God's Nightmares

Dozens of disjointed images flow one after the other: the mind of God^[6] reviewing human activities, anxiously considering the nightmare possibility of becoming trapped in his own creation as an everyman.

Ostensibly, Daniel Cockburn explores the "murky world of dream logic",^[7] "the stuff of dreams and nightmares",^[8] by means of a meditative collage of "iconic and esoteric movie clips ... artfully set to the measured but troubled reflections" of God.^[9] However, as Calum Marsh notes, the film technique is also a way "to think about how movies work", and in that sense God's Nightmares may be seen as a follow-up to the director's 2017 film, The Argument (with annotations).^[8]

In 2017, the same year he completed his York University master's thesis film, The Argument (with annotations),^[10] Cockburn began an artist-in-residency and a research fellowship at the Queen Mary University of London's School of Languages, Linguistics and Film in its pilot year.^[11] Both The Argument and God's Nightmares are considered Canadian-British co-productions.^{[12][13][1][3][4]}

In the introduction to his review of God's Nightmares, Marsh notes appreciatively that Telefilm Canada and other funding bodies in recent years "have completely redefined how money is awarded to filmmakers across the country", choosing to support dozens of different projects "instead of bankrolling two- or three-million-dollar epics by washed-up directors who have been phoning it in since middle age", representing "a shake-up that is already transforming the landscape of Canadian film in a fundamental way."^[8] It has been reported that Cockburn's project had a budget of $300,000.^[2]

Cockburn's film relies almost exclusively on "a few dozen carefully curated film clips,"^[14] the same collage technique he made use of in the first half of The Argument^[8] and in his early short film work.^[15]