Chris Derek Van | Dreams of a Man / 2023

the knock at the door

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Derek Van (screenwriter and director) Dreams of a Man / 2023 [5 minutes]

 

The short films of the young filmmaker Chris Derek Van, produced by Glenbard East Fine Arts, use extant film images to create a narrative about gay love missing and mostly permanently lost. His 5-minute short of 2023, Dreams of a Man concern what at first might be seen as a missing lover, who left 20-years earlier.

    Yet we as quickly discover that in the small French apartment to which the narrator Paul returns, evidently on a visit from Los Angeles where he now currently resides, is not his former lover’s apartment but perhaps his family home, and that the “knock on the door” of which he hallucinates is not that of some former lover, but his own German father which obviously represented the nightly visits he paid to his son in bed.

      Yet unlike most films of child abuse, even if the walls have stories to tell and the ceiling pockmarked with buckshot, his memories are hauntingly nostalgic, as if he has truly lost a lover. He wonders if his father even remembers him and what he might do if he met him now as an adult. Would they go out for breakfast?

      Paul has returned to Paris evidently as part of a book tour, but refuses even to attend the events, waiting the time holed up in the apartment, nightly hallucinating the knocks and the calls out to him of “Paul,” followed by his response, “Pappa.”

      The images of this film, only a couple in Paris streets, alternate with loving images of fathers and sons and mostly washed-out scenes of Los Angeles, obviously filmed in the 1950s. We must make the connections, that presumably when his father left, perhaps because of accusations of child abuse, he must have moved with the mother to the California city and grew up there.

    In this film, the night-time meet ups with his father, although obviously still psychologically haunting and seemingly torturing him, are basically positive ones, a lover still waiting for the man he has lost. Although he admits, he will now never open the door.

       To some audiences, however, the obvious homoerotic nature of this film might simply be perceived as those of a child whose father has gone missing. And in that sense, Derek Van’s film might be described as a highly coded movie. Yet some of the images, one in particular from Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied, along with the pleading knock on the door from the father and the suggestion of the walls hide wounds, all suggest something far deeper than parental abandonment has happened in this young man’s life. One has to imagine that his successful book speaks to these very concerns.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).