Institute Orphée (2011) Film installation.
Institute Orphée
Sleep paralysis is the state of waking while the body remains locked in sleep — a moment of consciousness trapped inside stillness, where the mind generates vivid, often terrifying presences that feel absolutely real. This film is an attempt to capture that experience: the particular quality of dread that comes not from something happening, but from something about to happen.
To make it, I built a miniature film set and worked with light as an additional character in the space. Light became the primary means of creating atmosphere — not illuminating the scene so much as thickening it, casting shadows that implied movement, creating presences at the edge of visibility. The Brothers Quay, whose work on Institute Benjamenta was a central influence, described this approach exactly:
"To every space is allied its own quality of light, and this too should be a poetic conception. Light creates the essential Stimmung, the metaphysical climate, those 'thicknesses' in the space itself."
And elsewhere:
"What happens in the shadow, in the grey regions, also interests us — all that is elusive and fugitive, all that can be said in those beautiful half tones, or in whispers, in deep shade."
The film also draws on the techniques of Jean Cocteau's Orphée — the use of reversed motion, mirror logic and the boundary between the living world and whatever lies just beyond it. Dreams, sleep paralysis and recurring nightmare share a common grammar: repetition, distorted scale, the sense of being watched. Institute Orphée tries to make that grammar visible.