Nuit noire – Olivier Smolders

un film davvero complesso e unico, ma con immagini bellissime e una storia che non c'è, o forse sì.
eppure se lo guardi resti stregato.
pieno di interpretazioni, di sogni e realtà, ma non capisci mica bene, e simboli, aggiungo di mio che qualche riferimento alla crudele e ignobile colonizzazione del Belgio in Congo riesco a vederla, o forse la immagino.
da non perdere, per vedere un po' di cinema altro davvero - Ismaele



More a dreamlike experimental experience than a coherent narrative, Black Night begins with a pair of old men unveiling a small snowbound stage with two child puppets. Intercut with random shots of insects, the story focuses in on the two children, now real, a brother and sister. After the death of the young girl, the boy, Oscar (Rodriguez), grows up to take over as an animal conservator at his father's Natural Sciences Museum, while the world has been consumed entirely in darkness except for a few fleeting seconds of sunlight each day (a device mirrored by the symbolic image of stage curtains opening and closing). One day he finds one of his coworkers, an African woman, ailing in his bed, and she and Oscar copulate (or do they?) before she dies. Then things get really strange, as his bed is taken over by a giant coccoon...

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…Nuit noire is not just a film which plays on the referent, which highlights, in order to play around with them, stereotypes, chromos, postcards and clichés; it is also a film which, through its special dilatation of space-time, draws the audience into day-dreaming and bifurcation, providing them with a game of snakes and ladders which they can, following the thread of their perception, play once or over and over again. Olivier Smolders asks us over to play, opens his toy cupboard and lets us all be filmmakers. He brings us a fragmented world that confronts desire with fantasy, hot with cold, and art with icons of St. Sulpician. The colonial Africa aspect as revealed through the popular tales that the continent engendered (we’re thinking of the inserted old black and white clips from films by André Cauvin) will take you back to Herge’s Tintin in the Congo or Jacques Martin’s La Griffe Noire(The Adventures of Alix). "Give me mystery to suspense any day." confesses Smolders. Don’t say we didn’t tell you…

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…Watching the film one certainly isn’t in short supply when it comes to acknowledging its predecessors. Lynch’s Eraserhead perhaps comes to mind most immediately, if only because it was another film that never made any pretense towards normality. One can also see Lynch in Smolders’ meticulously composed frames and the careful art-design that walks a line between recognizable reality, literary allusions and expressionism. If we want to go back further we can see the influence of Maya Deren in the film’s perpetual dream-state mode. One can see Kafka—or going further back, Ovid—in the film’s obsession with metamorphosis. Buñuel should probably be acknowledged when it comes to Smolders’ vivid use of animals, which extends beyond insects to zebras, elephants, and leopards. But if Nuit noire was merely a collection of easily identified influences then it wouldn’t be as fascinating as it is. The truth is that even these recognizable elements are transmogrified and integrated into a film that feels utterly unique…

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QUI nove minuti di scene che il film non contiene