Sleep Has Her House (Scott Barley, 2017) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Jake Levens

At the risk of being reductive, Scott Barley is the Philippe Grandrieux who doesn't fuck. Or, putting it less facetiously, Barley shares Grandrieux's interest in expanding the language of experimental cinema to encompass thematic and emotive concerns. But where Grandrieux fixates on the human body and its extremities of affect, Barley appears to be staking all his chips on the eerie sublimity of the natural world. The human body is of no concern here. This is not a bad thing in itself, especially since Barley's focus on landscape means that his visual language is much more metaphorical than Grandrieux's, which can be rather literal.

Having said that, I mostly did not respond to Sleep Has Her House. The main reason is that I failed to see how Barley was organizing the film across its 90-minute running time. To me it played much more like a series of small chunks, disconnected from any larger structure. The filmmaker has a method -- ultra-dark frames with a minimum of suggestion of the landscape, presented with the soft edges of a Gerhard Richter painting - and he subjects various sylvan views to said method.

Barley's approach would seem to imply that over time we would acquire a general sense of place, becoming able to cognitively map the lay of this land. That is really not the case, since each carefully framed image seems to float in its own bubble. It doesn't help matters that, while Barley seems very comfortable with single long takes, he doesn't indicate much intuition when it comes to editing. Several parts of the film cut unexpectedly to other images within the same basic class (sky, trees, waterfall) but they don't fit together in discernible ways. And more often than not, when Barley feels he's come to the end of a given passage, he just fades out.

By far the strongest portion of Sleep Has Her House happens at the one-hour mark, where Barley gives us a mostly uninterrupted view of a rainstorm. Through much of this part of the film, the screen is completely black, only lighting up to reveal the landscape when there's lightning in the sky. I can imagine that this is even more potent in a theatrical setting, since the increasing sound of the storm would reverberate through the hall, filling it while so much of the image is "blank." It reminded me a lot of certain Bill Viola works, and it even suggests that Barley would be a stronger sound or installation artist than a filmmaker per se.

This interesting portion of Sleep is eventually disrupted by a quick image of a wildfire (computer generated, I'm guessing), and a coda in which a circular eddy of elemental brushstrokes swirls in the middle of the screen, growing larger. It's a fairly uninspired way to end the film, since it returns us to the portentous text at the start, which alludes to some sort of cataclysm. After spending so much time exploring the limits of cinematic legibility, working to see just how little light and form are necessary to produce meaning for a viewer, Barley doubles down on his theme of the void, of absence as cosmic rather than merely formal.

A number of writers have compared Sleep Has Her House to the art of Caspar David Friedrich, and I can see this, especially in terms of Barley's use of Kantian natural vistas to evoke a sensation of smallness before the limitless universe. But someone has already made the perfect Friedrichian film. Sokurov's Mother and Son is much more frank about its spiritual striving, and succeeds in large part because the filmmaker juxtaposes the overpowering grandeur of nature with the aching intimacy between his two human figures.If Barley is trying to work in a Romantic mode, he undercuts it with over-explanation, which breaks the spell he appears to be trying to cast.

So why do people like this so much? Well, it's very clearly a Work of Art. It wears its ambition on its sleeve, and Barley certainly has a well-defined style, one that asks its viewer to abandon themselves to the awe and terror of the sublime. As I said, I suspect that when one is in a screening room, surrounded only by Sleep and an all-enveloping darkness, the film's visceral aspects are more powerful and can mitigate Barley's formal shortcomings. But I also think it's because, despite the film's tendency to approach an absolute threshold of minimalism -- often becoming "nothing" -- there is something reassuringly vernacular about Sleep Has Her House. When the existential void becomes personalized, an experience not of losing cognition but of losing the "self," it becomes Goth. That is, Goth is vernacular Romantic fatalism, and Sleep Has Her House is a Goth landscape film.