Lullaby (1925)

Directed by

Boris Deutsch

Country

United States

Runtime

14 min

Rating

6.6 of 10 from 5 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A silent drama about a woman tormented by demons in her sleep. The film blends her waking life with her nightmares using cubist cityscapes and subjective imagery.

dreamlikeunsettlingvisually abstractcerebralpsychologically intenseexperimentalmelancholicsurreal

What happens

Lullaby is a 1929 American silent drama film directed by Boris Deutsch and starring Michael Visaroff, and Riva Segal. In Lullaby there is not only a deeply realistic plot that is investigated by the director with a skilled use of light and close-up but also a sort of dream plot that lives in the interiority of the female protagonist represented through faces of demons tormenting her sleep and cubist alteration of the cityscape realized using Deutsch's paintings. In the development of the film the two planes, the real one and the dream one, merge each other and the reality for the female protagonist is one that embraces both sphere of matter and spirit. A work that ahead of its times. Only in 40s, after 14 years, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid will make similar films. Boris Deutsch declared that "is desire was to get at the abstract reality, the realm of mental imagery and imagination, without losing of the world of reality" (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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