Asleep in a burning cinema

Once I had a dream, and within the dream I was having another dream, in which I was asleep in a burning cinema. I awoke from one level of the dream to another, to the sight of flames quietly flowing across the walls. There was no alarm, no panic. The cinema, I seemed to know, was located on a wide, level plane, surrounded by darkness. In every direction the ground stretched away into the void. There were no stars in the sky, and the burning cinema lit up nothing but itself. The air was cold, cool enough that it seemed to arrest the spread of the fire, which was neither burning out nor progressing. Given the peaceful sense of stasis, and the lack of anywhere else much to be, I decided to stay and watch the movie that was underway, framed by the quiet inferno.

There is a particular pleasure in drifting off during a film and waking again to find it still there, waiting, unchanged by your absence. This may not work with narrative-heavy works that punish inattention. But there exist films that are somehow crepuscular in their nature, built for the half-light between conscious states, ready to coax a viewer into a hypnagogic calm and reward an untethered mind. The screen begins to soothe rather than stimulate. The cinema becomes a space for the unconscious mind to commune with the film, rather than an arena for logical analysis of theme and plot.

In this mode, the act of watching is at one with the liminality of the situation and the surroundings. Sleep arrives not as interruption but as a dissolve into cinematic time. We enter a fugue in which the mind becomes unsure what is real, and opens itself to all inputs. Haptic elements of the film are consumed by the collapsing mind and integrated into the dream state. Lines of dialogue are reworked into the texture of a peaceful delirium. Later - seconds, minutes? - we wake in the dark, disoriented. The film has not progressed so much as settled deeper into itself. Were you snoring? There is something akin to an out-of-body experience; while the body is at rest, perception drifts, slowly reattaching to sound and image. What were you dreaming? Or was your subconscious simply continuing to watch the film in its own way, while you enjoyed a little ego death and let the flickering light take the reins?

The magic of cinema lies in the gaps between frames, the jumps in time and place, and the disconnects between image and sound. These are the lacunae into which the mind flows, in an effort to make the thing cohere - and in doing so, becomes one with the film. To doze is to create new gaps, and fill them directly from the dark waters of the subconscious; to infuse one's own mind into the unfolding action.

Once upon a time, people would buy a ticket for the day and spend as long as they wanted in a screen. They would enter partway through a film, stay through the end credits, and let the film start up again, leaving only when they got back to when they came in. Or perhaps they could watch it all over again. After all, it may be raining outside. They may have nowhere else to go. For much of cinema history, falling asleep in a theatre was not a failure of attention but a side effect of using the cinema as shelter. Early picture palaces and neighbourhood cinemas were warm, dark, cheap, and anonymous - ideal for workers between shifts, the unhoused, or people killing time. Municipal authorities and exhibitors periodically cracked down on “loitering” bodies. Sleep in cinemas was policed when it became too visible or too permanent. The history of sleeping in cinemas is therefore also a history of who is allowed to rest, and where.

Before it shut in the early 1980s, The Scala offered a safe haven for slumbering cinephiles. Londoners caught out after dark near King’s Cross, with the Underground shut for the night and no trains home until after 5am, knew they could come to an all-nighter. The Scala would play outsider films all the way through to the dawn. The audience were frequently drunk, wired, desperate or confused. They watched, kissed, slept, and sometimes even died in their seats.

Perhaps no film has ever been slept on more than The Clock. Christian Marclay’s installation film shows an endlessly looping flow of film scenes depicting clocks and watches, synchronised to the time of day. Some viewers will dip in, get the gist, and leave again. Others will stretch out on wooden boards or soft felt of a gallery floor, or slump on a sofa. They are in it for the long haul, eating when they can or taking an occasional jaunt to a restroom. Long periods staring at the narrative-free succession of images produces an altered consciousness where sleep and wakefulness coexist. Drifting off at one hour and waking at another, the work simply receives you again. Time has passed, yet nothing has been forfeited. It all comes round again. The journey is durational and the loop eternal, absorbing viewers’ attention and obliterating the outside world. There is only the Möbius strip of time, returning us to whence we came, changed yet unchanged.

I had a similar experience thirty years ago when, ill with a fever, I dozed off to a DVD of Manhattan. It was set to auto-play if no one click on any of the menu options after five or ten minutes, and so it looped around and around as I sunk into a state of slumped delirium, unable to move. I eventually rose, fever somewhat broken, after about 14 hours. Manhattan is only 96 minutes long, so I must have seen (or unseen?) that film, eyes closed, brain misfiring, around eight times in a row, all its scenes shuffled into one problematic miasma.

Skinamarink has the texture of a nightmare, the durational murk enticing us to join it beneath rationality. Vitalina Varela’s gloom, its sense of water and rock and shelter, feels like entering the womb of the Earth. Sleep Has Her House is a pure exercise in drifting disembodied across a landscape of dark forces. Goodbye, Dragon Inn is set in a ghost-haunted cinema on its last night before it is erased from the face of the world. The endless winds and glacial pace of The Turin Horse build to an unstoppable night in which God seems to undo the very idea of light. Across all these films it seems that things are coming to an end, or entering an eternal plateau. They are slow, calming, yet filled with dread.

But what makes them hospitable to sleep is their tactile presence. Their images linger and sounds hum; the sensations register even as our higher brain functions cease to operate. As the mind implodes, the film proceeds like a shared dream that can be left or re-entered without explanation, where meaning accumulates through exposure rather than focus. People say of low comedy that viewers should leave their brain at the door. But what if the very best films reward us for the same approach? For extinguishing sentience and becoming one with the sensory experience?

To fall asleep inside such a film and wake again within it is not simple disengagement. It can be a different kind of engagement, with a transcendent style of cinema that understands viewing as communion. It can even be a repurposing of cinema intended to be experienced with full attention, but remade into a tool for knocking oneself into a new state of consciousness. As you drift back and forth, sometimes remembering what you are seeing, sometimes not, the self evaporates and the world of the screen is everything.

Abbas Kiarostami said “I believe in a cinema which gives more possibilities and more time to its viewer—a half-fabricated cinema, an unfinished cinema that is completed by the creative spirit of the viewer, [so that] all of a sudden, we have a hundred films.”

Dozing is a method of de-finishing cinema, and so providing gaps in which we might find traction. There may be limits to this approach. You may not necessarily gain much from passing out ten minutes before the end of Tony Scott’s bravura train smash movie Unstoppable. But anything is possible.

In Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor: A Family Romance, the narrator claims he and his editor/lover are about to die into the unfinished book. Maybe this is ultimate way to dissolve into a film; the longest sleep of all.

Bi Gan pondered on this in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, whose final movement folds the film back on itself. The lead character Luo is shot, and drifts into sleep inside a cinema. From that moment, the film abandons external reality and commits fully to interior time, in an extended 3D one-shot sequence that does not behave like narrative continuation but like a last, lucid dream, where memory is untethered from clear cause and effect, gliding forward into a a fantasia of hopes and regrets. Whether the gunshot kills him is left unresolved, but the direction of travel is clear. Sleep, and cinema, have become terminal. Film is the final apparatus still operating as consciousness slips away, projecting one last, impossibly fluid reverie before everything else goes dark. The final image is of a burning sparkler flaming out. Dying in the cinema - now there’s a transcendent style.

So come to the movies, and forget yourself. Or, in the words of William Burroughs: exterminate all rational thought.

The films referenced here span a loose constellation of slow, liminal, and durational cinema, plus Tony Scott’s Unstoppable (2010): The Clock (also 2010), an installation film by Christian Marclay; Skinamarink (2022), directed by Kyle Edward Ball; Vitalina Varela (2019), directed by Pedro Costa; Sleep Has Her House (2017), directed by Scott Barley; Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), directed by Tsai Ming-liang; The Turin Horse (2011), directed by Béla Tarr (co-directed with Ágnes Hranitzky); Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), directed by Bi Gan.