A2 size offset folded poster of Sylvain George's essay "What the Night Sees".
Sylvain George's essay "What the Night Sees" delves into the political darkness of the film trilogy Obscure Night, unveiling a cinema of the "Black Carnival" where borders fracture and exiled bodies reinvent their presence beyond the logics of erasure. Through a reflection on the Oceanocene—conceptualizing exile and the human and non-human condition through the fluidity of flows—and Profane Childhood—a figure that disrupts established categories—the work transforms the screen into a battleground of perception, where the visible is sabotaged to reveal the silent insurrections of the invisibilized and those whom the State seeks to banish.
"There are images that accompany the order of the world and reinforce it, and others that fracture, disturb, and make it tremble at its foundations. Some films do not narrate, they fracture. They do not simply observe: they unsettle, displace, and sabotage. They do not produce meaning, they produce trouble.
In Obscure Night, the night is not just a physical darkness; it is a political darkness. It is the darkness of Fortress Europe, which hunts, repels, and erases; the darkness of security discourse, which reduces exiled bodies to statistics and strips them of any singular existence. But if this night is a territory of control, it is also a field of insurrection. For through silhouettes that appear and disappear, through the interplay of shadow and light sculpting each frame, the film makes another form of presence emerge, irreducible to the logics of erasure."
Sylvain George (born 1968 in Vaulx-en-Velin) is a French director, writer and producer.
After studying philosophy, law, political cinema and cinema George completed his first short films in the mid 2000s. Standing in the tradition of the cinétract or newsreel, these early works, first shot on Super 8 and then in digital, which would go on to become his medium of choice, always in black and white, pose a simple, but radical question: what is a political film? The answer that already formulates itself, and that George will build on is double: at once, the filmmaker is interested in documenting political movements of the present he traverses, like 15-M in Spain (
Vers Madrid - The Burning Bright), or Nuit Debout in France (
Paris est une fête - Un film en 18 vagues), and secondly, his filmmaking is conceived as a political gesture, not content in being a simple bystander, but rather becoming an active part in the conception of the film. Sylvain George, as
Georges Didi-Huberman wrote of
Harun Farocki, is a filmmaker "that takes a stance".
