The Science of Sleep

The Science of Sleep (La Science des rêves, literally The Science of Dreams) is a 2006 French film, written and directed by Michel Gondry.

Michel Gondry, is a French Academy Award-winning screenwriter, film, commercial and music video director. He is noted for his inventive visual style and manipulation of mise en scène.

For more examples of his inventive visual style, check out his Air France commercial

and the Chemical Brothers ‘Let Forever Be’ music video.

The Science of Sleep title sequence is very simply constructed. It is an animated sequence following a graph line travelling over old scientific diagrams and connecting title boxes. These title boxes introduce the title of the film and work through the credit list. The typography used matches that of old scientific drawings. There are no cuts in the title sequence: the camera travels with the line over the diagrams. The implication of the aged look of the scientific drawings used in this opening sequence establishes immediately the ambivalence of the film’s title, the “science” of dreams, suggesting that such limited understandings of the past are but obsolete and spurious folly.

The original soundtrack by Jean-Michel Bernard adds to the mood of the opening. At times the simple line movement seems to link to the soft dreamy tone of the music. The linear directionality of the black line stands however in counterpoint to the almost drifting ethereality of the singer, again emphasising the paradoxical nature of the film’s title.

Overall this mise en scene in this title sequence establishes the tone for the film, a dreamy tone, but with the clear message to the viewer to re-evaluate notions of what is real. In the world of the film’s main protagonist surrealistic and naturalistic elements begin to overlap, and the viewer is often uncertain of which portions constitute reality and which are merely dreams.