Directed by
Lawrence Johnston
80 minutes
Rated PG
Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
Night
Synopsis: A documentary reflection on our social and natural world at night.
The obvious points of comparison for Lawrence Johnston's film are Godfrey Reggio’s masterful cinematic essays, Powaqqatsi (1988) and Koyaanisqatsi (1982). All three use a combination of photography and music to showcase aspects of the wondrous world in which we live. The points of difference are that Johnston's film uses an intermittent commentary made up of voice-overs and talking head interpellations and instead of Phillip Glass’s minimalist cyclical score, an eclectic soundtrack of specially-composed music by Cezary Skubiszewski and pop/club tunes. Whether either of these strategies is beneficial is a moot point.
Thus, in the impressive opening sequence Cezary Skubiszewski’s orchestral score is appropriately dramatic but, presumably because of the inadequate audio set-up in the theatre at which I saw this film, it sounded thin and brash. Elsewhere the musical variety seemed only to add aural clutter that diverted attention from the main strength of the film - its imagery
Laurie McInnes' cinematography is so strong one wonders if there really was a need for spoken commentary. Potentially such verbal exegesis could have added another dimension to our experience but the problem is that Johnston has not chosen to canvas the thoughts of poets and philosophers of night but instead seems to have grabbed whoever was at hand (many, like producer Al Clark, filmmaker Adam Elliot and former AFI director James Hewison come from the film industry) to air their opinions, memories and so on. The result is a mixture of the pretentious, the banal and in the case of the taxi driver who compares his cab to a wife because he’s “always in it”, (presumably) unintentionally comical. As voice-overs these observations are largely irrelevant, when the film cuts to the actual person speaking, a distraction. In either respect they are a function of the more fundamental problem with the film - a lack of conceptual rigour.
This is particularly noticeable in moments such as the inclusion of home photography of children playing in a backyard and of the 9/11 attacks. Yes, both are related to the film’s subject, as a preamble to bedtime in the first instance and as a symptom of a kind of “night” of our cultural soul in the second but the reality is that they both occur during daylight and should have been left on the cutting-room floor.
Johnston’s idea is commendable but it needed to be pushed further in order to find a structure in the raw material and a more empathetic way of presenting it. As it is, it is of passing interest but hardly an eye-opener. And in a film of this nature, that largely defeats its purpose.
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