Feature film
The Story of Night
Geschichte der Nacht
Clemens Klopfenstein · 1979
Synopsis
Streets, empty offices and street lamps after midnight, in cities across Europe, from Dublin to Istanbul. No one acts and no one speaks: there is only sound recorded on the spot, a siren, an engine in the distance, the hum of a lamp. Here and there, a human presence, a bar still open, a procession, and the grain of the image that eats the light. The viewer recognises what they can, a sign, a language heard, and invents the rest.
Context
Its author started from Leopold Bloom's nocturnal wanderings in Joyce's Ulysses. He filmed a hundred and fifty nights, in Switzerland, Turkey, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Italy, France, Spain, England, Ireland and Germany, on ultrasensitive black-and-white stock pushed to 3200 ASA, in sixteen millimetre. Hugo Sigrist recorded the sound on a miniature tape recorder and edited the film with him. Ombra Films produced it with ZDF, SSR and INA.
Who it is for
Sixty-three minutes, without colour and without dialogue. It helps to know that the aim is to lead to reverie, and that nothing will be explained.
Prizes and reception
Shown in the Berlinale Forum, where the grain of its image surprised audiences; Serge Daney reviewed it in Cahiers du cinéma.
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