Just been to see Black Sun, a visionary documentary film by Gary Tarn. Though “documentary film” doesn’t really do it justice. It’s more like a visual art piece on a big screen.
It’s the thoughts of Hughes de Montalembert, a French artist who was blinded in an attack in the late 1970s and who travels the world experiencing new and non-visual ways of seeing. Tarn illustrates de Montalembert’s narrative with a slithering mass of visual images and colours and also composes the music.
I’ve been looking forward to seeing this film for weeks. And I wanted to go with my friend Nikki who I met in Brazil this year. She’s an artist and she was travelling to the seminars in Bahia with another artist, a friend of hers from the US called Clara who was also blind. So I thought it would be interesting.
Weirdly, and this is symptomatic of the state of mind I’m in at the moment, from the moment I sat in the cinema I was overcome with an immediate desire to sleep. I wasn’t sleep-deprived, I hadn’t eaten too much. But within minutes of the film starting I was overwhelmed with the urge to stretch out on the floor between the rows of seats and sleep. I nodded off throughout.
Talking to Nikki afterwards, I realized that the film was almost too timely. It was talking about a lot of things that relate directly to the shifts in my life at the moment. The move out of the crysalis that began in Brazil and has been squeaking and cracking and straining ever since.
What I saw of it was wonderful. I’m going straight back to see it again tomorrow and make sense of my sudden narcolepsy.
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