Sandra Moore’s new film The Soup of Sleep evokes the power of the senses during sleep, making sight and hearing more meaningful than they are in our conscious everyday lives. The film’s innovation lies in the choice of sleep itself to make its point. Far from treating sleep as an inert state, the filmmaker offers us the metaphor of SOUP to show that (like soup), sleep bubbles up and melds disparate ingredients —memory, fragmented images, and (with reference to Henri Bergson) phosphenes— that is to say, the light show of “visual dust” arising from stimulation of the retina and optic tracts behind closed eyes.
The film opens up with stones and mountains, presumably non-sentient entities. In order to make us "see through" their inertness, Moore raises questions regarding the being of stones. Do stones sleep? Dream? Do mountains remember? The film then moves from the non-sentient to the sentient—from stones to plants and animals— and asks: Do they sleep? Do they feel? and more intimately—what do animals feel when they sleep with humans? She presents a universe which is alive, buzzing with Mind. The film raises questions about mind but does not presume to provide answers.
Another metaphor is used—the ocean realms from the superficial sunlight zone down to the dark ocean floor—the abyss. We rapidly submerse into the Midnight Zone, along with the lantern fish—wherein the rational mind has absconded and reality is at a loss for words. That is, the film plunges us into a simulacra of sleep. We witness (or become?) a figure—a woman immersed in sleep. She struggles and is upended by a huge wave. Does she drown? —possibly, given the the anguish of her wailing companion. She sinks to the abyss. But then—like only an animated character can—she goes on to dance to an underwater rumba.
Another strong pictorial metaphor recurs throughout the film. It is like an eye—or a hole in space— that urges us to engage in a novel way of seeing—what the poet Dante Alighieri called a "novella vista", We are invited to contemplate what sleep, with all its brouhaha, actually is—on the basis of these images, and recollecting our own observations of sleep. This hole throughout the film the invites the observer "to see through”, to ruminate on what sleep is, and the profound and sublime activities that sleep can entail.
In sleep, sound too is transmuted since the senses are transformed—or even broadened?— in their field of operation. As with sight, and sound remembrances/memories also collide behind our closed eyes, becoming the stuff of dreams. These sense fragments may seem incoherent to the waking mind on recollection, but they are not inert. Like the metaphors of soup in a pot, and of the bottomless ocean, in sleep these fragments are under pressure as we stir in circles throughout the night.
Partially erased and blurred cartoon characters pop up. One, guffawing and exclaiming, tumbles endlessly through space—and subsequently undergoes brain mapping in an off-camera operating room. In the film these convoluted characters and contrasting bursts of color disclose, visual patterns whose meaning must be interpreted in ways other than through the rational and the nameable. The film stands against interpretation, against making sense, or assuming any authority to answer all questions. and the filmmaker pointedly steers clear of illustrating of concepts.
This film however beckons the observer to go beyond words and sense, in order to “grasp" the unity that underlies this rich, mostly hidden state which comprises 1/3 of our life.. The jumbled shards of perception and memory that fly by may seem—but are never—disparate in this film, nor in the state we know as“sleep".
Yvonne Jehenssen Dunn is a professor of comparative literature (ret.) She lives in Hudson NY.