Rachael Lei Professor Kyath Battie MMEDIA 4F04 Monday, October 7, 2014 Screening Response Essay Alan Berliner’s documentary Wide Awake is a personal tour of his life-long obsession with insomnia and filmmaking. Both these obsessions feed the other, forcing him to stay up all night working on his films. In this documentary, Berlin uses many film archives such as outtakes from films, home movies, television commercials and interviews with sleep specialists as an effort to figure out why he cannot sleep and what sleep really means. The documentary follows a narrative thread using voice-overs accompanied by many film archives from his collection in rapid sequences to represent a mind that will not shut down. The editing of Wide Awake plays a huge …show more content…
At one point of the film, he makes a remark about hearing loops of music when he goes to bed. He makes his point while playing looped music over and over again. He also mentions that the ticking rhythm heard throughout much of the soundtrack is the same as the sound he hears while he is in bed, a pounding like a woodpecker. He uses his archives as visual representations of his imagination. For example, in the scene with the conversation about counting sheep, the visuals cut to archived footages of sheep jumping over a fence. Then, as the voice over of the sleep specialist states that counting anything can help make someone fall asleep, the image cuts to a looping of gymnasts fading into a collage of multiple images edited together in an increasingly faster pace. The archives are used as a representation of Berliner’s mental images. Like the images we see in our heads, the archives Berliner collected over the years come from everywhere. However, it does not matter where they come from but what matters is the way they are arranged and the way Berliner inputs them in his film. In the film, Berliner says, “My brain doesn’t shut off, I cant control where it goes or for how long.” Editing gives Berliner a way to control over the hyperactivity of his mind and while it can benefit an effective end result of his film, it keeps him …show more content…
As a professional filmmaker, he has shelves and shelves of personally archived material, ranging from photos, stock film footage, and newspaper clippings. Some of the stock footage is used to prove his points and although the use of archival footage can be seen as an addition to the film’s goal to represent a sleepless mind, it also represents Berliner’s obsession with old images. The constant insertion of various images, clips and sounds illustrate and underline the fact that Berliner is a very obsessive man. This creates a very choppy flow to the documentary. At first, the footage appears as a unique feature of the film’s style but we later understand that it is evidence of his obsessiveness, where he reveals that he is consumed with organizing the footage he has collected. The documentary on insomnia takes a turn into a more personal perspective. We are then shown glued together sequences of him filing boxes or rearranging newspaper clippings on the floor. I am not too sure why Berliner did not just insert a touch of the archived footage along with some context for its inclusion. Still, the use of these images connects to the theme of time in the documentary where the neurotic tempo of the film has a soundtrack of many ticking clocks to