Black Sun - Gary Tarn

Gary Tarn accompagna/trasforma in immagini le parole di Hugues de Montalembert (qui una piccola biografia, qui lui parla, qui un'intervista).
lui è cieco, ma non si arrende, e continua a vedere in un altro modo.
un film da non perdere, promesso - Ismaele

QUI il film completo, in francese

…In the tradition of Chris Marker, but without conceit, Tarn creates a musical and visual accompaniment to De Montalembert's droll, hyper-intelligent narration. He lets us hear the voice, but not see the face, thus cleverly approximating the experience of the blind, and shows us streetscapes of bustling people: they cannot see us, and we are left to wonder if we have really seen them. A valuable filmic essay to set alongside the writings of Oliver Sacks.

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Fascinated by the idea of how a film dealing with a painter's loss of sight might be visualised, I approached Black Sun with curiosity. It turns out to be surprising on a couple of counts: one, the images seem to be a combination of random footage in the streets of New York, Paris, London, Indonesia, etc, and some manipulated graphic displays that sometimes suggest what Hugues de Montalembert might 'see' in his mind's eye.
Secondly, the film surprises by its power to communicate, through de Montalembert's rich, textured voice narrating his thoughts and feelings with a likeable French accent. No other voice is heard. He tells his story with candour and without a trace of self pity; on the contrary.
The third surprise is that we never see him; if this is meant to help convey the loss of sight, it's a misguided idea for a film about a single human subject. We yearn to understand him more completely by seeing his face, and being denied this, we are a little frustrated.
All the same, the film has many sublime moments, offers great insight into the human condition and finds a visual vehicle for a story that's not just about sight, but about seeing the world.

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…The distance between sound and image in this film dovetails nicely with a portion of Montalembert's monologue where he describes the joy of walking, as a blind man, with a painter friend, who sees everything so clearly and in such detail that his descriptions are an artform. Through his blindness, Montalembert comes to realize that sight is an act of creativity, a way of creating a world by choosing what to see, what to focus on, what to notice; it's a creative act that most people, seeing only what they need to in order to get through their days, rarely engage in. In Tarn's film, the painter's descriptions of the world become a metaphor for Montalembert's own monologue, his descriptions of his interior state. Just as the painter sees everything around him so acutely, Montalembert's thought processes have a crystalline clarity even when circling around complex abstract concepts. Tarn's gorgeous but stubbornly non-representational cinematography necessitates the monologue, ingeniously putting the blind narrator into the role of the painter who must describe, with all his creativity, what the audience cannot see for themselves.
This subtle metaphor is a constant subtext in the film, flowing through the tension between the voiceover and the allusive, elusive images chosen to illustrate these words. It is no surprise that Tarn is primarily a composer, and that Black Sun is his first effort as a filmmaker, not because the film is technically inept (far from it), but because his attentiveness to sound inscribes every moment of it. His score, quietly under-girding Montalembert's narration, combines delicate, repetitive piano figures with synthesizer and other electronic touches, creating a moody, swirling bed of sound that often emotionally enforces both the images and the narration, uniting the film's two separately realized components. The film's effect is stimulating, thought-provoking, and incredibly moving. It immerses the audience in sensation, and even more so in the contemplation of sensation and what relationships exist between the senses, the human consciousness, and the world that's created by this collaboration of the mind and the eyes.

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