It’s late at night. I’m not sure exactly when, because my phone has been off for hours and I’ve long since lost track of time. From my perch, I can see a giant circular screen which seems to be floating in midair like a mesmerising moon. Dreamy images flit across its surface and cast a faint glow into the darkness, which is permeated with sounds of breaking waves and gently creaking wood. I could be on a ship, sailing across the sea. Or, perhaps, back in my mother’s womb, viewing the outside world via a mysterious portal.
Where I actually am is in a large hall inside the Beurs-World Trade Center in Rotterdam. For this year’s Rotterdam film festival, the space has been converted into the Sleepcinemahotel, an installation-cum-guest house conceived by Thai film-maker and multimedia artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul. In films such as Tropical Malady, Syndromes and a Century and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (which won the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes film festival), Weerasethakul blurs the distinction between sleep and wakefulness, reality and dream. This tendency culminates in his most recent feature, Cemetery of Splendour, whose characters, stricken by a sleeping sickness, roam a dreamed reality that provides respite from the oppression of their waking present.
The sedate rhythms and transporting images lend themselves quite naturally to nodding off. Contrary to what one might expect, though, this is not something he discourages. Weerasethakul has extolled the synergy between sleeping and film-watching in numerous interviews, arguing that it is a means of entering into a deeper conversation with the images on the screen; he even organised a giant film-watching sleepover at Tate Modern in 2016. Guests at the Sleepcinemahotel are invited to test out his theory.
The hotel consists of a scaffolding construction with seven platforms at different heights, each with a bed and a night stand. Netting is wrapped around the rooms’ cubic frames and canvas curtains can be pulled down to act as walls. Within view of the beds, a large round screen hangs from the ceiling at the end of the hall. On to it is projected a 120-hour stream of documentary clips from the archives of the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum. The images are accompanied by a soothing soundtrack of waves and ships’ creaking.
Featuring recurring motifs – water, boats, nature, animals and people sleeping – the strikingly beautiful footage provides glimpses of life from across the last century. A regatta gives way to a young girl sleeping in bed as her dog keeps watch; a family of ducklings jump off a log into a stream; flowers bloom in closeup. Each clip lasts only a few seconds.
Without a story to follow, a time frame to abide by, or even the need to stay awake, the hotel’s guests are offered a 20-hour window between check-in and check-out to immerse themselves in the pure pleasure of uninhibited contemplation. And what happened? As tiredness set in, I found my mind began to travel freely, propelled in myriad directions by images that were no longer even consciously registered. I departed on one reverie after the other, regularly dozing off and then coming back again. It made for the gentlest of hallucinatory trips and when I eventually fell asleep for the last time, I slept like a log.
