Too Dark for Night

“Clare Langan’s bleak but beautiful vision proposes the fragility of civilisation in the face of the indifferent might of nature. Issues of sublimity, memory and aloneness enrich her pieces but this intellectual engagement is only the after-shock to the affective tremors of our first encounter.

Darkness frames this new film from Clare Langan and sand pervades its every frame. Her location has moved from the eerie greens and blues of water and ice in the previous Forty Below to the browns and sepia of the desert. The opening sequence plays the graininess of the medium against graininess of sand, subject and method become one. Langan’s mise en scéne is not the creation of post-production manipulations but of self-made filters attached to the camera lens during the actual filming. Prisms and gels contort the subject into a vision distinct from and equal to the high tech enhancements of special effects in commercial cinema. The soundtrack, which moulds the emotional shape of a film scene, is predominantly the wind, the agent that also forms the shapeliness of the desert dunes.”
Patrick T Murphy. Director RHA Gallery Dublin

https://www.clarelangan.com/pages/patrick-t-murphy-2002

2001
16mm film transferred to DVD with Surround Sound
Edition of 5
10 minutes

Cinematography: Clare Langan & Robbie Ryan
Producer: Melanie Gore Grimes
Performer: Wendy Judge
Composer: Niall Byrne
Voice: Katell Keineg
Editor: Isobel Stephenson