The Challenge and Joy of Visceral Communication

In this conversation between two of the hottest directors at the moment, Mark Jenkin (Bait) and Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse), they touch on several fascinating insights and is worth a watch/listen. A real highlight of the lockdown.

There was one specific thought that stayed with me. At one point Mark Jenkin frames cinema and the importance of form in this way:

“There are better ways to tell stories than films. You know, sitting around a fireside telling a story with words and reading a story and adapting it accordingly to attention and stuff like that, that’s the best way to tell a story. But what film can do that no other art form can do, I think, is to create a mood, an atmosphere. I think the sense I’ve made of that is that evoking of the dream state. A dream isn’t about narrative. A dream is about atmosphere. That’s what so powerful about dreams. It’s why, if I wake up and I’ve had an amazing dream and I try to describe it to somebody, it’s just nonsense because it sounds like I’m either making it up or it sounds tedious because all I’m describing is what happened whereas the intangible of the dream which makes it. A certain dream can completely change your outlook of a day, is to do with mood and atmosphere. I’m not going to say that a lot of films don’t do that, but certainly the films that really affect me are the ones that do that, create an atmosphere that’s similar to how the human brain works. And the form has got to be so significant within that.”

This statement carries with it three ideas, it not only poetically links dreams and films but it also justifies form (and its unique nature in cinema) as well as brings a piece to the existential puzzle. What if everything is just atmosphere and intangible communication? Wonderfully poetic and a humble defense of cinema, in a sense arguing that what some people see as the most superficial aspect of films is its most profound quality. Well done, Mark.