Sleep Has Her House: Refusing Modern Cinema
Imagine for a moment that the films we watch are akin to buildings, only instead of wood, brick, and steel, they are constructed and mortared with light. Each time we view a film, we take a precisely guided tour through the filmmaker’s construction. As they show us every intricately adorned wall, the passages of each labyrinthine hallway, each meticulously arranged room, and all the circuitous plumbing and wiring hidden in the floors; we are absorbing their meticulous curation of visual elements.
As such, it is the trend in Hollywood and modern cinematic culture to continuously find increasingly eccentric ways of capturing and wielding light; much like builders have evolved from simple hammers to sky-high construction cranes, filmmakers now find themselves equipped with unbelievably sophisticated cameras, lenses, and editing software capable of ingesting light almost as adeptly as the human retina.
Yet, what if one were to make a film that dealt primarily in darkness, rather than light? What if one were to embrace lower-resolution technologies and mediums, rather than clambering for the newest RED or ARRI cameras? These are the questions that drove Welsh artist and filmmaker Scott Barley to begin working on his first feature film, enigmatically titled Sleep Has Her House (2017). Filmed entirely on an iPhone 6 in the deep, nocturnal reaches of uninhabited forests, rivers, mountains, and other natural locations, Barley’s freshman film is a pure antithesis to Hollywood. Almost everything that attracts audiences to theaters and streaming services—narrative, action, allegory, metaphor, dialogue, characters, and people—is entirely absent. In their stead are languorous stretches of dark landscapes, with little else. One of the film’s opening sequences shows only the teal, wispy texture of water, zooming out slowly over the next eight minutes to reveal the full majesty of a lone waterfall enveloped by night. Somewhere in these eight, unbroken minutes, most viewers will abandon the film. Those who stay will largely be met with more or less the same ritual: dark, slowly evolving landscapes, ranging from terrifying bouts of lightning that interrupt a tar-black night to the sight of mysteriously slaughtered animals on the forest floor to the unmistakable pattern of stars.
It becomes clear to any viewer that taxonomizing the film will be a difficult, if not utterly impossible, task to undertake. Due to its hauntingly isolating nature and 90 contemplative minutes spent alone amongst thickets and dark crags, many tout the film as some iteration of existential horror—however, scarce moments of utter beauty and sublimity leave many, myself included, feeling resolute and inspired. Others label the film as a nature documentary—a notion that is once again complicated, this time the seamless integration and splicing of Barley’s own oil paintings into the film’s frames that precludes it from being considered pure, profilmic nature.
Such an impasse suggests that the quixotic idea that everything can be categorized and demarcated is precisely what Barley is attempting to rebel against with his film. In a cinematic economy where light and photonic data are the supreme materials and currencies, Sleep Has Her House is a revolutionary response that attempts to trade in darkness and the unknowable. In this same vein, perhaps we can view Sleep Has Her House as a film that does not operate under the umbrella of populist cinema, but intentionally outside of its roof. Instead of viewing cinema as something that must be understood or a message that must be deciphered, might we instead see it as a medium to experience, a meditation chamber, an intentionally murky space that hopes only to offer us a site for contemplation? Barley may not be interested in seeing the world at the highest resolution or cast in the brightest lights, as looking upon the world with such total clarity would be a boring reality lacking mystique, wonder, and possibility.
If all of today’s popular films are analogous to bright, professionally constructed mansions, Barley’s film finds itself more akin to the architectural skeleton of an abandoned home. Many will enter Sleep Has Her House and declare it unfinished, criticizing its opacity and lack of proper ornamentation. Yet, there is an undeniable passion that Barley has put into the film, the likes of which few other filmmakers today can claim to possess. As the sole member of the film’s crew, Barley himself was the one to venture into all these scenes of darkness and peril that he presents to the viewer, and he is the one who has scored the film with its alien, nearly divine soundtrack. Thus, enjoying Sleep Has Her House becomes a matter of seeing the film’s darkness and shadow not as markers of incompletion, but as wellsprings of untapped potential. Although the house is not quite as furnished as we have come to expect, Barley presents us with its barren walls and unoccupied rooms as an invitation to fill them ourselves.
There is no telling what you might find inside a film like Sleep Has Her House: pure boredom, transcendental beauty, ineffective pretentiousness, or nothing at all. Unlike spaces and buildings that are entirely illuminated, there is precious little that can be known for certain in an unlit structure such as Barley’s film. Sleep Has Her House is slow, dark, unrelenting, and brimming with a reminder that darkness can hold just about anything we can imagine, and then some.