
On Saturday, the director Richard Jobson introduced his new picture, The Somnambulists (2012), as part of the 55th BFI London Film Festival. I’ve never seen a film like it. Quite fairly, any discussion about it places much emphasis on the intensity of its message: according to the festival guide, it stands as ‘a response to our collective apathy to the war in Iraq’. But there is much craft here, carefully orchestrated by a filmmaker who always champions technological advances. So, while the stories are the focus, Jobson makes use of cinematic techniques to achieve the desired tone.
It would be an understandable first reaction to think that the devices and techniques of cinema have been purposefully drained from The Somnambulists. Sandra Hebron notes that the speakers, against a black backdrop, are ‘starkly but effectively’ lit so that we ‘concentrate on their words, without distraction.’ In other words, the severe matter is expressed in a suitably bare style. Jobson rejects any conventional narrative progression, presenting instead a series of subjective fragments which are united by a common theme (the experience of the war). Though this formal choice brings to mind the work of Sarah Kane (a dramatist who explores the literal and metaphorical meaning of a ‘fragment’ throughout her corpus), it is to her namesake, the Scottish photographer Joanna Kane, that we should turn to understand the film’s structure and aesthetic.
Joanna Kane’s project, The Somnambulists, shown in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2008, presents a series of digitally edited images of phrenological heads and death masks. Plaster off-white, these faces appear to peek out of a thick black fog. Eyes closed, these figures look faintly alive because of the possibility of sleep. Kane uses new techniques and old objects to explore the space between life and death. The photographer’s influence on Jobson is clear.

He also lights his speakers from above, allowing them to struggle to distinguish themselves from the black background. (Their black shirts provide no help.) If, though, Kane’s project is to create the illusion of life in the dead – or the inanimate – then Jobson seems to aim at something different. Through abstraction, he makes living flesh seem not quite alive. The most visually resonant moments of his presentation are those when the speakers’ eye sockets are bathed in shadow. At these points, the figures are at their most abstract – farthest away from being living subjects – because they are closest to our cultural images of death (the skull, the Grim Reaper).
We always see the (closed) eyes of Kane’s (still) subjects; we only need a flicker of the Grim Reaper during the delivery of one of Jobson’s stories to be haunted by the idea that these narratives are separate from the figures we see before us. The effect is chilling, like watching the twitching and animated limbs of a corpse motivated only by still-firing neurons. Whether or not the individual tales end in death, there’s a feeling that they all reach us from beyond a grave.
The BFI thinks this effect is stark. Though it is, the words are not presented unadorned, not given to us totally naked. The opening shot indicates that the film is not concerned with presenting any type of focused cinéma vérité: as a man on fire shapes an outline in flames and slow motion against a black background, with an unseen piano accompanying the image, we’re alerted to the importance of the filmic elements (cinematographic choices, editing, soundscape). The rhythm of the picture is created by a repeating pattern: an account from a speaker followed by a glimpse of a life left behind. We’re invited to take note of the variation within this sequence: from the first figure to the fifteenth, subtle changes in delivery or the position of the cut contribute to the overall effect. During one speech, on particularly resonant words, the lens begins a slow zoom out, reframing the head to create a mass of negative space that engulfs the speaker. During another, as we listen to an enraged cry of ‘Come on then!’, a series of faces quickly flashes before our eyes.
We shouldn’t treat The Somnambulists as a misplaced radio play. Though they are subtle and easily missed, the specifically cinematic details are essential to its overall effect.
