Johnny Panic
'Johnny Panic' is the third film of a feature-length trilogy inspired by the works of the poet, Sylvia Plath. It is an experimental and perverse dramatisation of the short story 'Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams'.
Using a strong central persona to identify with, the film focuses on the seven dreams of panic/phobias that emerge trom the hospital case files kept by Plath. The dreams allow conversations with disembodied people including Plath herself. She has reinvented herself as an off-duty medical secretary wandering through the mental hospital records as a night spirit. Johnny Panic is her alter ego, a living fairground puppet who rides wildly on the old Coney Island roller coaster turning one's panic into artistry instead of a case for treatment.
The hospital case-records or "dream-files" are kept in FBI-type vistas of surveillance, reflected in a corridor of mirrors. In the films that are back-projected onto the 'Bell Jar' panels, images combine and part, sliding into each other by slow dissolves, or fast-forwarding to future dreams. The film imitates the fluid mechanism of dreams rather than illustrating them in linear plots. As in Plath's story, it evokes the city wobbling with dreams over a vast common reservoir of images, some ecstatic, some grotesque... all inspired by panic. 'The Bell Jar' glassiness evokes fragility and visual fragmentation making this ether dome appear to be three dimensional. Expressionist techniques using mirrors and lens distortion animate Plath's phantoms of the alter-ego.
Description source: Cinenova paper archive
