Dreams Rewired.

Van Riper, A. Bowdoin

Dreams Rewired (2015)

Written and Directed by Manu Luksch, Martin Reinhart, and Thomas Tode

Produced by Amour Fou Vienna with Ambient Information Systems and Bildschon Film Productions Distributed by Icarus Films, icarusfilms.com

85 minutes

The technologies that connect us change, but--to an astonishing degree--the fears, anxieties, hopes, and dreams that swirl around them stay the same. Dazzled by the newness of the latest and greatest gadgets, however, we tend to see only the change, overlooking the continuity. We marvel at our instantaneous awareness of current events, but forget that the second message sent over Samuel Morse's telegraph wires in 1845 was: "Have you any news?" We wring our hands over "kids today" and their obsessive need to communicate with their friends, ignoring the "teenage girl ties up family phone line" jokes that were staples of film and television comedy for decades. We imagine that the spectacle of people "glued to their devices" in public spaces began with the smartphone, as if the Walkman, boom box, transistor radio, and paperback book had never existed. We have passed this way before; we just don't realize it.

The makers of Dreams Rewired would like to remind us.

The film is an exploration of our how our dreams about the future of communication technology were played out on movie screens between (roughly) 1890 and 1940. An eighty-five-minute mosaic of brief archival clips knitted together by voiceover narration and a delicate piano-strings-and-trombone score, it is nominally a documentary, but plays like a tone poem. The clips--a mixture of news and promotional films, period documentaries, and snippets from dramatic films both famous and forgotten--depict a world that seems visually, socially, and technologically distant from our own. Even as the filmmakers invite us to smile at their quaint otherness, however, the narration--performed by Tilda Swinton--subtly, insistently argues for the familiarity (indeed, the modernity) of the hopes and anxieties embodied in them. The people on the screen are not us, their world is not our world, and their gadgets are nor our gadgets, but our dreams (both joyful and fearful) overlap with theirs.

None of this is explicitly stated. Rather than framing a master narrative to which the stream of images add richness and texture, the voiceover creates a parallel stream of--for lack of a better word--aphorisms. "Our time is a time of total connection. Distance is zero," declares one. "Geography is history," says another. A third asks: "If we see what's in store for us, could we refuse it?" A fourth offers an implied answer: "Today in our pockets. Tomorrow woven into our bodies." The tone of the narration lies somewhere between Buddha and the Oracle of Delphi: elliptical and oblique, suggesting meanings but not insisting on them, leaving viewers to connect the dots. "A new electric intimacy," the narration declares at one point, early in the film. "Once we bridged a hundred meters with a shout; now we span the globe with a whisper." The viewer, primed by their day-to-day experience to interpret this as a statement about the present, is wordlessly prodded by the accompanying film clips to realize that all electronic communication moves at the speed of light, and that "spanning the globe" was made possible by the technologies of an earlier century: the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television. "Every age thinks it is the modern age," Swinton intones at one point, "but ours actually is." A hint of arch amusement creeps into her voice, suggesting the filmmakers' view that such finality is an illusion. Moments like these are the film's stock-in-trade. It makes its case not by argument, but by immersion.

Swinton--known for playing enigmatic, otherworldly characters in films ranging from Orlando (1987) and Conceiving Ada (1997) to Constantine (2005) and Doctor Strange (2016)--serves brilliantly as a latter-day priestess of Delphi. Whether the narration serves the film well is different question, the answer to which ultimately depends on whether Dreams Rewired is considered as art, or as social commentary.

As art, the film is a triumph. Having embraced an approach in which success depends on creating a seamless blend of imagery, narration, and sound, the filmmakers execute that complex task with extraordinary skill. Masterful, yet unobtrusive, editing creates a distinctive look-and-feel in the opening moments of the film and sustains it for the entire running time. What could easily have become a ponderous, twenty-first-century update of Future Shock (1973) becomes, instead, a fusion of the playful found-footage bricolage of The Atomic Cafe with the technical mastery of Koyaanisqatsi (both 1982).

Any film compiled from snippets of other films depends on the quality of its source material, and that used in Dreams Rewired is superb. The clips are breathtaking in their chronological and geographical diversity, drawn from film archives in (by a rough count kept while watching them flash past) at least a half-dozen countries. Some are familiar--cinema historians will recognize the work of Edison and Lumiere, Eisenstein and Chaplin-but the vast majority are startlingly, intriguingly unfamiliar. The footage of the 1936 Summer Olympics, for example, is not from Leni Riefenstahl's epic (and visually distinctive) documentary Olympia, and the educational-film clips explaining the concept of television are from European, not American, archives. Even when drawing from familiar films, the filmmakers choose less-familiar moments. The clip from Modern Times (1936) is not the Little Tramp's famous struggles with the assembly line or the feeding machine, but the Tramp being spied on by his Henry-Ford-like boss as he sneaks an illicit cigarette during a bathroom break. As a result, Dreams Rewired retains its capacity to surprise and delight even over multiple viewings; to re-watch it is to discover clips, connections, and juxtapositions that slipped past, unnoticed, before.

As vehicle for commenting on the relationship between technology and society, the film is considerably less successful. Its central point--that our responses to the promise and peril of electronic communications technology are evergreen--is important, and well worth making. Having made that one critical point, however, Dreams Rewired has no means of exploring it in greater depth, or moving on to other, related points. Phrases like "distance is zero" and "geography is history" catch the ear and the attention, but rather than pausing to unpack what they mean--or what the filmmakers want them to mean--the film briskly deals out other phrases: equally fascinating, equally suggestive, and equally unexplored. Straightforward, concrete statements about the past are rare and, when they appear, barely developed. The preferential hiring of women as telephone operators gets a few sentences; the story of Alice Guy, pioneer of narrative filmmaking in France, flashes by in a brief paragraph minutes later. A tossed-off comment that the Olympic torch relay was a "tradition" first staged, in 1936, for the benefit of television is ripe with analytical possibilities. Before any of them can be explored, though, the moment sinks into the ceaseless flow of images and is swept away.

The filmmakers' decision to not to contextualize individual film clips onscreen (though citations for each snippet are--in a useful and welcome innovation--listed sequentially in the credits) further hobbles the film's ability to function as a work of commentary. Hiding the eras, authors, and national origins of specific clips serves the artistic ambitions of the film (and reinforces its overarching analytical point) by emphasizing the cross-cultural, cross-era universality the messages they seem to contain. The air of "universality" thus created, however, is ultimately a product of artful omission: a masking-out of the very specifics--time, place, and authorial intent--that can cause apparently similar images to carry very different messages. The process raises the troubling possibility that the past has been over-simplified to make a point rather than engaged by the filmmakers in all its rich, unruly complexity. Worse, it leaves the audience no way to assess whether such suspicions are, in fact, valid.

Most troubling of all, when considering Dreams Rewired as a statement about history rather than simply a work of art using historical film as a medium, is the filmmakers' indiscriminate, unacknowledged mingling of documentary and dramatic footage. The problem lies not at the extreme ends of the spectrum--an animated diagram of an early television system marks one clip as documentary; the presence of the Little Tramp flags another as drama--but in its vast, gray midsection. Observers familiar with the history of science-fiction film will recognize the scene of an activist's speech projected live on a translucent, multi-story screen as a clip from William Cameron Menzies' Things to Come (1936). Students of 1930s Germany will recognize the stamp of Josef Goebbels' state-sponsored propaganda in the footage of the Berlin Olympic broadcasts. Every viewer, however, will find that background knowledge repeatedly fails them. Is that early experiment in virtual reality (a dummy ship's hull in a vast hall, moving on hydraulic pistons and flanked by slow-scrolling paintings) real, or some forgotten filmmaker's whimsy? Even when the outlandishness of what is shown onscreen marks it as another era's dream of the future (or of their own present, enhanced by a magical new machine), Dreams Rewired carefully conceals a key piece of the puzzle: Is it, for the characters in the story, a blessing or a curse--a dream, or a nightmare?

Dreams Rewired is a beautifully made, endlessly inventive work of art. It is thrilling, and--particularly for those interested in the history of early cinema--fascinating to watch and even to re-watch. Exploring it in detail with students of documentary filmmaking could be both rewarding and illuminating. As the commentary on communication technology and society that it clearly wants to be, however, it is more frustrating than compelling, the filmmakers having sacrificed--deliberately or not--both analytical depth and historical sophistication on the altar of artistry.

A. Bowdoin Van Riper

Independent Scholar