The Night Visitors (Michael Gitlin, 2023) (Patreon)

Over on Bluesky Social [got invites if you need 'em], I remarked that The Night Visitors is pretty much the Platonic Ideal of a True/False film. In case it need be said, that's a good thing in my book, because for the most part T/F has a good track record when it comes to singling out the most artistically successful hybrid docs. Since this approach has become so fashionable lately, there are more and more bad examples -- didactic, uninspired essay films that play like PowerPoint presentations or TED Talks, but with funding from the MacDowell Colony.

Like the best T/F docs, The Night Visitors is rich with factual information, exhibits a deep understanding of its subject, but also tilts those qualities at an odd angle. It displays the fascination, even obsession, with its topic, something the filmmaker is eager to share simply because to them, the subject is self-evidently mind-blowing. It has the flavor of an autistic data-dump, because the filmmaker has just discovered so many awesome things.

The Night Visitors, then, is a film about moths. But more than this, it's a film about Michael Gitlin's odd obsession with moths: their beauty, their activity, and all the various ways they are regarded in the human world. Most notably, Gitlin never once utters the B-word. Moths have tended to live in the shadows of their more well-publicized brethren, but when we are able to gaze at these exotic insects, with their intricate markings and startling coloration, the distinction between moths and butterflies seems, well, arbitrary. (And in fact, butterflies are just a subcategory of moths.)

Gitlin not only focuses on various species, and some of the people devoted to collecting them and subjecting them to taxonomy. He also considers closet moths, and the holes they leave in clothing. He mentions his dark suit jacket, taken out for his mother's funeral, and observes the moths' handiwork as a kind of memory scar, displaying the long period between deaths. He also takes his own documentary practice into account, inserting comments like the one above that remind us of the bad habits we humans have adopted with respect to looking at "alien" species, i.e., things that don't look like us.

I don't have a whole lot to say about The Night Visitors. It is clear and concise and Gitlin evinces a warm, self-deprecating humor. He even manages to sneak in a subtle Eric Carle joke. It is as if Gitlin recognizes that his interest in moths is a little weird, but then no weirder than any of our other obscure fascinations. The Night Visitors is a pleasant, casually intelligent film that lands on the screen, dazzles, then flits away.