Lucid: Experimental Super Short that Expresses with Dreamlike Images

Emma Grey Rose’s super short experimental film Lucid is exactly one minute long, and succinctly illustrates the experience of the loss of love.  

There is a muted sense of urgency, as though the exhaustion of fighting heartbreak is giving way to numbness. There are no dialogues, unless you count the automated voice machine’s sterile pronouncement of unavailability. Instead, the despair and heartbreak of its invisible subject haunts the film. The shots are put together to a background score that underscores that sense of hauntedness with its scratchy and rewinding retro sound. 

Many of the images are evocative whether they are within the limits of interior life or the vast outer world; the pouring of a gallon of milk has as strong an effect as the fleeting glimpse of tall, distant trees swaying under the power of a storm. Emulating the effect of a slideshow, the shots, which are usually black and white, seem to trace the outline of a ghost whose presence can only be gauged by the manifestation of its emotions on the screen and finally, on the soundtrack: a short, intense scream. Not quite a dying cry, it startles by the power of its despairing fury—the same power that allows the swaying trees to instil gloom. The countdown with which the film opens anticipates this final articulation, but no one who hears the mechanical voice of the opening could have expected the sound to climax quite like this. 

Lucid constructs pain and its haunting quality with the vividness of a dream as you are dreaming.  

Watch Lucid Experimental Short Film