Dream Work

A woman goes to bed, falls asleep, and begins to dream. This dream takes her to a landscape of light and shadow, evoked in a form only possible through classic cinematography. Dream Work is – after L’Arrivée and Outer Space – the third section of my CinemaScope Trilogy. The formal element binding the trilogy is the specific technique of contact printing, by which found film footage is copied by hand and frame by frame onto unexposed film stock. Through this, I am able, in a literal sense, to realize the central mechanism by which dreams produce meaning, the “dream work”, as Sigmund Freud described it: displacement (Verschiebung) and condensation (Verdichtung). The new interpretation of the text of the original source material takes place through its “displacement” from its original context and its concurrent “condensation” by means of multiple exposure. Moreover Dream Work positions itself as an homage to Man Ray, who, in 1923 with his famous rayographs in La retour à la Raison was the first artist to use this technique for filmmaking, exposing the image by shining light through physical objects onto the film stock. (Peter Tscherkassky)