Sweden’s Gothenburg Festival presents The Hypnotic Cinema
After isolating a film enthusiast on a lighthouse on the North Sea in 2021, this year’s Gothenburg Film Festival, Scandinavia’s largest film TV event, looks to stage another bold metaphor for film consumption, which exposes the audience at three different film screenings to mass hypnosis.
Dubbed The Hypnotic Cinema, the string’s titles selected for the rare experiment are Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2021 Cannes Jury Prize winner’s Memoria ‘, starring Tilda Swinton; “Land of Dreams,” from Iran’s silver lion winner in Venice, Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari (“Women Without Men”) starring Sheila Vand, Matt Dillon and Isabella Rossellini; and the Danish director Christian Tafdrup’s “Speak No Evil”, scheduled for world premiere at this month’s Sundance Festival.
Before each film, a hypnotist will make a mass hypnosis from the big stage at the Stora Teatern in Gothenburg, the festival announced on Tuesday. By changing the audience’s state of mind in accordance with the film’s mood and theme, the hypnotist will break the hypnosis after each screening.
The Gothenburg Festival has just released a promotional trailer that dubbs The Hypnotic Cinema into a “mind-bending film experiment”. In the video, a suitable hypnotist in front of a spiral vortex instructs a female audience member to “open your eyes.”
“Listen carefully”, “Forget your worries”, “Release your stress”, “Do not be afraid”, “Let us inside you”, “We are your new experiences” give other hypnotist characters advice as the camera rolls down. what looks like a hotel corridor as a rabbit-masked individual lurks in the background, channeling echoes of “The Shining” and “Donnie Darko.”
The woman is finally asked to wake up. She finds herself sitting in a movie theater, but whether her trance is really over is another matter. “Do you really dare to let go of control?” asks a final title.
Hypnosis involves focused attention, which reduces peripheral awareness. Bioteater film watching has a parallel effect, says the Gothenburg Festival’s artistic director Jonas Holmberg. “Bio-theaters and hypnosis both emerged in the late 19th century. If you look at early film – Méliès, Griffith – it is completely full of hypnosis. I do not think this is a coincidence. There are very, very similarities between becoming hypnotized and watching a movie, especially in a movie theater. ”
The organizers of Göteborg Film Festival 2022 are currently keeping their fingers crossed that they will be able to arrange this year’s event as a personal event in theaters, supplemented by an online program with 50 films for those in Sweden who can not do it. to Gothenburg.
In such a context, “we want to celebrate this film experience in cinemas and also expand it by adding another layer of hypnosis”, said Holmberg Amount.
But The Hypnotic Cinema also has a bigger picture, which is part of a larger focus, entitled Disorder. Its titles take in Berlin 2021 Golden Bear winner “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”, “Land of Dreams” and “The Falls”, from Taiwanese Chung Mong-Hong.
“During the pandemic, society has been very much ordered by rules and restrictions. Many have begun to reflect on what makes us do what we do and why,” says Holmberg.
The titles of The Hypnotic Cinemas were chosen for various reasons. Apichatpong’s films strike at “different states of consciousness”, said Holmberg.
Co-author of Luis Buñuel co-author Jean-Claude Carrière, “The Land of Dreams” addresses “The Relationship Between the State and the People’s Conscience”, with Sheila Vand (“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”) as a US Census Bureau starring an official who collects people’s dreams.
“Speak No Evil” strikes a Danish family visiting a Dutch couple they met on holiday. The journey becomes increasingly strange, even unhappy. “The Hypnotic Cinema is about maintaining the film experience,” said Holmberg. “We wanted to see what happens when you go even further into the spectator mode associated with a very well-made and effective horror film.”
The Gothenburg Festival takes place January 28-Feb. 6. The full program will be announced on January 11.