Black Sun (Maureen Fazendiero, 2019) (Patreon)

Taking as its ostensible topic the recent partial solar eclipse, Fazendiero’s film is a meditation on the role that light plays in shaping reality and our consciousness of it. To this end, we hear a recording of Delphine Seyrig on the soundtrack, reading a poem by Henri Michaux about a land where sunlight is a rare, precious commodity.

Fazendiero opens the film with tinted images – mountains, volcanoes, waterfalls – that resemble the ethnographic recordings of early explorers (or, even more specifically, the appropriation and re-presentation of such images by experimental documentarians Yervant Gianikian and the late Angela Ricci Lucchi). In context, this material seems to suggest that, at one time, everything before the camera seemed out of reach, impossible to see. Now, not even the sun is off limits to our curious eyes.

Black Sun has a bit of experimental-film star power behind it. Fazendiero’s collaborators on the short film include Nicolas Rey (Differently, Molussia) and Pedro Pinho (The Nothing Factory). Nevertheless, there’s a strange disconnectedness that characterizes the film’s seven minutes. Straightforward documentary material mingles with more abstract imagery, with the Michaux poem floating uneasily on top, and depending on your outlook, Black Sun either resists totalizing meaning, or it fails to cohere. 

Personally I’m on the fence between these two positions, and I suspect that had the film been at least twice as long, its more evocative aspects might have had time to take root. But then, eclipses don’t last, and so there’s a certain logic to the fact that Black Sun doesn’t linger.