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God's Nightmares

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God's Nightmares
Title frame
Directed byDaniel Cockburn
Written byDaniel Cockburn[1]
Produced byDaniel Cockburn
Edited byDaniel Cockburn[1]
Production
company
ZeroFunction Productions[2]
Distributed byVtape[1]
Release date
  • 8 September 2019 (2019-09-08) (TIFF)
Running time
5 minutes[1][3]
CountriesCanada
United Kingdom[1][3][4]
LanguageEnglish
BudgetC$300,000[2]

God's Nightmares is a 2019 Canadian-British short experimental[1] black comedy film[2][3] created by Daniel Cockburn that "mashes together" appropriated film clips, creating a visual collage that imagines the thoughts that plague God at night,[5] his "interior monologue," in which he muses about a recurring nightmare of being an everyman.[2]

Synopsis

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Dozens of disjointed images flow one after the other: the mind of God[6] reviewing human activities, anxiously considering the nightmare possibility of becoming trapped in his own creation as an everyman.

Themes

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Ostensibly, Daniel Cockburn explores the "murky world of dream logic",[7] "the stuff of dreams and nightmares",[8] by means of a meditative collage of "iconic and esoteric movie clips ... artfully set to the measured but troubled reflections" of God.[9] However, as Calum Marsh notes, the film technique is also a way "to think about how movies work", and in that sense God's Nightmares may be seen as a follow-up to the director's 2017 film, The Argument (with annotations).[8]

Production

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Background

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In 2017, the same year he completed his York University master's thesis film, The Argument (with annotations),[10] Cockburn began an artist-in-residency and a research fellowship at the Queen Mary University of London's School of Languages, Linguistics and Film in its pilot year.[11] Both The Argument and God's Nightmares are considered Canadian-British co-productions.[12][13][1][3][4]

Financing

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In the introduction to his review of God's Nightmares, Marsh notes appreciatively that Telefilm Canada and other funding bodies in recent years "have completely redefined how money is awarded to filmmakers across the country", choosing to support dozens of different projects "instead of bankrolling two- or three-million-dollar epics by washed-up directors who have been phoning it in since middle age", representing "a shake-up that is already transforming the landscape of Canadian film in a fundamental way."[8] It has been reported that Cockburn's project had a budget of $300,000.[2]

Editing

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Cockburn's film relies almost exclusively on "a few dozen carefully curated film clips,"[14] the same collage technique he made use of in the first half of The Argument[8] and in his early short film work.[15]

Release and reception

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God's Nightmares had its world premiere at the 44th Toronto International Film Festival on 8 September 2019 in the Short Cuts Programme,[3] and its U.S. premiere shortly thereafter at Fantastic Fest on 22 September 2019.[9]

Critical response

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Writing for Now following the film's premiere at Toronto, Norman Wilner placed it at the top of his list of best ten short films at the festival,[14] Wilner calls the film a video essay.[14] God's Nightmares likewise makes it on to Calum Marsh's list of top six short films at the festival, and he also calls Cockburn "one of Canada's preeminent film essayists" whose "odd, often beguiling experiments with sound and image display an extraordinarily rich familiarity with cinema history and, more than anything else, a profound love of motion pictures."[8]

God's Nightmares, his latest short, follows up on the sly metacommentary of 2017's The Argument (With Annotations), again using found footage from a huge range of movies . , and over the course of its brief running time, Cockburn draws surprising connections, finds intriguing parallels, and makes observations that qualify as bona fide film criticism, all tied together with a meditative narration that playfully muses about the thoughts and fixations of the Almighty.[8]

Victor Stiff compares God's Nightmares to the "unsettling" films of David Lynch, saying the clips such as Halloween and After Hours induce anxiety through the "strange visual collage".[7]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f g "God's Nightmares". British Films Directory. British Council. Retrieved 21 September 2019.
  2. ^ a b c d e "God's Nightmares by Daniel Cockburn". Cinando. Retrieved 21 September 2019.
  3. ^ a b c d e "Short Cuts Programme 06". tiff.net. 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. Retrieved 21 September 2019.
  4. ^ a b "Toronto 2019: UK films and co-productions so far announced". We Are UK Film. Retrieved 21 September 2019.
  5. ^ Adams, Kesley (1 August 2019). "TIFF's 2019 Canadian Film Offering Has Angles for Art Lovers". Canadian Art. Retrieved 21 September 2019.
  6. ^ TIFF
  7. ^ a b Stiff, Victor (5 September 2019). "TIFF 2019: Our Look at Short Cuts Programmes 5, 6 & 8". In The Seats. Retrieved 21 September 2019.
  8. ^ a b c d e f Marsh, Calum (13 September 2019). "6 of the best Canadian films at the Toronto International Film Festival". Maclean's. Retrieved 21 September 2019.
  9. ^ a b "God's Nightmares". Fantastic Fest. Retrieved 21 September 2019.
  10. ^ Cockburn, Daniel. "Daniel Cockburn" (PDF). ZeroFunction Productions. Daniel Cockburn. Retrieved 10 February 2019.
  11. ^ "Film Practice Research Fellowships". School of Languages, Linguistics and Film. Queen Mary University of London. Retrieved 10 February 2019.
  12. ^ "Toronto goes British!". British Council. Retrieved 11 February 2019.
  13. ^ "UK Films at Toronto 2017". www.weareukfilm.com. Retrieved 11 February 2019.
  14. ^ a b c Wilner, Norman (27 August 2019). "TIFF 2019: 10 must-see Canadian short films". Now. Retrieved 21 September 2019.
  15. ^ Hoolboom, Mike (1 November 2005). "Experimental: Daniel Cockburn-Preliminary Notes". Point of View Magazine (60 [Winter 2005]). Archived from the original on 22 September 2019. Retrieved 22 September 2019.
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