Sleepy Haven


Rental Format(s): 16mm film / Digital File

sound/Music: Dirk Schaefer

"Blue is the color of the sea, but it is also the color of Romanticism, whose phantoms of desire haunt this reverie. Images flow by to the sound of a scratched record, lappig waves, and the monotonous crescendo and decrescendo of a repeated string of music that matches the fade-ins and fade-outs. Ships heave at the dock, anchors drop into water, dripping ropes tug at chains, and naked sailors sleep in their berths, tossing and turning to the rhythm of their ships. The montage intimates that, as in Jean Genet's Un Chant d'Amour, each man is (in) the dream of the other. (...) As in The Memo Book, the medium itself imparts an erotic palpability: the image pulses in flashes and phosphorescent blues and is drowned in bubbles. Light and shadows move in syncopation across the frame like waves. The repeated cadence of the fade to black is lulling, as if the drowsy eyelid were closing and reopening. The entire films seems to want to induce a trancelike state. Enhanced by Dirk Schaefer's lulling music, the appearance and disappearance of the image mimics the rhythms of the body - a palm opening, nocturnal tossings, the heartbeat, and breath."
- Alice A. Kuzniar: The Queer German Cinema. Stanford/California, 2000

Awards: "highly recommended", German Commission of Valuation, 1993; 1st Prize, Filmwinter Stuttgart, 1993; 1st Prize, Filmfest Dresden, 1994; 1st Prize, Filmfestival Münster, 1994

Rental Fees

  Fee  
16mm film $60.00  
Digital File $60.00  

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