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• At The Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators by Jean Ma
• Xueli Wang

Watching a film together is a ritual of intimacy, especially if we fall asleep. In her book At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators, Jean Ma takes the familiar act of sleeping at the movies as an entry point into a wide-ranging exploration of attention, sociality, and embodiment in moving-image culture from the early twentieth century to the present. Tying this ambitious study together is the Thai artist-filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose distinctly soporific œuvre Ma returns to throughout the book as a touchstone for rethinking longstanding theories of the somnolent spectator and for engaging with related works according to an alternative, sleep-woven logic. At stake in this reconceptualization is a fresh receptivity to the kinds of relations sleep can open up: between individuals, past and present, humans and nonhumans, the living and the dead. Whether in the spiritual “possession, transmutation, and reincarnation” that occupy Apichatpong’s visions of sleep (56), or the staging of collective slumber as a ritual of healing in the art installation Black Womxn Dreaming/Divine the Darkness (2019), Ma reads sleep as a social and relational process through which borders soften and energies circulate between self and others. “To sleep in the presence of others is to willingly abandon the fiction of self-sufficiency and autonomy,” Ma writes, “in acknowledgment of vulnerability and interdependence” (36).

At the outset, Ma situates her project within a recent “turn to sleep” in critical and popular discourse, in which “[t]he traditionally suspicious view of sleep—as a thief of time, an obstacle to progress . . . gives way to an attitude of solicitousness and respect” (10). This encompasses the emergence of overnight installations in contemporary art; the rise of “critical sleep studies” in academia; and the proliferation of sleep-aid marketing in the wellness [End Page 133] industry. Ma challenges the prevailing tendency to posit sleep as a universal condition, found in texts as divergent as Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 and Arianna Huffington’s The Sleep Revolution. She points to how the uneven distribution of power across race and gender determines “whose sleep must be protected and who must stay awake in order that others may rest” and views the history of modern sleeplessness as intertwined with that of racial capitalism, beginning not in the factory and coffeehouse but the plantation and colony (34–35). Ma’s own inquiry aims at a more nuanced view of sleep—as historically contingent and permeable with, rather than cloistered from, waking life. In the process, Ma’s book offers a good primer on the history of moving-image spectatorship; a methodological model for writing fluidly across film and visual art, world cinema and media archaeology; and an example of how to use non-Western moving-image practices to interrogate the premises of Western film and media theory.

The first section of the book traces a history of sleep and sleepers on screen, while the second ruminates on sleep and spectatorship. Individual chapters overlap and sometimes circle back on one another, a structure that mirrors the porosity and circuity of sleep itself. They cover significant historical and conceptual ground, including the early cinema of Georges Méliès, the photographs of Weegee, Freud’s regressive thesis of sleep, and notions of narcotic reception by Siegfried Kracauer, Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, and other influential figures of Western film theory. Threaded through are close readings of works by Apichatpong and others that unhinge familiar accounts of sleep and cinema, creating openings for Ma to complicate established ideas—e.g., the analogy between films and dreams, the sedative effects of filmgoing—and shift the terms of debate beyond entrenched binaries of active versus passive, concentration versus distraction.

Indeed, it is in its close readings that Ma’s book shines, taking us deep into the wayward itineraries of moving-image works and spectatorial experiences with a sustained sensitivity to how they can open up new conceptual horizons. Tracing the spiral of dream...

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  在睡眠的边缘：移动的图像和昏昏欲睡的观众 作者：Jean Ma
•  王雪莉

一起看电影是一种亲密的仪式，尤其是当我们睡着的时候。马青在她的著作《在睡眠的边缘：移动图像和昏昏欲睡的观众》中，以人们熟悉的看电影睡觉的行为为切入点，对移动图像文化中的注意力、社交性和体现进行了广泛的探索。二十世纪初至今。将这项雄心勃勃的研究结合在一起的是泰国艺术家兼电影制片人阿彼察邦·韦拉斯哈古 (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)，马云在整本书中反复提及他明显催眠的作品，作为重新思考昏昏欲睡的观众的长期理论并根据另一种睡眠编织逻辑参与相关作品的试金石。 。这种重新概念化的关键是对睡眠可以建立的各种关系的新接受能力：个体之间、过去与现在、人类与非人类、生者与死者之间。无论是在阿彼察邦的睡眠愿景中所体现的精神“占有、嬗变和轮回”（56），还是在艺术装置《Black Womxn Dreaming/Divine the Darkness》（2019）中将集体睡眠作为一种治疗仪式，马云表示睡眠作为一种社会和关系过程，通过这个过程，边界被软化，能量在自我和他人之间循环。 “在他人面前睡觉就是自愿放弃自给自足和自主的幻想，”马写道，“承认脆弱和相互依赖”（36）。

一开始，马云将她的项目置于最近批评和流行话语中的“转向睡眠”中，其中“传统上对睡眠持怀疑态度——它是时间的小偷，进步的障碍……。 。 。让位于关心和尊重的态度”（10）。这包括当代艺术中夜间装置的出现；学术界“批判性睡眠研究”的兴起；以及健康[第 133 页完]行业中助眠营销的激增。马云对将睡眠视为一种普遍状况的普遍趋势提出了挑战，这种观点在乔纳森·克拉里 (Jonathan Crary) 的《24/7》和阿里安娜·赫芬顿 (Arianna Huffington) 的《睡眠革命》等不同的文本中都可以找到。她指出，种族和性别之间的权力分配不均如何决定“谁的睡眠必须受到保护，谁必须保持清醒，以便其他人可以休息”，并认为现代失眠的历史与种族资本主义的历史交织在一起，而不是从工厂和咖啡馆，但种植园和殖民地（34-35）。马云自己的研究旨在对睡眠有一个更细致的看法——睡眠在历史上是偶然的，并且与清醒的生活渗透在一起，而不是与清醒的生活隔绝。在此过程中，马云的书为了解电影观众的历史提供了很好的入门读物。一种跨电影和视觉艺术、世界电影和媒体考古学流畅写作的方法论模型；以及如何使用非西方运动图像实践来质疑西方电影和媒体理论前提的例子。

本书的第一部分追溯了屏幕上睡眠和睡眠者的历史，而第二部分则反思了睡眠和观众。各个章节相互重叠，有时相互循环，这种结构反映了睡眠本身的多孔性和循环性。它们涵盖了重要的历史和概念基础，包括乔治·梅里爱的早期电影、维吉的照片、弗洛伊德的睡眠回归理论，以及齐格弗里德·克拉考尔、让·路易斯·鲍德里、克里斯蒂安·梅茨和其他西方有影响力的人物的麻醉接受概念。电影理论。贯穿其中的是对阿彼察邦和其他人作品的仔细阅读，这些作品打破了人们对睡眠和电影的熟悉描述，为马云创造了机会，使既定的想法复杂化——例如，电影和梦之间的类比，看电影的镇静作用——并改变辩论的术语超越主动与被动、专注与分心的根深蒂固的二元对立。

事实上，正是在仔细阅读中，马云的书才大放异彩，它带领我们深入了解动态图像作品和观看体验的任性行程，并对它们如何开辟新的概念视野保持持续的敏感度。追踪梦想的螺旋……