Steve Finbow reviews Sumarsólstöður by Amélie Ravalec – Part Two
Le Métro de Paris – Episode 2: World premiere at the Iceland Eclipse Festival on 13th of August 2026, global release 2027. Directed by Amélie Ravelec, written by Vincent Ravalec.
“At the edge of our world connected to another time and space, there are portals woven with tales and lies,” these words introduce the episodes, they are metatitles informing us that art – in all its forms – is a portal to another place, a realm that cannot be fixed in anything as solid as time, space, and story – as Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, “When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.” The episodes of Solstice foreground the destabilising effects of art, of Cubism, Vorticism, Oulipo, Surrealism, and Situationism – and one could add the “sages of dual civilisation,” the synthesist poets:
“Sade, Lautréamont, Jarry, Apollinaire,” and I would add Georges Bataille. The portals created by these movements and artists (books, painting, music scores) scramble time, space, and our perception of reality and memory.
For Deleuze, the conventional flashback was not an invention of memory, but its domesticating tomb – the analepsis reduces the vast, terrifying abyss of time into a mere “former present,” a tidy psychological link meant to explain a current situation, restoring the linear sensory-motor chain – an airport thriller, an amateur landscape painting, a home movie.
The moment cinema relied on the flashback to explain away the dream, to tame the temporal rift, it signalled the end of its pristine, revolutionary innocence, chaining the direct time-image – that pure, unhinged crystal of duration where past and present coexist – back to the service of a simplistic plot, for, as Eliot knew, “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable.”
The opening to the second episode parachutes us behind the lines of normative cinema – presenting us with the idea of superposition, the narrator asks, “being in two places at once. What do you think? Dream or reality?” My answer would be – what’s the difference? And this episode explores that question. Analepsis is instant nostalgia, an abomination.
Carroll’s Alice and the White Rabbit are called forth. Alice never needed a flashback; she moved through the direct presentation of time, a world where the queen executes before the trial, and the effect precedes the cause – an aesthetics of prolepsis. To reduce her journey to a psychological flashback would be to destroy Wonderland. In this episode, four artists – a composer, an architect, an artist, and a writer, take on the role of Alice, narrativity flows from this conception of montage – think John Cage, Bernard Tschumi, Max Ernst, and William S. Burroughs. The four artists are summoned to a meeting in London, “When they stepped into the room, they all felt it: a subtle shift, as if time and space were unfolding along unfamiliar lines.” They are given a synopsis of the first episode: Miho, the Architecture, the exorcism, the porous solidity of truth and fantasy.
Le Métro de Paris operates as a mosaic of fractured visual phrases – linguistic units to be decoded, yet simultaneously shifting through distinct temporal phases. To map this structure is to confront a fundamental shift in how cinema constructs myth – fragmentation becomes a spatial coordinate system – like the Paris Metro map – like Ezra Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ – “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough.” The four artists attempt to chart the information they have received but – as we have seen in the first episode – reality is fluid, it is corrupt, it may evolve but that evolution is one of mutation not linear progression, it is an apparition.
The story splits into scattered pieces across screen and interface, transforming the spectator into an active “co-dreamer,” while the project explicitly frames its central mystery around repairing corrupted “phrases” – truth, fantasy, stories, lies, future, past, war, peace. In The Process, Brion Gysin wrote, “As no two people see the world the same way, all trips from here to there are imaginary; all truth is a tale I am telling myself.” The cinematic execution converts these units into visual phases – lunar tides, solstices, shifts in perception, cyclical passages through memory – the labyrinth of the universe and the inner ear.
This spatial narrative engine finds direct precursors in Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980), Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995), and Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009), spatial submersibles descending into cinema’s Benthic Zone. Russell’s ego-dissolution, Bigelow’s neural mind-tapping, Noé’s ghostly Tokyo trip. This episode operates within the same fever-state – a narrative collapsing into the various narratives of consciousness, a glitched reality that flickers as optical phases across a Gibsonian grid, a Dickian simulation where memory and illusion melt together.
Six minutes in and I had to pause, the old man Miho sees in her dreams proclaims, “Consciousness is an immense labyrinth. Language is the key that unlocks access to it. It’s the bridge between the madness of chaos and the raw rigidity of matter.” The film has strayed into my liquid/linguistic abode, the place where I swim – my own Haunt of the Black Masseur – let’s tread water for a while and examine this statement. While Henri Bergson contends that words actually distort fluid consciousness; Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Antonio Damasio argue that raw bodily and biological feeling precedes language; Ludwig Wittgenstein rejects the idea that language is a grand metaphysical bridge, rather, it is a practical social tool; and Jacques Derrida insists language traps us in self-referential signs that never reach physical matter. But let us allow the episode to flow and negotiate the dangerous currents and undertows of language and consciousness.
By embedding clues across an evolving digital map and interactive collaborative puzzles, this episode realises Barthes’s idea of the “writerly” text, a work where the spectator actively participates in producing meaning. The narrative operates as a network of relays and anticipations. Each restored phrase marks the transition into a new developmental phase, forming a node on an interactive grid where past, present, and future are reconstructed all at once. Ezra – the Korean aesthete – states, “‘contemporary culture remains haunted by its own ghosts, incapable of inventing the future, endlessly recycling the fragments of the past into an eternal, spectral present.’” The narrator continues, “A spectral present? The sentence echoed in their minds, triggering a new rupture.”
If the phrase belongs to the spatial, linguistic surface, then the phase operates as its temporal ghost. This shift moves us directly into hauntology. Derrida posited that the ghost is neither present nor absent, neither living nor dead, but an insistence that spectrally disrupts the linearity of time. Mark Fisher expanded this into a cultural condition: hauntology marks the persistence of lost futures, the haunting of the present by virtual realities that never came to pass, yet refuse to disappear – Stephen Hawking possessed by the astrology rather than astronomy of Galileo and Einstein.
We are presented with visions of Stonehenge, Santa Claus, dream projections, while Miho enters a Bardo – an intermediate space-time – and the four artists, discussing the state of contemporary art, raise another question, “how does one lay claim to reality?” To answer this, examples of Cubism, Vorticism, Oulipo, Montaigne, Burroughs, James Joyce, Surrealism, and Situationism are inveigled. But to understand how these temporal ghosts interact within the cinema-screen, we must channel J. W. Dunne’s theory of Serialism from An Experiment with Time (1927). Dunne proposed that time is not a single, linear river, but an infinite regressive sequence of dimensional planes (Time1, Time2, Time3). On the physical plane (Time1) consciousness is trapped moving forward second by second. But in states of dream, reverie, or artistic absorption, the mind ascends to a higher dimensional observer (Time2) gaining a bird’s-eye view of its own timeline. From this vantage, future events and past memories coexist simultaneously, mixing freely in the dreaming mind (Time3).
The episodes of Solstice – so far – transform the filmic screen into an active Dunnean experiment in Serialism. The interactive interface acts as the mechanics of Time2 when spectators engage with the mosaic of episodes and digital maps, they step into the role of Dunne’s higher-dimensional observer. They do not merely watch characters react to events in linear real-time; they look down upon the whole of the timeline at once – the neural map of the labyrinth – Emily Dickinson’s “The Brain is deeper than the sea— / For—hold them—Blue to Blue— / The one the other will absorb— / As sponges—Buckets—do—”.
The four artists are offered the chance to teleport into the Paris Metro, they would achieve that shift by lucid dreaming – the very technique employed by Dunne in his experiments. The “co-dreamer” does not experience time sequentially – a temporal version of Cubism’s spatial totality – instead, precognition and memory blend into a single optical field – Surrealism’s hypnagogic hallucinations. The narrator explains, “Today, on our planet, in our civilization, there’s no longer a hierarchy in the chronology of events. No more distance barriers. That’s why you’re about to become Synchronauts!” The aesthetes have become synaesthetes, the artonauts have evolved into synchronauts.
Synaesthesia challenges clean sensory partitions and insists on the brain’s latent integrative capacity. Unlike aphasia – where language falters – synaesthesia shows perception overflowing its channels. Both unsettle assumptions: one fractures expression, the other reweaves experience. Luca – the musician – can hear the sound of silence, and the narrator informs us that, “The precision offered by the synesthetes suddenly made perfect sense, as if electrical threads had abruptly connected them to a malevolent force hidden deep within the earth.” Does a bad trip await them? Arthur Rimbaud knew all about synaesthesia and substance-induced psychotic disorders, “A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies / Which buzz around cruel smells,” and “I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips / In anger or in the raptures of penitence.”
Synaesthesis is maximalist, a crescendoed flood where perception metastasises, where speech exceeds semantic need and blossoms into excess – think James McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room (1877) with a catalogue written by Proust on LSD and an Ambisonic soundtrack by Olivier Messiaen. Here, expression is decadent and gloriously disequilibrated. Joyce was affronted by the blank page and ambient silence; his prose was no scrotum-tightening sea but a splurging waterspout of cumulatext. Finnegans Wake is neither book nor babel but phonemic overgrowth – language liquefied, dripping with portmanteaux and echoic torsions. Reading Joyce is entering a cathedral where language chants to itself, spiralling into liturgical overload, reading Joyce is entering the Paris Metro – the unconscious of the world.
In an accelerated series of tableaux and ideas – “The Great Book of Images was a mysterious place, where all images produced in the past… in French, ‘image’ is an anagram of ‘magie,’ so we’re making magic right now” – this is also where memetics becomes relevant. The Book behaves like a reservoir of cultural replicators, ideas that spread and mutate through transmission, unlike mimetics, which concerns simple imitation rather than evolutionary propagation. Then visions of Piranesi’s Carceri, the interconnectedness of the universe, the synchronauts’ interactions with these forces, and game theory, unfold in rapid succession, until suddenly a glitch appears – a bug, a virus already encoded into this terrible reality – one presaged by Willaim Blake, “O Rose thou art sick. / The invisible worm, / That flies in the night / In the howling storm: / Has found out thy bed / Of crimson joy: / And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy.”
To explain this, we are presented with ‘Restoration of the Transmitter’s Memories # Decryption 2’ – an expository scene, “Even though we eventually became certain that a being truly existed deep within the planet’s core, we were never able to communicate with it directly. We tried different systems of language, but without success. What was certain, however, was that it was interfering with the imaginal world of humans.” This is a means by the Architecture to stop the chaos and the madness of war, terror, and torture.
Separately and in the past, the four artists have attended Roger Penrose’s lectures where they encountered his theories, particularly “Orchestrated Objective Reduction, Orch-OR for short,” in which “each moment of consciousness would correspond to a quantum collapse within the microtubules of our brain, linked to the very structure of space-time. Despite the criticism, Orch-OR remains one of the few theories that seriously attempts to connect fundamental physics, neurobiology, and the philosophy of mind. It raises questions science has yet to resolve, particularly about the nature and workings of consciousness.” A return to our nautological/narratological ocean, to the theory of superposition, and to Dunne’s experiments with time.
The narrator explains how Penrose’s theories “explored the fundamental link between human nature and the art of storytelling, suggesting that our biology and evolution shaped the structure of our stories. It argued that civilisation was built on this unique ability to transform reality through subjective and abstract narratives. By analysing our senses, sight and touch, and our cognitive functions, it showed how our perception of the world shapes narrative mechanisms, and in turn, our representation of reality. Concepts such as reflexive consciousness, bodily symmetry, and emotional cycles emerged as the invisible foundations of all creation.”
I will counter this with a long quote from Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) – one of Burroughs’s favourite books – “We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first. Even if we had a complete wiring diagram of the nervous system, we still would not be able to answer our basic question. Though we knew the connections of every tickling thread of every single axon and dendrite in every species that ever existed, together with all its neurotransmitters and how they varied in its billions of synapses of every brain that ever existed, we could still never – not ever – from a knowledge of the brain alone know if that brain contained a consciousness like our own. We first have to start from the top, from some conception of what consciousness is, from what our own introspection is. We have to be sure of that, before we can enter the nervous system and talk about its neurology.”
The episode then swiftly moves back to Carroll and the binary existence of the white/black rabbit – while watching this section, I unconsciously conjured Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity (1933) – another foundational book for Burroughs – “In mankind’s cultural evolution its current abstractions became codified here and there into systems, for instance the aristotelian system, our main concern here. Such systematizations are important, for, as the Talmud says, ‘Teaching without a system makes learning difficult.’ In analysing the aristotelian codifications, I had to deal with the two-valued, ‘either-or’ type of orientations. I admit it baffled me for many years, that practically all humans, the lowest primitives not excluded, who never heard of Greek philosophers, have some sort of ‘either-or’ type of evaluations. Then I made the obvious ‘discovery’ that our relations to the world outside and inside our skins often happen to be, on the gross level, two-valued. For instance, we deal with day or night, land or water, etc. On the living level we have life or death, our heart beats or not, we breathe or suffocate, are hot or cold, etc. Similar relations occur on higher levels. Thus, we have induction or deduction, materialism or idealism, capitalism or communism, democrat or republican, etc. And so on endlessly on all levels.” The episode answers this by a move into alchemy (all artists are alchemists) and the work of Fulcanelli (a contemporary of Dunne and Korzybski), author of The Mystery of the Cathedrals (1926), and Dwellings of the Philosophers (1929), an esoteric figure who combined the occult with an interest in atomic physics – think Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons who was a rocket engineer, chemist, and Thelemite occultist.
Towards the end of this episode, the concerns shift to social media, the influence and proliferation of Artificial Intelligence; the dialogue and narrative become meta-commentary on what we have already seen – including an analeptic synopsis of the first episode – the narrative leans toward hyperstition, a feedback engine of self-fulfilling prophecies. Like all art that refuses closure, Le Métro de Paris asks more questions than it answers, and affirms that creativity is a game of consciousness and agrees with Sigmund Freud that the unconscious is narratological. The synchronauts create synaesthetic works and the narrator asserts that “for a fleeting moment, the shadows that had overtaken the world withdrew,” a brief suspension in which fiction, perception, and reality converge into the same unstable field – Antonin Artaud understood that inner space, “Two paths were open to him: that of the infinite without, that of the infinitesimal within.”
To conclude, I would like to introduce two quotes, the first an agreement with the aims of this series so far, that Solstice – like science fiction films – as Ballard explains, involves “powerful stories, unrestrained imagination, a hot line to the unconscious” in which “classical myth and scientific apocalypse collide and fuse.” Later, Ballard becomes a dark and malevolent entity, one that follows a different path, a different way to understand humanity, being, and creativity, a disruptive force. As he pronounced in Super-Cannes, “We’re creatures of the treadmill: monotony and convention rule everything. In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom. Our latent psychopathy is the last nature reserve, a place of refuge for the endangered mind. Of course, I’m talking about a carefully metered violence, microdoses of madness like the minute traces of strychnine in a nerve tonic. In effect, a voluntary and elective psychopathy.” Ballard may be the dark force that counters the argument put forward by Solstice, “Violence is spectacular and exciting, but sex has always been the main hunting ground of psychopathy. A perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in even the dullest soul. The consumer society hungers for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that will keep us ‘buying’? Psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world.”
Through a multidimensional montage of science fiction, fantasy, hauntology, modern art, quantum physics, sagas, and mythopoesis, Solstice reimagines narrative memory; the filmic image ceases to be a record of nostalgia and becomes a serial vessel where past traumas and future restorations constantly signal to one another across the grid, proving that every narrative phrase is haunted by the infinite temporal phases waiting to rewrite it. And one line resonates and is echoed in the quotes above, “If we change our point of view, with the right framing, by imagining that behind this reality, there’s another reality called poetry, and that we’re inside the unconscious of the world, maybe even of the universe. Then this place, so unappealing, can take on a sense of wonder.” I very much look forward to the remaining eight episodes of Solstice and am fascinated to see whether or not psychopathy is invoked as an aesthetic and philosophical option.
