The Dream of the Girl Diver is a sumptuous and mesmerizing 14 minute film by Samuel Bester, inspired by Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, an 1814 shunga (erotic art book) by Hokusai, the artist famous for creating The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Bester uses the technique of datamoshing, a method of blending digital video footage together by hacking into the compression data, to create a powerfully sensual evocation of Hokusai’s tale, a strange form of erotica, where a diver reaches ecstasy with her octopus lover.
The video is composed of the intermingling of three types of footage: the writhing of an octopus (mainly closeups of the tentacles and suckers), a sexual encounter, and sliding brocade fabrics, with their swirls of flowers and curlicues.
Bester is highly effective at exploiting the “watery” qualities of datamoshing, like a digital form of animated water-color painting, to evoke Hokusai’s watery love encounter.
Through the magic of datamoshing, male and female body parts morph into octopus tentacles, engorging and slithering with curious exploration. The breathing and pulsing of the octopus’ body swells the surfaces of breasts and fingers and animates folds of fabric. The sinuous movements of the tentacles manage to embody male and female arousal simultaneously. The pulsating suckers lining the tentacles are alive with erotic suggestion.
The sparse, effective musical score, by Bester and Jean-Marc Montera, recalls the sounds of the shakuhachi flute and the koto. The music is mixed with the erotic banter between the diver and the octopus, taken from the text of the Hokusai shunga. Their breathless love-words are given an erotically charged reading by Kate Pinault and Naoyuki Tanaka. The octopus’s voice is multiplied with a “chorus” effect, as if all eight arms are speaking in unison.
“Boundaries and borders gone; I’ve disappeared,” exclaims the woman, as the watery washes of datamoshed color merge the fabrics with the skin and the glistening tentacles, encrusted with shiny scales like a living, bejeweled embrace of arms.
The erotic activity depicted is sensual and diffuse: an alert but relaxed pursuit of pleasure, where fingers ramble from one body part to another, the whole body becoming erogenous. The music, as well, drifts from one chord cluster to another, suspended in the pleasures of the moment. Color and imagery run over the surface of the screen, bathing the viewer in a liquid erotic energy field. When the sexual climaxes do come, at the end of the film, they seem to swell spontaneously up from the water.
The Dream of the Girl Driver is disturbing and powerful precisely because its evocation of the alien, forbidden world of Japanese tentacle erotica is so powerfully alluring. The effect at is at once classic and contemporary. The highly decorative, sparkling tapestry of the fabrics intermingled with cephalopod writhing and human coitus suggest a dream of Klimt’s Japanese-inspired paintings come to life and engaging in oceanic intercourse. The highly pixelated effects and transitions, unique to datamoshing, are a distinctly digital approach to filmmaking. Bester invites western viewers to dive into an alien culture and an alien species with all our senses open and receptive to new kinds of pleasure, and you won’t be sorry if you take the plunge.
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