Black Night (excerpt Nuit Noire BE 2005)

BLACK NIGHT shows CINEMA can be a place of artful & dark magic!!! Oscar (Rodriguez), grows up to take over as an animal conservator at his father's Natural Sciences Museum. One day he finds one of his coworkers, an African woman, ailing in his bed... and things get really strange, as his bed is taken over by a giant coccoon...
BLACK NIGHT
isn't easy to watch nor to understand, yet, remember CINEMA should be a place of imagery & dark art, sometimes. This nightmarish world of Oscar's Wishes, associations and subconscious fears make up a dream in such a short period of time, only to be made possible by cinema. Just watching pictures -- without any interpretation. Not a linear narration, rather fragments of a sureal order of things, Black and white, snow and night, blood and milk, the old Europe and the 'dark Africa', its colonial invention. Two old men, twins, conduct the threads of a puppet in a raree show. Kid's eyes watch dreams. Beatles web a cocoon. A pregnant woman is waiting on her bed for Oscar, the protagonist, to be born. Caught between wishes and the longing for the lost paradise of youth, he slowly loses control of his life and phantoms take over.
IMDb
USER REVIEWs
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0758442/usercomments
WATCH ONLINE
BLACK NIGHT with ENGLISH SUBTITLES at StageVu
(Restricted Content - registration required)
http://stagevu.com/video/szczbgodkzjp

Unknown outside of die hard arthouse circles, Belgian director Olivier Smolders has been turning out surreal, often inscurtable short films since the mid-1980s. His work teems with imagery involving human skin, religious inconography, and reptiles and insects, while his formal aesthetic style immediately invites comparisons with other European (or Euro-friendly) directors, most obviously Peter Greenaway (whose A Zed and Two Noughts is an obvious influence), Terry Gilliam, Francois Ozon, and Luis Bunuel. Eventually he completed a feature-length film, shot on DV but manipulated to look for all the world like a moody 35mm film, entitled Black Night (Nuit Noire), and its release has allowed his entire body of work to finally gain some appreciation

"Nuit noire was at first intended to be a film about audio-visual sensations. The narrative pretext, the trauma suffered by the main character, a story of mourning over the death of a little sister, had to be presented to the audience in deferred fashion, by the most improbable device it was possible to find. Throw in some elements of decor and a small cast. Interlace the guiding thread of the narrative pretext with other threads. A canvas slowly but surely unveils, its intersections tied with occasionally loose knots. In reality, events and characters had to be born of the more or less conscious fears and desires of the main character. That's why the series of episodes could be both very structured and random. I could quite easily see the film as the x-ray of a dream advancing by associations, by the contamination of elements that, although not easily discernible, were also susceptible to multiple meanings. Personally, I have always liked leaving myself at the mercy of stories I don't fully understand but whose composite parts do seem to draw on a vaguely worrying, subterranean causal logic."
The FILM
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0758442/combined
http://cineuropa.org/ffocusarticle.aspx?lang=en&treeID=916&documentID...
DIRECTOR
Olivier Smolders
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0810564/
http://www.mondo-digital.com/blacknight.html

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Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Olivier Smolders
• art house films
• belgien