Dark Light (2014)

Dark Light (2014) is an essay-film concerned with themes of philosophy, aesthetics, and animal. This genre has a potential for enabling viewers to freely cross between discourse and image, language and light. In a somewhat paradoxical move, the aesthetic strategy for Dark Light aims to initially develop a struggle between language and light, confounding a capacity to negotiate between image and text. Yet, coincident with its concerns for animality—both inside and outside ‘us’ humans—the film slows its encounters of language and image through a carefully orchestrated un-tethering of our desire for mastery. Dark Light thus defies closure or narrative suture. With /horse/ as its key motif, its animal-word, it attests to that strange, most uncanny animality of being-human. Composed through seven discrete poetic episodes—Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Agamben, Derrida, Deleuze & Guattari—each episode inflects to the proper of a masculine tradition in Continental Philosophy, broaching a thinking of memory, nature, aesthetics, ethics and the animal, in the spoken languages of German, French and Italian. Another feminine voice acts as a spacing or interval between these episodes—a voice of sexual difference—responding to, countering and encountering the textual traces of the metaphysics of animal being.