The Dream Machine (2022, France) by Michael William West

Michael William West’s The Dream Machine Joins the Auteur Cinema Archive

The Auteur Cinema Archive is thrilled to announce the inclusion of The Dream Machine (France) by Michael William West—a visceral, hallucinatory short film that redefines the limits of cinematic form. Winner of Best Experimental Film at the Brussels Independent Film Festival, among others, The Dream Machine has rapidly earned acclaim as one of the most daring and visionary works in recent years.

Inspired by Brion Gysin’s iconic stroboscopic invention and the cut-up aesthetics of William S. Burroughs, The Dream Machine invites viewers into a fractured, unstable dreamscape where light and shadow, sound and silence, identity and illusion collapse into each other. At its center is a woman seeking refuge from her reality through the titular machine—only to awaken violent emotions and unearth deeply buried instincts.

Rather than narrative clarity, West offers pure sensory overload: flickering images, inverted negatives, spectral double exposures, and a visceral soundscape that escalates into something resembling a spiritual possession. The experience is unsettling, ecstatic, disorienting—and unmistakably cinematic.

Curator Kris De Meester on the inclusion:
"The Dream Machine is one of the most visionary films I’ve seen in years. It’s a pure cinematic trip—aggressive, poetic, spiritual, and completely untethered from conventional storytelling. Michael William West pushes the medium to its threshold and creates something utterly unique. This is not just a film—it’s a transmission from another dimension of cinema."

Described by critics as a post-experimental fever dream, The Dream Machine draws on visual motifs from West’s earlier work—mirrored gestures, haunted silhouettes, and claustrophobic interiors—but refines them into a tighter, more immersive experience. The result is a film that feels at once mythological and futuristic: a meditation on femininity, madness, and the annihilation of identity through light.

The film’s symbolic echoes—Eve, Lilith, death masks, irradiated skies—layer meaning without insisting on it. Its final image, hands trembling like in Bresson’s films, suggests release, resistance, or perhaps the simple end of the trip. As Michèle Levieux Regnier wrote, West has created "a unique cinematic journey"—one best experienced in the dark of a theatre, where its energy can fully take hold.

With the inclusion of The Dream Machine, the Auteur Cinema Archive affirms its commitment to championing the boldest, most original voices in contemporary cinema. Michael William West doesn’t just make films—he fractures them open, letting us glimpse what lies on the other side.