We Are Movie Cameras, Lucidly Dreaming

Filmmaker and curator Pamela Cohn knows all about the medium’s gallant struggle for a cinematic language that is new, immediate, and accessible to the viewer. Originally from Los Angeles, Cohn has travelled the world as an arts journalist, educator, producer and photographer, and has been a consultant on dozens of films. Currently based in Berlin, she has been an expat now for 10 years, traveling throughout Europe and Asia, and Lucid Dreaming: Conversations with 29 Filmmakers is the result of those intersections. Cohn sees her role with this book as a curator at a gallery of interconnected rooms with alternating ideas on one aesthetic; film language is spoken here, human experience is the entry fee.

Cohn says her inspiration for the method applied to the garnering of conversations and their presentation in Lucid Dreaming came as a result of watching Astra Taylor’s film, Examined Life, at the Woodstock Film Festival in 2008. She writes that it “inspired me greatly. The format with which she approached long and in-depth conversations with some of the world’s most renowned philosophers was very much in line with how I wanted to converse with filmmakers.”

Lucid Dreaming begins with a special, bracketed conversation with Barbara Hammer, who succumbed to cancer last year. In Vital Signs, Hammer attempted to capture the essence of her battle with death (“looking it right in the face,” she tells Cohn). She was a legendary New York filmmaker, of whom Cohn says, “she has left behind an oeuvre that is staggering not only in its fecundity, but in the way her legacy as a life-long working artist lives on in hundreds of filmmakers creating work today.” Her themes and cinematic interests are too innumerable to catalogue here, but, in the interview with Cohn, she discussed a book she was working on that broadly addresses her aesthetic focus: “sexuality, film form and structure, the politics of abstraction.” Her life and work are memorialized at her website.

Lucid Dreaming comprises seven dialogical sections: “Antonyms of Beauty”; “Sonic Truth: Visioning with Sound”; “Border Crossings; Power Plays: Disruption”; “Memory & Magic: Inter-dimensionality”; “Notes from the Interior”; and “The Embodied Camera”. There are discussions of technical considerations, visual politics, and the phenomenological components of subjectivity. The filmmakers come from various countries and cultures, and their stories are idiosyncratic, sometimes bizarre, and always rich with the possibilities of the human experience.

Read the full review here.