Cinema of the World

EXCERPTS FROM REVIEW BY Derek Elley:

A mix of dreams, nightmares, fears and sexuality, filtered through a mordant Belgian sensibility, "Black Night" envelops rather than illuminates the viewer. First feature by writer-academic Olivier Smolders, whose occasional shorts the past 20 years have been in a similarly Expressionist vein, is perfectly tailored for fantasy festivals and other specialist events but, despite its visual merits, won't travel far beyond Euro arthouse niches.

Introducing the film at South Korea's PiFan fest -- where it won Best Film -- Smolders urged the audience not to concentrate on understanding all the pieces but to treat the whole "like a dream." It's the kind of movie that, like Peter Greenaway's oeuvre, looks as if the footnotes have fallen off the page. (Coincidentally, Greenaway's longtime producer, Kees Kasander, is credited as Dutch co-producer.)

Framed as a theater piece, complete with old style proscenium arch, film starts with key images -- black night, falling snowflakes, traumatic childhood memories. They're the recollections of a grown man, Oscar (Fabrice Rodriguez), who's trying to get to grips with his past (and especially his maybe dead sister) in seshes with a doctor.

Immaculate and very buttoned up, Oscar is an entomologist at a Kafkaesque museum, where he painstakingly catalogs dead insects. Outside, the world is in perpetual night, apart from brief, 15-second spells -- announced by an Orwellian radio broadcaster -- when daylight floods the planet.

Saturated, non-primary colors (sourced and manipulated on DV) conjure up a world in which David Lynch or the Terry Gilliam of "Brazil" would feel at home. So, too, subsequent events: Returning to his funereal apartment, administered by a crazed Russian landlady, Oscar finds a naked African woman in his bed, amidst all the jars and cages containing various creepy-crawlies.

Despite its contrariness in providing much explanation, pic does maintain interest on a purely visual level. Smolder's precise helming, flecked with straight faced humor, is inventive enough, and beyond the callow central figure other roles are colorfully drawn. Semi-baroque, vaguely '20s production design is also full of detail, and transfer to 35mm is flawless.

EXCERPTS FROM REVIEW BY Michael Guillen:

Nuit Noire inherits a night logic of surrealistically-interpreted dream images (twinning abounds) and purposely contaminated chronologies (trajectories bifurcate). Polarities are staged and layered one upon the other: darkness and light, black and white, youth and adulthood, male and female, sex and death, desire and fear, blood and milk, history and memory. Memory itself is configured as either a theatrically staged enactment replete with arched proscenium or cinematically captured in grainy black and white by a voyeuristic Super8 camera. As night watchman, Smolders flips a coin whose two sides spin endlessly throughout the film, glinting in dim light. Heads or tails, either way; it’s the flip of the coin that truly matters.

One might wish to pin down this movie as readily and enthusiastically as Oscar pins down the insects that he checks off his assignment list. Then again, revealing that wish might be the true aim of this movie, which purposely obfuscates, fragments, thwarts, distracts and detours at every nocturnal turn. To pin this movie down, to freeze frame it in the lens of a camera, is tantamount to chloroforming it. To recognize it as collage, as mosaic, as an exercise in Surrealist exquisite corpse, as self-indulgent and self-referential polysemy, is to be more on track. Quoting from Smolders’ La part de l’ombre (Share of the Shadow): “Sometimes, beetles that we hadn’t effectively chloroformed woke up in the night, impaled on their pins, and spent hours going round in circles, making that annoying scratching-paw sound. In the morning, we put them out of their misery, not without feeling somewhat guilty about the whole thing. Nuit noire (Black Night) is first and foremost a film about insects and guilt.”









Extras:




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http://filepost.com/files/e57mcb7f/Nuit.noire.2005.EXTRA.About.Nuit.Noire.DVDRip.XviD.avi/
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http://filepost.com/files/95814bc3/Nuit.noire.2005.EXTRA.Behind.the.Scenes.DVDRip.XviD.avi/
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http://filepost.com/files/f33a6929/Nuit.noire.2005.EXTRA.Deleted.Scenes.DVDRip.XviD.avi/
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http://www.filesonic.com/file/1171662321/Nuit.noire.2005.DVDRip.XviD.avi
http://www.filesonic.com/file/1171630831/Nuit.noire.2005.EXTRA.Deleted.Scenes.DVDRip.XviD.avi
http://www.filesonic.com/file/1171630841/Nuit.noire.2005.EXTRA.Deleted.Scenes.DVDRip.XviD.ENG.srt
http://www.filesonic.com/file/1171622741/Nuit.noire.2005.EXTRA.About.Nuit.Noire.DVDRip.XviD.avi
http://www.filesonic.com/file/1171622751/Nuit.noire.2005.EXTRA.About.Nuit.Noire.DVDRip.XviD.ENG.srt
http://www.filesonic.com/file/1171622811/Nuit.noire.2005.EXTRA.Behind.the.Scenes.DVDRip.XviD.avi
http://www.filesonic.com/file/1171622831/Nuit.noire.2005.EXTRA.Behind.the.Scenes.DVDRip.XviD.ENG.srt
http://www.filesonic.com/file/1171617871/Nuit.noire.2005.DVDRip.XviD.ENG.srt

Language:French
Subtitles: English (SubRip)
no pass