling display of cinematic virtuosity and an ode to the photography of yore, this short film is perfect for making sure I don’t get any sleep the night I watch it in fear of the images sneaking their way into my subconscious.
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