The other day I was fishing around for a blog I had written back in 2022, when presenting The Blinding Sea at University College London. Now that the definitive two-hour version of my film is complete, I wanted to find this blog because it recounted a personal anecdote about my dreaming how to get out of the creative mess I was in, around 2020, with all the footage I had shot in the Arctic and Antarctic. How to make it all into a story?
Earlier this week, I vaguely remembered that Alfred Hitchcock had suddenly come to me in a dream around 2020, and had said: “You have elements in your film which remind you of me: Victorian iconography, dreams, Pre-Raphaelite portraits of women, haunted castles, Edgar Allen Poe, suspense, terror and vertigo, encounters with wild animals, elements from Gothic novels showing indescribably tiny people lost in grandiose landscapes, the tragic hero … Listen, I know you are unable to bring all of this together, to create a narrative unity. Your material is tremendous though. Would you accept that I take over direction of your film and pull it all together? I am good at that. Don’t worry: we can share credit as directors.”
Little did I know what shape this dream would later take! Thanks to Google (the world’s fifth largest corporation ranked by market capitalization), Hitchcock-the-director would plunge into and fuse with my psyche, as if he were my double; he would enter my unconscious mind and rummage around in my despair and dream states!
So, the other day, not suspecting anything, being somewhat distracted and still looking for that blog from 2022 about the dream from 2020, I typed “Hitchcock, evidentia, The Blinding Sea, dream” in the Google search box.
Here’s what Google AI Overview came up with: I have put my annotations in square brackets. Remember I was the one to shoot this film on the high seas and many other challenging locations, whereas generative AI only offers plausible responses:
“AI Overview
“Learn more
“In Alfred Hitchcock’s The Blinding Sea dream [Google affirms Hitchcock made the film or was dreaming about it], as recounted in the Evidentia Channel’s Altered States in London, the dream occurred during an artistic crisis while working on the film, suggesting a pivotal moment of inspiration or breakthrough.
“Here’s a more detailed explanation:
“Context:
“The dream is presented as a key moment in Hitchcock’s creative process [so this was Hitchcock in a deliberate process], specifically during a period of difficulty while working on The Blinding Sea [yes, he was the one working on the film].
“Evidentia Channel:
“The story is featured on the Evidentia Channel, which focuses on exploring altered states of consciousness and creative inspiration. [I hope I do more than that on this website, but Google says no, I don’t.]
“Artistic Crisis:
“The dream is presented as a solution to an artistic crisis Hitchcock was experiencing while trying to complete the film, The Blinding Sea [so Hitchcock was in trouble, not me].
“Pivotal Moment:
“The dream is presented as a pivotal moment of inspiration or breakthrough, suggesting that the dream helped Hitchcock overcome the artistic challenges he faced.” [According to Google Hitchcock had a dream around 2020 which helped him overcome challenges whereas he had actually died 40 years earlier.]
I remember co-producing a three-hour series of radio documentaries for CBC and Radio-Canada in 2003, called When the Machine Awakes / Quand la machine s’éveillera, in which I contrasted the world of real lived experience and the virtual world. Actually, my PhD dissertation Man the Machine at McGill University (I got that degree in 2003) also explored the same themes.
Things have certainly moved along a lot since then!
This week, Google’s free AI application informed me Hitchcock worked on my film, then had an artistic crisis which was only resolved when he had a dream which constituted a pivotal moment of inspiration or breakthrough for him. In other words, in quickly scanning the blog, which I had called Altered States in London, Google AI brought Hitch back from the dead and projected my experience onto him, as if we had suddenly morphed together into one person. This is much more than I could ever have hoped for, considering that I am a lifelong admirer of Hitchcock films, especially when he portrays characters in altered states (e.g. in Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious and Vertigo)!
My wife asks: why didn’t Google’s algorithm quickly go through a list of Hitchcock’s films, and check whether he had ever made a film called The Blinding Sea? This would only have taken a second, or less.
I remember now why I was looking for this blog about Hitchcock: in making the film I found myself experiencing altered states as our three-masted bark raced across the Southern Ocean, and I drove in dog teams through white-outs. Apart from the technicalities of shooting action scenes, I noticed how different I felt to be thrusting myself into ever more demanding situations, where I risked not just my cameras, but my own life and limb as well. And the challenges of filming taught me to examine my main characters more closely – polar explorers who knew excitement, love, desire, fear, hatred, hunger, disgust, terror, thirst, pride and shame.
These are real not virtual emotions, even if these real emotions are experienced in altered states. They have to do with people and non-human persons like huskies, not with machines.
AI is here to stay, and that includes in the world of film production. But AI shouldn’t be telling us how to relate to our own experience! Generative AI can develop complete screenplays in a few seconds, based on thousands of previous examples (read about the massive LibGen dump of pirated contented on the Atlantic website, here: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/). Creators have to make sure we stay well away from that, and put the focus on non-derivative story-telling of our own.
Anyway, here is my original blog from back in 2022: https://www.evidentia.net/evidentia/altered-states-in-london/
