Background

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]}

Financing

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]

Editing

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]

Critical response

Writing for Now following the film's premiere at Toronto, Norman Wilner placed it at the top of his list of best ten short films at the festival,^[14] Wilner calls the film a video essay.^[14] God's Nightmares likewise makes it on to Calum Marsh's list of top six short films at the festival, and he also calls Cockburn "one of Canada's preeminent film essayists" whose "odd, often beguiling experiments with sound and image display an extraordinarily rich familiarity with cinema history and, more than anything else, a profound love of motion pictures."^[8]

God's Nightmares, his latest short, follows up on the sly metacommentary of 2017's The Argument (With Annotations), again using found footage from a huge range of movies . , and over the course of its brief running time, Cockburn draws surprising connections, finds intriguing parallels, and makes observations that qualify as bona fide film criticism, all tied together with a meditative narration that playfully muses about the thoughts and fixations of the Almighty.^[8]

Victor Stiff compares God's Nightmares to the "unsettling" films of David Lynch, saying the clips such as Halloween and After Hours induce anxiety through the "strange visual collage".^[7]