At The Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators by Jean Ma (review)

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

AT THE EDGES OF SLEEP: MOVING IMAGES AND SOMNOLENT SPECTATORS. By Jean Ma. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022; pp. 209.

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...