(Stockholm) A screening for two reasons: the largest film festival in Scandinavia is offering its spectators this week the opportunity to attend screenings after 20 minutes of hypnosis to stimulate their cinematographic experience.
Posted at 12:43 p.m.
“We designed this hypnotic cinema to experiment around watching a movie, to challenge our ideas of how to watch a movie and see how the experience is affected when watching a movie differently,” says Jonas Holmberg, director of the Gothenburg Film Festival in southwestern Sweden.
The first experimental session took place on Sunday evening in front of a limited audience – COVID-19 requires – a few dozen spectators. Entrusted to the hypnotist Fredrik Praesto, they then attended the screening of Land of Dreams by Iranian-American director Shirin Neshat.
Installed on stage in front of a large hypnotic spiral, the expert began with physical exercises – like bringing his hands together as if they were magnets – before spinning the spiral and then asking the spectators to close their eyes.
After a 20 second count, the audience opens their eyes and the movie begins. At the end of the film, another countdown of 10 seconds must break the hypnosis.
The sensations ranged from a form of stupor to a much stronger concentration, said the voluntary guinea pigs.
“We get rid of all the noise and distractions and with the sound we really get into the film. As he told us: “touch that, feel that, smell the smell of that”, better concentration”, explains Jonna Blumborg, a young spectator.
“I tried to do the things he asked of us: feel the textures of fabrics, skin, hair, etc. And it was easier to concentrate thanks to the atmosphere, the total darkness and just the light from the screen,” says her friend Louise Nilsson.
For Fredrik Sandsten, “we enter a very pleasant state of mind”. “It’s hard to explain. Hypnosis almost makes you go into a kind of stupor”.
The Gothenburg Film Festival is a regular for extraordinary experiences. Last year, to adapt to COVID-19 rules, he offered a week of screenings to one person, in the lighthouse on a desert island off the coast. It was a nurse exhausted by the pandemic who had been selected.