Collective:Unconscious is an immersion into 21st century paranoia and fear. It’s an intimate and surreal psychological web of displacement and isolation. It’s a Rorschach test of modernism rooted in the collective psyche of five different walks of life. Five burgeoning, experimental directors came together to interpret each other’s dreams. Just the conceit is complex to sift through.
Dreams – maybe the most nebulous, ethereal, and ambiguous of human processes – are not domains of volition. Words often fail those who try to explain them. The slumbering consciousness has no road map; it’s a suspension of will and navigation. At its very core, dreaming is an act of layered submission to an incalculable, immovable matrix of memory and association. To articulate a dream is to remember at will a consciousness of unconscious submission. It’s tricky.
This short film omnibus begins with a close-up of a man’s face in front of a black background. His voice is calmly resonant. He opines, “All hypnosis is self-hypnosis.” He is the psychologist that first invites the audience to submit to the “dreams” to come. The audience is told to breathe deeply, release thoughts, and submit to these visions as if to music. Let it wash over. He also leads each of the directors into a state of “hypnosis” – which here could be seen as a state of creativity. Each goes into the recesses of the mind; there’s a cut and then the next short plays.
Each short is defined by a collaborative dream logic: the composition of the original dream, then the vision of the director filtering it cinematically. Visions layered upon visions. Critical questions of plot mechanics and narrative are secondary to coherent filmmaking. And each piece truly does excel. The first is photographed in black-and-white in a wooded land where a monotonously sinister voice projects from a tower, “One sheep, two sheep, three sheep, et al.” It’s a lulling sleep-spell one man, a caretaker of an older woman, attempts to destroy. The second is like a hollowed-out, deconstructed rap video. A man returns home from prison and tells his story yet finds no pleasure in the life around him. The third is set in the 80s in a high school near Mount St. Helens. An authoritative gym teacher prepares the teens for another eruption as fear and paranoia mount. The fourth plays like a VHS recording of an early-90s, low-budget talk show. It’s called “Everybody Dies!” and is hosted by Ripa the Reaper. It’s a harrowing allegory of the tragedy of the death of black youth in America. And the fifth is a piece of haunting performance art. It’s a body horror film about a mother, drained of life, glamour, and the future.
The pretext of Collective:Unconscious is to explore the minds of art’s dream-crafters. The thesis is that cinema is inextricably tied to dreaming and unconsciousness. This has been a theoretical reflex of filmmakers since the medium’s inception, maybe best summed up in the André Bazin quotation that begins Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt: “The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with out desires.” The narrator-psychologist whose hypnosis seams Collective:Unconscious’s patches together asserts the same notion. Cinema is the projection of our hearts, souls, bodies, and minds. Yet the single psychological thread teased from each film is one of anxiety. Desire is implicit in the anxiety.
The 21st century has increasingly dived into a state of dread. There’s an apocalyptic sense to this collaboration that contemplates that, at any moment in the present, our collective psyche could collapse. The paranoia is not necessarily derived systemically or from a source outside ourselves – though those may be the catalyst; instead it comes from within. The mental paranoia of our time is in us. The end of all things feels near. At least, our psyches constantly flirt with that precipice.
If the cinematic form is the one most suited to retell dreams, then psychology and film-making/watching are joint ventures. Even though Collective:Unconscious often wears its conceit on its sleeve, it’s lucid enough to present a true, cohesive thematic vision. And this group effort seems to assert that in the cinema, where our dreams are projected back at us, we can find rest or, at the very least, some sort of release. The questions don’t have to be answered; sometimes just sharing a common dream experience is enough.