Research Statement

Research Question

Everybody Dreams is a video-essay that explores how videographic practice, in this case shaped by a parametric workshop, can open new ways of seeing and analysing cinema, revealing structures that are often hidden. Centred on a rapid montage from Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky (2001), the work reframes the viewer’s perception of cinematic temporality through an intervention that exposes imagery otherwise imperceptible within the sequence’s accelerated (and intended) pace. By equalising the duration of each shot, the video-essay challenges established hierarchies of cinematic images and invites new modes of spectatorship. It also reflects on the interplay between still and moving images in the representation of death, memory, and dreams. Ultimately, it asks how analysis through a parametric and videographic lens might allow us to resee and reconsider film through the editing timeline, revealing a clarity and intimacy of the video-essay’s approach that is often unavailable and intangible to the cinematic spectator. 

Context 

Everybody Dreams is the outcome of a parametric video-essay workshop series led by Ariel Avissar in the summer of 2024. Conducted over four sessions, the workshop invited participants to produce video-essays following predefined constraints and formal parameters drawn from existing videographic publications, curated by Avissar. My submission responds specifically to 'Laird’s Constraint,' derived from Colleen Laird’s video-essay, Eye-Camera-Ninagawa. In that work, Laird deconstructs the opening montage of Mika Ninagawa’s Helter Skelter, a dense sequence comprising 146 shots over 3 minutes and 37 seconds, which Laird reconfigures into a grid format. This visually striking intervention makes the scale and intensity of the montage immediately perceptible. By its very nature, montage often obscures individual shots due to the abundance and rapidity of their linear succession. Laird’s grid, however, reorients the viewer’s experience from sequential progression to visual simultaneity, allowing for a more comprehensive apprehension of the montage’s compositional density. Once the grid is established, Laird identifies specific similarities among the shots, grouping them thematically. These clustered clips are presented, then gradually faded out, eventually dissolving the grid entirely. This conceptual and structural approach is at work for Everybody Dreams.

Methods 

I: Choosing a Montage 

Given the time constraints and the depth of focus the project required, I chose to work with a montage I was already familiar with but one that still offered space for renewed interpretation. The finale of Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky felt like an appropriate choice; having long found it emotionally resonant and compelling (not least for introducing me to Sigur Rós), making it well-suited for close analysis.  

The sequence opens with David Aames (Tom Cruise) running across the rooftop of a New York skyscraper, appearing intent on throwing himself off, but stopping short at the ledge. To clarify, this is not a suicide attempt, but rather a moment of awakening: Aames has come to understand that his life has been a technologically constructed lucid dream, and he is now ready to return to reality. To do so, he must face his fear of heights and jump. With a final glance at Sofia (Penélope Cruz) a simulated love born from a fleeting real-life encounter, Aames makes the leap from illusion to reality. His descent initiates a rapid montage of 88 shots in 23 seconds, presenting a cascade of moments from his life, both real and imagined, flashing before his eyes and those of the viewer. The sequence blends still images, moving footage, and a mix of fictional and real-world content, which I will outline below. Due to the uneven distribution of screen time across the 88 shots, some images linger more prominently than others. The process of this work enabled me to see some of the imperceptible imagery for the first time and make the intervention of showing each shot equally.   

The significance of still imagery within the montage reflects Aames’s symbolic death as he ends his simulated life. The connection between photography and death has been widely examined by scholars, notably in Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second, Christian Metz’s Photography and Fetish, and Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Each of these works position death with the still image through the suspension of duration and an indexical link to absence, loss, and ephemeral temporality. The grid structure (within the video-essay) functions to isolate and highlight the collective still and moving imagery, enhancing the sequence’s visual clarity and interpretive depth. The subsequent thematic clusters, in which I organize the 88 shots into 16 distinct groups, articulate my interpretive reading of the sequence and film. 

II: Creating Order From a Flash of Life

Grouping these fragments proved to be the more creative and timely aspect of the project. While some were readily apparent, others demanded deeper reflection, imagination, and research. The first and most obvious category is the character of Sofia, which drives Aame’s desire throughout the film. There are thirteen still images of the character on her own and a moving one of her dancing, which make up the first and biggest cluster. The second group consists of early cultural influences, potentially on both the character of Aames and the filmmaker, Crowe, expressed through music references. This set includes nine images: two depict the Icelandic band Sigur Rós, which as noted provide the soundtrack for this sequence. Five are album covers: Beth Orton’s Trailer Park (1996), Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours (1955), Bruce Springsteen’s The River (1980), Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy (1973), and Blind Faith’s self-titled album (1969). The central moving image is taken from The Kids Are Alright, a documentary about The Who. This particular image has a direct link to the diegesis of Vanilla Sky, as Aames appears to own the shattered Gibson guitar of Pete Townshend, displayed prominently in his luxury apartment. The final still, featuring a truck driver, closely resembles an album cover, though I have been unable to verify its origin. The music reflects both Crowe’s early career as a music journalist, but the album choices may allude to a deeper meaning, for example a lyric in Springsteen’s The River, asks 'is a dream a lie if it don’t come true,' which is the conundrum Aames faces as he jumps back to an unknown reality.

Group three simply consists of close-up imagery: two pairs of eyes, two mouths, and a single shot of legs and feet. In the case of the eyes and mouths, combining them to form two new composite faces became a playful method for categorising this section and moving it forward. Group four features imagery of Aames with Sofia, both within his apartment and in Times Square (the latter not appearing in the final film). There is also a shot of Aames standing alone in Times Square, which occurs prominently at the start of the film when he is dreaming. The shifting presence and absence of Sofia in this location struck me as evocative of how she begins to flicker in and out of Aames’s lucid dream as the software starts to break down. At its most unstable point, this glitch culminates in Sofia being replaced or blended with Julie Gianni (Cameron Diaz), which is why the image of this character haunts the group also.

The fifth group similarly explores Aames’s friendship with Brian Shelby (Jason Lee), incorporating shots of them together from the film as well as deleted scenes. The images highlight a bond reinforced by a shared enthusiasm for snowboarding. Like the Gibson guitar, a snowboard is also seen as a prized possession in Aames’s home. Group six features’ dogs, including Benny (from the film), who, within the diegesis, is cryonically frozen and later revived, just as Aames is. The seventh group consists of more deleted scenes, with added focus on Dr. Pomeranz (Armand Schultz), the surgeon responsible for reconstructing Aames’s face after his car crash. The eighth group is more ambiguous. It contains four images of women, one of whom, according to the website WhatCulture.com, is singer Nancy Wilson (bottom left), from the band Heart, who was also married to Crowe. The identities of the remaining women are unclear, but this collective ambiguity served as the rationale for grouping them together.

Group nine goes back into Aames’s childhood, showing him as a boy through a deleted scene with Thomas Tipp (Timothy Spall), who is both Aames’s lawyer and a type of surrogate long-term guardian. The deleted image suggests the longevity and depth of Tipp’s involvement in Aames’s life. This group also includes nostalgic imagery, such as a Disneyland ride and a train carriage labelled ‘Pennsylvania,’ both evoking themes of childhood memory and emotional or physical journey. These elements, paired with Tipp’s presence, reinforce the idea of Aames’s transition from boyhood to adulthood. 

The tenth group is more visually direct, featuring Claude Monet’s 1873 oil painting The Seine at Argenteuil. Its Impressionist style is revealed as the inspiration behind the striking sky that appears in Aames’s lucid dream. Two additional images of skies accompany this, reinforcing the dream’s aesthetic atmosphere. The eleventh group draws from cultural and political influences that have shaped Aames’s identity and values. One presents Martin Luther King Jr, which is juxtaposed with a photo of a New York City building: The Dakota, where Aames also resides. The Dakota is significant for being the home of John Lennon and the location where he was fatally shot, assassinated just as Luther King Jr was, emphasising this pairing.  

The twelfth group shifts into more personal territory, featuring imagery that appears rooted in family and memory. At the centre top is a photo of Cruise’s real-life parents, flanked by images of a younger and older couple, suggesting a generational continuum. Additional vintage photographs contribute to a parental theme, including one on the middle left that is believed to depict Aames’s father. This group underscores the lucid dream’s fusion of the real and the virtual, blending fictional narrative with authentic personal imagery.

Group thirteen is again rich in cultural imagery, showcasing iconic figures and moments that likely shaped Aames’s early influences. These include Grim Natwick’s animated legend Betty Boop, Kay Thompson’s beloved comic character Eloise, Albert Lamorisse’s poignant film The Red Balloon, the quintessential American sitcom Leave It to Beaver, and Audrey Hepburn’s luminous role in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina. Together, they suggest a tapestry of formative cultural touchstones in Aames’s childhood. By contrast, group fourteen reflects the cultural landscape of Crowe’s early filmmaking, featuring imagery from Almost Famous and photographs evocative of the film’s setting and spirit, emphasising the director’s autobiographical perspective.

The final two groups are the most intimate. Group fifteen consists of Super 8 home movies of a young Crowe with his family, offering nostalgic glimpses into his early life. While the last group centres on Cruise’s own childhood photography, including a shot of him jumping into a pile of autumn leaves (a moment that resonates metaphorically with the building jump), along with a tender image of Cruise as a child swimming with his mother, waving at the camera. This final shot, safe and nostalgic, gently ties together themes of memory, mortality, and the fragile continuity of life, before we move back to Aames’s dive and awakening. His vulnerability is marked by a subjective shot (which elsewhere I have referred to as a hap-tech experience), before a transition of white light takes the viewer to an opening eye. 

Outcomes

This process revealed a range of insights about the fictional film’s relationship with biographical memory between Crowe and Cruise, as well as its thematic relationship to another film more than half a century apart. The final step of the parametric workshop was to choose another audio-visual media object (film, television series, computer game or other media format), released 54 years before or after the initial chosen one. This constraint led me to Hans Richter’s experimental film, Dreams That Money Can Buy. Its diegesis follows a character credited as Joe/Narcissus (Jack Bittner) who discovers he can peer inward and observe the contents of his own mind, as if it were recorded by a camera. This revelation inspires him to sell custom-made dreams to clients, which turns out to be an uncanny parallel that foreshadows the premise of Vanilla Sky. The narcissistic theme in Richter’s film (in character name at least), clearly overlaps with the character of Aames. Other symmetry can be drawn from the symbolic presence of the artboard canvas held by Joe/Narcissus with the Monet painting, along with the close-ups of eyes in each film, presented through split-screen.

Impact 

The split screen effect exemplifies what Patrick Keating describes as a 'cumulative mode' of video-essay practice. One of the distinctive affordances of videographic work is its capacity to juxtapose multiple texts within a multi-screen composition, enabling both intentional and unexpected connections to emerge. This is a prime example, raised by Kevin B Lee of how 'the audiovisual can be a form that thinks.' In this case, it reveals how two seemingly unrelated films can speak to one another through their shared exploration of human emotion and unconscious subjectivity. Cinema, after all, operates as a universal dream machine, a mirror to the human condition. Despite a wide temporal and stylistic chasm between these two texts, recurring emotional patterns surface, grounded in the enduring constants of what it means to think, feel, and dream. As the final line of dialogue in the video-essay reminds us, 'everybody dreams.' The parametric workshop, among many other affordances, reopened my eyes to this idea.  

Everybody Dreams demonstrates the analytical potential of parametric video-essay practice to reveal new forms of cinematic knowledge. In this case it shows how constraints can deepen interpretive engagement to understand and perhaps see for the first time the obscure pictures, thoughts and memories that galvanise cinema. This is perhaps similar to what Slavoj Žižek refers to as 'looking awry,' understood as seeing anew with perception from an angle, which in the case of videographic work, takes on a practical form. The video-essay perpetuates and accelerates new perception through the time-line, allowing viewers to magnify or create new understanding through a parametric process.   

Bibliography

Avissar, Ariel (2024) ‘the-parametric-summer-series’ [online]. Available from https://www.arielavissar.work/the-parametric-summer-series [accessed 20 July 2024]

Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang.

Keating, P. (2020) ‘The Video Essay as Cumulative and Recursive Scholarship’. The Cine-Files 15, 2.

Laird, C. (2023) ‘Eye-Camera-Ninagawa’. [in]Transition Vol 10, no. 2 [online]. Available from https://intransition.openlibhums.org/article/id/11328/ [accessed 23 July 2024]

Lee, Kevin B (2020) ‘New Audiovisual Vernaculars of Scholarship’ The Cine-Files [online]. Available from https://www.thecine-files.com/new-audiovisual-vernaculars-of-scholarship/ [accessed 20th July 2024]

Metz, C. (1985) ‘Photography and Fetish’. October, Vol. 34. 

Mulvey, L. (2006) Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books.

O’Brien, D. (2019) ‘Hap-Tech Narration and the Postphenomenological Film’. Philosophies 4, no.3.

Pooley, Jack (2023) Vanilla Sky: ‘Every Frame Explained’ WhatCulture.com [online]. Available from https://whatculture.com/film/vanilla-sky-ending-every-frame-explained [accessed 20th July 2024]

Žižek, S. (1991) Looking Awry — An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. London: MIT Press.  

Filmography

Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000, USA)

Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe, 2001, USA)

Leave it to Beaver (Joe Connelly & Bob Mosher, 1957-63, USA)

Le ballon rouge (Albert Lamorisse, 1956, France)

Herutâ sukerutâ (Mika Ninagawa, 2012, Japan)

Dreams That Money Can Buy (Hans Richter, 1947, USA)

The Kids Are Alright (Jeff Stein, 1979, UK)

Sabrina (Billy Wilder, 1954, USA)

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response to what follows

Review 1: Accept submission for publication with no amendments.

Everybody Dreams is a smooth, expertly edited and assembled video essay, tight, economical and expressive. Emerging from a collective ‘prompt’ project, it applies the ‘constraint’ suggested by a previous video essay by Colleen Laird. This constraint involves, first of all, making a grid of frames from a densely edited sequence – in this case, a rapid-fire montage near the end of Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky (2001) – and, second, juxtaposing the chosen sequence (now run backwards) with extracts from another film, Hans Richter’s Dreams that Money Can Buy (1947).

One definition of film analysis is to bring out what the film-object does not already say, obviously, about itself. In taking a montage passage that is literally impossible to wholly take in at normal speed viewing, and then making its parts visible and available for further contemplation, Everybody Dreams succeeds in its goal of ‘disaggregating’ Cameron’s film.

The video essay’s analysis takes a further step – as per Laird’s Constraint, it proposes meaningful ‘clusters’ or groupings of the images in the frame-grid, thus offering interpretations. Some of these interpretations are indeed obvious, or at least fully within the logic generated by the film’s fiction – shots of Sofia, album covers/music references, landscapes, film/TV clips, and so on. There is also a nicely playful cluster involving close-ups of body parts. Could there have been a greater degree of playfulness in the ‘clustering’ process? Perhaps not.

For other interpretive categories, we need to turn to the accompanying written statement. In general, I tend to think video essays should stand alone and work in their own right, without such a text. That is not the case here; it is a more hybrid video/text analysis. Yet some of the clusters nominated here raise more questions they answer. Why should moments from Crowe’s own life be part of the montage mix? Or Tom Cruise’s (not the character’s) childhood? What is the status of a ‘deleted scene’ (there appear to be many) within this strange diegetic replay? The author may have pursued these questions in other research contexts, but they remain opaque and mysterious here.

A commentator once argued that many video essays help to give us the tools for an analysis, but not the complete analysis itself. That is how I would sum up, finally, Everybody Dreams. Yet, in providing these tools, it already performs an invaluable service for anybody approaching Vanilla Sky.

The more creative part of the video essays involves the Richter addition/comparison. It is very effective, and adds a welcome touch of cinematic and surrealistic poetry to the somewhat slick facade of Crowe’s superficial ‘mind-game/simulated life’ movie. The Sigur Rós track is rather heavily laid on top of the ensemble – just as it is in the original film – but I can understand and accept the author’s stated sentimental fondness for it. 

In all, this is a very worthy and useful video essay, very well made and presented

Review 2:  Accept submission for publication with no amendments.

Ariel Avissar’s 2024 'Parametric Summer Series' may mark an important waypoint in the transition of constraint-based videographic criticism from an avant-garde without an audience toward a corpus of methodologies recognized by more traditional academics. Everybody Dreams, produced by Dan O’Brien as part of that group project, applies a template Avissar calls 'Laird’s Constraint' to the 2001 film Vanilla Sky, yielding a remarkably interactive workbench of reflection for an attentive viewer. Just as one must acclimate oneself in grad school to the practices of reading scholarly literature, we must also tutor ourselves in constraint-based videographic criticism’s techniques if we wish to develop the skills to derive insight from them. That’s what this project does.

Everybody Dreams demonstrates that even when a film seems to merit no more analysis than a blog post citing visual references image-by-image, the constraint-in-itself provokes something far richer. To maximize the contrast between the two approaches, O’Brien’s written statement helpfully follows a familiar expository format, simultaneously 'getting it out of the way' and illustrating just how limited and limiting it is. It is only useful to identify the album covers that appear in Crowe’s life-flashing-before-your-eyes montage to avoid misinterpretation, not because naming them lights the way toward anything more substantive. By contrast, Laird’s constraint of 'de-montaging' images into a grid welcomes the viewer into an act of further analysis by implicitly challenging us to devise our own groupings.

Such 'de-montage' activates our attention to a core question of associative editing: what intuitively attracts us to a particular combination of images over another? While the ‘rules’ in effect in this project heavily favor heuristics of similarity or matching-ness, the history of montage, from the Shub/Svilova/Eisenstein era to the present, establishes a vast continuum of possible image juxtapositions, ranging from colligative to collisional. Watching O’Brien’s essay leads attentive viewers down two diverging paths simultaneously. In the first and more superficial path, we attempt to 'solve' the problem at hand and guess which collections of shots will be grouped into matching sets. But O’Brien’s chosen categorizations inherently imply alternative categorizations. Thus, in the second and more speculative path, we imagine more exotic schema of image-grouping that would result in completely different image-sets.

In this way, engaging in scholarship, either as essayist or as viewer (and algorithmic criticism appears to always address us as both) becomes as personal as encountering an artwork. The difference being: the pace of Crowe’s original montage provides for subtractive interpretation – based on what a viewer subjectively misses or misidentifies – whereas Laird’s constraint promotes additive interpretations. Each viewer confronting the constraint imagines a different but valid set of image-sets. Thus, if the 'naming of parts' in the middle of the written statement feels like an epistemological cul-de-sac, that’s the point: it reveals just how broadly the paths of constraint-based criticism can yet tesselate. As O’Brien’s thoughtful coda implies, if we want out of Hollywood’s closed loop of self-referencing pop culture ('dreams that money can buy'), parametric interventions like this offer the surest escape route yet.

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response