Hugues de Montalembert:
Black Sun
Information:
[BLACK] | 2005 | 70 min | Feature Documentary
Directed by: Gary Tarn and Ishai Setton
(Black Sun)U.K.
New York Premiere
Interests: Documentary, New York
Cast & Credits
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Synopsis
Sudden blindness leads an artist on a journey to regain his independence and ultimately attain a different kind of vision in this haunting, original first-person documentary. In the spring of 1978, French painter and filmmaker Hugues de Montalembert was brutally assaulted in his Greenwich Village apartment. His assailants flung paint thinner into de Montalembert's eyes before fleeing. Rushed to the hospital, de Montalembert awoke the next morning almost totally blind. Only light and the most indiscriminate of shapes shone through the swath of darkness. A man who had depended on his vision to make his art was now deprived of the privilege of seeing his art, and the world at large. In Black Sun, de Montalembert narrates his long journey back from that abyss: the painful months of rehab, the strange and often erotic visions that fluttered through his headspace, his attempts to reassert his independence (at one point by traveling to Indonesia alone) and reclaim his identity as an artist. As the subject describes his experiences, director Tarn recreates de Montalembert's interior world through impressionistic visuals and a haunting self-penned score. Images of urban architecture, street scenes from exotic locales, and half-seen faces drift in and out of focus as spare, pulsing orchestral music combines with de Montalembert's richly accented voice to immerse us in the blind artist's perceptual web. Dreamlike and poetic, Black Sun is more than just one man's inspirational life story. It's a profound meditation on the artist's role, in de Montalembert's words, of "creating vision" out of darkness.
--Elliott Larkfield+About The Director
Born in London, Gary Tarn is a self-taught musician and filmmaker. After studying the music of Indonesia, Africa, and India, as well as European orchestral composers, he began composing music for film and television in the early 1990s. He went on to compose for such projects as Stephen and Timothy Quay's 2003 short The Phantom Museum. From Gary's film exposure, it was a natural progression for him to start shooting images of his own, and he directed and produced the short Making Miyake in 2004. Black Sun is his first feature-length film.
+Director Statement
Hugues de Montalembert has lead an extraordinary life. His story is one that I am surprised is not better known. Any one of us could have suffered such a random fate, but few among us would have coped as well. His example is humbling, and could put many of our own problems and concerns into sharp perspective.
I have always enjoyed the analogue of film to dreams (you're awake, it gets dark, you see pictures, you're awake again), and a more poetic approach to sound and imagery seems to elicit this. As a result of being denied images through his eyes, de Montalembert's curious side effect is that he creates 'films in his head.' My own journey in making this film, and tracking some of de Montalembert's travels, allowed me to create my own version of such 'mind films.'
The project started in the spring of 1999. I had been working as a media composer for some years, and was frustrated by the projects I was offered to score. Eventually, I decided to make my own film. My goal was to produce, shoot, edit, score, and direct, just to see if it could be done. I would learn each job as and when I needed to, and I started to think about what kind of story would work for the kind of film I had in mind.
I knew I wanted a spoken narrative, and I knew that a conversational interview could be radically edited to create an intimate, poetic narration. I remembered a book I'd read in the early 1980s, about a painter who had been attacked and blinded. With help from a journalist, I eventually tracked down de Montalembert in Denmark and pitched the idea of an 'experimental documentary' over the phone. He was interested enough to suggest that we meet, which we did a few weeks later at his apartment in Paris, in the summer of 1999.
I played him a couple of pieces in which I had incorporated spoken word into an orchestral composition, and he agreed to be interviewed, which we did the next day. Returning to my London studio I set about editing, trying to create a narrative structure from the diverse material. With a vague shooting script of some 20 pages, I bought an old 1970s Canon Scoopic 16 mm film camera over the Internet, and started to shoot some images in between commercial music jobs. Over the next few years I travelled to America, India and Europe, and amassed around 9 or 10 hours of film. Ultimately I tried to balance strong imagery and pictures that were almost so banal as to allow each viewer to impose his or her own interpretation on the film. I'd like to think that the audience can make their own connections using the film as a conduit for their own memories and experiences.
I have always enjoyed the analogue of film to dreams (you're awake, it gets dark, you see pictures, you're awake again), and a more poetic approach to sound and imagery seems to elicit this. As a result of being denied images through his eyes, de Montalembert's curious side effect is that he creates 'films in his head.' My own journey in making this film, and tracking some of de Montalembert's travels, allowed me to create my own version of such 'mind films.'
The project started in the spring of 1999. I had been working as a media composer for some years, and was frustrated by the projects I was offered to score. Eventually, I decided to make my own film. My goal was to produce, shoot, edit, score, and direct, just to see if it could be done. I would learn each job as and when I needed to, and I started to think about what kind of story would work for the kind of film I had in mind.
I knew I wanted a spoken narrative, and I knew that a conversational interview could be radically edited to create an intimate, poetic narration. I remembered a book I'd read in the early 1980s, about a painter who had been attacked and blinded. With help from a journalist, I eventually tracked down de Montalembert in Denmark and pitched the idea of an 'experimental documentary' over the phone. He was interested enough to suggest that we meet, which we did a few weeks later at his apartment in Paris, in the summer of 1999.
I played him a couple of pieces in which I had incorporated spoken word into an orchestral composition, and he agreed to be interviewed, which we did the next day. Returning to my London studio I set about editing, trying to create a narrative structure from the diverse material. With a vague shooting script of some 20 pages, I bought an old 1970s Canon Scoopic 16 mm film camera over the Internet, and started to shoot some images in between commercial music jobs. Over the next few years I travelled to America, India and Europe, and amassed around 9 or 10 hours of film. Ultimately I tried to balance strong imagery and pictures that were almost so banal as to allow each viewer to impose his or her own interpretation on the film. I'd like to think that the audience can make their own connections using the film as a conduit for their own memories and experiences.
