Something More Than Night

1. The idea that a film about a city, a quiet, architectural film no less, can tell us anything that we don’t already know about urban life at this point in our new century is perhaps a bit arrogant. But the city is an organism that changes constantly; our knowledge of it is provisional at best. So a film that examines the urban environment under the cloak of darkness must presume to reveal a reality that we don’t know, and tries to dispel projections and fears that are for the most part located in the imagination... in a memory of film, television, or the novel.
　　2. It’s under this general principle that my work brought me to consider the urban landscape and contemporary urban conditions. Because I construct images and sounds, I mean this less sociologically than I do sensually; the film work tries to make clear how the urban environment conditions and reveals social space primarily through its reception by the senses. Much as even I would like to believe otherwise, we arrive at all intellectual considerations of the physical world through the body; and experience of the physical world is mediated by the senses. Cinema, residing as a meta-experience derivative of the sensual, can also reveal through the use of time, sound, and the conscious use of the languages of representation, the active and unsettled space we call night.
　　3. In thinking about our fin-de-siècle condition, and the relation of cinema to an increasingly technologized landscape, it seems that the experience of duration is quickly disappearing, replaced instead by an overwhelming absence of experience, which is becoming familiar and comfortable. In fact, because television and computers have accustomed most viewers to an accelerated sense of time, the discomfort in watching durational time cinematically represented on the screen is palpable, and signals an accommodation to the ever-increasing visual speed of montage and simultaneity in daily experience. It perhaps signals a discomfort in seeing the world in any kind of continuity at all, be it sensual or theoretical.
　　4. Montage, because it is so bound up in the conditions of materiality, has a particularly fixed position in relation to representation and experience. We know already too well not to trust cinema as reality, or even as a document of reality. So the question of a formal method to reconfigure the visual world keeps coming up, and in some ways one almost always returns to beginnings, to the blank page and the time before experience.
　　5. I am drawn back to the beginning of cinema, to the Lumières, to the endless rolls of films taken on street corners and streetcars, to the ‘Archive of the Planet,’ of Albert Kahn (Musée Albert Kahn, Boulogne-Billancourt), to that moment where reality and cinema were so confused, and confusing. In returning to the simple, fixed camera and long take after a century of cinema, one doesn’t see the world in the same way. Of course, the image still reveals its many social, linguistic, and sensual texts, but it now reveals an ability to return us to a memory of the past that is already deeply embedded in the image, and in the durational shot we can reconsider these meanings from an altered perspective.
　　6. Duration also recuperates a parallel (parallax?) of experience. Time can never be really reproduced, but it can have a quantitative relation to experience. You can at least be looking for the same length of time. Duration is empirically the same, and in this time, in the 21st Century, it allows for the viewer to consider the conventions of reality, of its representation, of its language, of our private and pub