Dreamless Sleep (A Sweet Disaster)

 
The Sweet Disaster series first came to my awareness in early 2012, and transformed almost immediately into a burning obsession of mine.  Actually, I’d been familiar with one instalment in the series, Peter Lord and David Sproxton’s Babylon, for years, it having featured on a DVD collection of Aardman shorts that I’d watched back in 2004, although I’d never put it together that it was part of a wider series of animated films upon the subject of nuclear apocalypse.  Back then, Babylon had stood out as one of the real oddities of that collection – clocking in at over thirteen minutes, it was one of the longest shorts to feature therein, and easily the darkest and most sombre of the lot.  Numerous Aardman films deal with serious topics – we all know that Nick Park’s original Creature Comforts (1989), for example, is really a film about human alienation and loneliness – though Babylon has none of the quirky humour we’ve come to associate with the studio, or any humour at all for that matter.  Even Going Equipped (1990), which I recall being the second most sombre of the collection, ended on a comparatively optimistic note.

In 2012 I happened to be browsing through the BFI database when I came across an entry for Babylon and, from there, learned about the proper context of the short – namely, that it was originally part of a pentad of animated shorts conceived by David Hopkins and broadcast in 1986 upon the then-relatively young Channel 4.  In addition to the aforementioned Babylon, the series was comprised of Death of a Speechwriter (David Hopkins), Conversations by a Californian Swimming Pool and Paradise Regained (both Andrew Franks), and Dreamless Sleep (David Anderson).
 
Back in 2012, the BFI website described Sweet Disaster as a “series of animated shorts about the end of the world” (I could no longer find that exact statement when I visited them recently).  More specifically, it deals with the threat of nuclear war, the fear of which was the driving force behind a number of resonant and iconic works from the period.  Two years earlier, the BBC had broadcast Threads, a shocking television drama about the immediate and longer-term effects of nuclear attack upon a community in Sheffield.  In 1985, the National Film Board of Canada produced The Big Snit, a sweetly poignant animated short by Richard Condie which draws parallels between an impending nuclear war and an oblivious couple caught up in a small spat over a game of Scrabble.  Within the same year as Sweet Disaster, Raymond Briggs’ tear-jerking 1982 graphic novel When The Wind Blows, about an elderly couple’s naïve efforts to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear blast, was adapted into an equally tear-jerking animated feature film.

Fuelled in part by the same morbid curiosity that lead me into buying a copy of this book and in part by my insatiable appetite for esoteric/experimental animation, I made it my mission to track down and view the four remaining Sweet Disaster films – no small task, given that they were all languishing in obscurity.  I could barely find any additional information on most of them, beyond what was included on the BFI website.  Thankfully, I lucked out fairly quickly - Sleeping Weazel, a theatre production company originally founded by David Hopkins in 1998, hosted three of the shorts on their Vimeo account later that very summer - Death of a Speechwriter, Conversations by a Californian Swimming Pool and Babylon, so I soon had the majority of the series licked.  In early 2014, I was fortunate enough to acquire a VHS release that featured Dreamless Sleep (see below).  At the time of writing, Paradise Regained is the only entry in the series that continues to elude me.

Within the past three years, things have progressed to the point where Sweet Disaster now has its very own Wikipedia entry, although the information supplied there is still extremely limited, and the series remains an obscurity.  If I can do my bit, however small, to increase awareness of it, I would be delighted – hence, the coverage on this blog.  I hope to look at all of the Sweet Disaster shorts in due course (including Paradise Regained, should I ever come across it), though I’m going to start with Dreamless Sleep because it ranks as my personal favourite of the four entries that I have seen.  Even before I'd had a chance to see the film itself, the BFI synopsis, which refers to “a moment in time before the nuclear explosion, in which nature itself is disturbed, as if it knows what’s coming,” had a curious impact on me.  From that description alone, I felt the helplessness and desperation of the situation in a manner which really got under my skin, and that in itself was enough to cost me one or two nights' worth of sleep.
 
Dreamless Sleep (the title of which is derived from the Phillip Brooks carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem”, but here conveys something altogether more deadening) was awarded the Hiroshima Prize at the Hiroshima International Animation Festival in 1987.  To date, it has never been released in disc or download format, so if you want to legally own the short, then your only option is to track down a copy of the David Anderson “Works On Film” VHS released by BFI/Connoisseur Video in 1992.  Also included on this VHS are Anderson’s films Dreamland Express (1983), Deadtime Stories For Big Folk: Deadsy (1989) and Deadtime Stories For Big Folk: Door (1990), along with a making-of documentary in two parts. Copies of this VHS can be hard to come by, though for anyone with a taste for offbeat or surreal animation it should be worth the pursuit.

(Note that, while David Anderson’s official website does state that all of his films will be available for download and on DVD soon, it said that back in 2012 when I first started my hunt for Dreamless Sleep.  I personally am not holding my breath.)

While I'm currently unable to draw comparisons with Paradise Regained, Dreamless Sleep differs from the remaining three films in being completely devoid of dialogue.  It’s also unique among the series in that it focusses upon the subject from the perspective of innocent victims of an imminent nuclear attack (Babylon, Conversations and Speechwriter all deal with figures who are instrumental in some way) – specifically, a couple who find themselves mysteriously unsettled in the middle of the night and are compelled to seek out the source of the disturbance.  In this sense, it recalls When The Wind Blows, which likewise builds much of its emotional impact by accentuating the vulnerability of its characters in the face of a threat entirely beyond their control and understanding.  The stop-motion figures of Dreamless Sleep have only vaguely-formed faces with no visible mouths, so expressiveness comes predominantly from their eyes, which convey a wonderful mixture of doe-eyed innocence and sleep-deprived weariness.  We do not get to know them as individual characters, as we do Jim and Hilda of When The Wind Blows, but we are left to no doubt as to their bewilderment and defencelessness.  This is something that the viewer, however uncomfortably, is invited to share in - unlike When The Wind Blows, which took occasional steps away from its protagonists to reveal glimpses of the chaos and devastation unfolding unbeknownst to them (we share in Jim and Hilda's pain and apprehension, but not in their overall naivety), Dreamless Sleep remains grounded in its characters' perspective throughout.  The only hints that there is something amiss in the wider world come from the sounds and movements of that outside their window.
 
Dreamless Sleep deals entirely with the distilled moments of horror that immediately precede a nuclear blast, although this horror takes on an eerily muted form throughout much of the film.  Devastation looms on the horizon, but it does not make itself explicitly known until the very end, and the characters, as they fumble wearily through their home in search of whatever it is that is preventing them from sleeping, seem to sense only instinctively that something is wrong.  The world outside appears in an agitated state – winds are howling, branches are quivering, waves are crashing – yet there is little, initially, to indicate that this signifies anything more unusual than a particularly stormy night.  In the absence of dialogue, the underlying discomfort is communicated through a fluctuating bombardment of discordant sounds, ranging from the totally mundane (taps dripping, trees creaking) to the outright peculiar (mysterious clangings and distant bleepings) and the utterly hair-raising (ghostly, disembodied exhaling).  These sounds dominate and drive the mood of the short so thoroughly that the instances in which they are punctuated by sudden, momentary bursts of silence come off as startling.

 
As with much of Anderson's work, Dreamless Sleep contains elements of the surreal, although in contrast to the Deadtime Stories For Big Folk shorts, which deploy all manner of weirdly eye-popping visuals, here the surrealism is rooted more firmly within the familiar - that is, the juxtaposition of the stop-motion figures in their deceptively humdrum environment with grainy, somewhat distorted images of the external natural world.  There are multiple sequences that depict the couple rotating against backdrops of trees, waves and cloud, gripped by the same agitation that has engulfed their surroundings, so that the anxiety-induced insomnia itself becomes a kind of disorientated nightmare.  A rare moment that combines undisguised terror with more overtly surreal imagery involves a portrait morphing into a screaming clock (a clear indication that time has run out) before crumpling and peeling from the wall altogether. 

Despite the sense of escalating tensions toward the end of the short, the closing moments are chillingly understated.  The couple, now seemingly aware of what’s happening and fully resigned to their fate, huddle together as their world is hijacked by a tell-tale white flash and the sounds are reduced to one final oppressive sough, but the film freezes and fades out right before the moment of obliteration.  Once again, When The Wind Blows might come to mind, in the stark imagery of a frightened couple left with nothing more to hold onto than one another, and while the emotional impact is more low-key in Dreamless Sleep, the results are every bit as affecting. 

Sadly, while in the process of writing this entry, I discovered that David Anderson apparently passed away earlier this year (I say “apparently” because a number of websites, including Anderson’s official website and his entry in the BFI database, make no indication of this, which is not to say that I’m suspicious).  I was very sorry to hear this, as my fascination with Dreamless Sleep had led to an interest in his wider body of work and made me a great admirer of his.  Dreamless Sleep was Anderson's only contribution to the Sweet Disaster series, but I’ve no doubt that I’ll be returning to him sooner or later.  After all, Door is about as perfect an animated short as I’ve ever come across, and every bit as ripe for analysis.