Black Night (2005)

 

a.k.a. Nuit noire

Director: Olivier Smolders

Screenplay: Olivier Smolders

Cast: Fabrice Rodriguez as Oscar; Yves-Marie Gnahoua as La femme africaine; Philippe Corbisier as Oscar enfant; Iris De Busschere as Le petite fille; Raffa Chillah as Le petite fille; Raymond Pradel a sLe taxidermiste; Marie Lecomte as Marie Neige; Luc David as Le médecin

An Abstract Film Candidate

 

“I was afraid to sleep, the night seemed so peopled with ghosts. My fear and my desire to see them caused events which I recognized very well without really understanding them.”

[Major Plot Spoilers Throughout]

Set in a world which is permanently dark, where the sun only shines for fifteen seconds a day, Black Night is firmly among the vein of surreal films which exist in their own logic. Immediately we are in the position where everything is subjective when we are introduced to protagonist Oscar (Fabrice Rodriguez). In the middle of a therapy session with his doctor, examining his thoughts for himself, we see a back-story of a happy childhood with his sister which was cut short by a shape shifter who ripped her limbs off, only with the factor that it was with his own hands (and scissors) she died afterwards. The therapist dismisses all this, the dream in a subjective image set in a theatre, with two creepy identical old men loom over the top as puppet masters. Reality for Oscar in an already abstract world is distorted for him.

An entomologist, one who specialises in filming insects, his days are greatly subverted when a woman (Yves-Marie Gnahoua) is found one day in his bed, pregnant and ill, his perspective of reality drastically under suspicion in what happens. Whilst shot in digital, Olivier Smolders' film is steeped in an atmosphere that is distinct, feeling at times likes the work of an installation filmmaker. His world even in the digital camera lens (and a CGI moon) is approaching chiaroscuro in its use of darkness and shadow. Set in a time in the past, it certainly looks of an old world, befitting its content. Animals will play a part, but especially with the real insects interspersed throughout. Some moments, like one pinned on a board, will upset but you get to the many, from stag beetles to insects, which in intercutting to will build the strange mood of the film with vibrancy. Magnificent creatures, they themselves are not creepy for me at all, though there are scenes of actors with them crawling on them, but their prescience are living objects alien to reality, such as those whose look like living dried leaves among examples, creatures a sense of they are the occupants of a dream the viewer has watching this film that actually from the reality of nature.

One aspect which does need to be addressed, as it is far more complicated, is that heavily layered aesthetic of African culture which could boarder on pure exoticism, including that a huge part of the film being that the woman in Oscar's bed is African, part of a narrative turn where his true childhood is exposed by a film he is provided, not like the one he fetishises in a shrine to his sister. Just a decade later to the 2000s the use of other cultures became more of an issue and Black Night's use of an aesthetic of an imaginary Africa could likely have become a problematic appropriate in another film. One immediate thing of note however is that Olivier Smolders was born in Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo, a city and country that would no longer exist only a few years after his birth, and are now known as Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo respectively. Only declaring independence in 1960, this becomes a more troubling subject in how, under King Leopold II, the Belgium colonisation of the Congo is steeped in a horrifying and bloody history, but at the same time I do not suspect Smolders came to this film's content ignorant of any of this, or that even merely evoking this past is not without meaning in not even hiding its existence.

In fact, learning this detail adds an even ominous edge to the film, one that I highly suspect is intended when, for Oscar's place of work at a Natural History Museum, Smolders is clearly filming in the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. Erected by Leopard II, and naturally as much a source of controversy in the decades that past as his statues erected of him from after his 1909 death, it is naturally an institution stepped in a moral crisis in that it was originally a museum to colonialism, which it has had to deal with in its own renovations over the dexades. Whilst there is a danger in Olivier Smolders having his film play out with a lens of an imagined Africa as a European film, or that he never addresses the violent colonial past, this context adds a great deal especially as the film's dreamlike narrative disrupts itself. A huge plot point reveals the woman in his bed as his sister, evoked from his father's past in the African continent, and for all the potential issues of its fetishism, the film's nightmarish qualities push for Oscar being a man with layers to him. None so much as an unhealthy fascination with his sister, specifically a perceived image he had of a sister beforehand, a white girl, who even haunts his real sister briefly and may have likely shot her in the head in one scene.

Black Night pushes further into the surreal when, faced with the body of his sister, Oscar decides to create a human cocoon. This does lead to another moment depending on how one interprets the narrative where Black Night could be problematic - as the black sister turns into a white woman leaving the cocoon - but even how this moves on in itself is significantly more complicated. The other actress, with striking eyes and visibly cast both for her willingness to do nudity and to look completely alien even to this world, plays a figure who is both is Oscar's fantasy but also meant to be his sister, the perverseness of the narrative turn address in one casting choice. His obsession with his sister is inherently held as a fixation, one where the versions (his idealised child one, the real one and this cocoon one) blur at one point.

Said cocoon sister also has a stinger to impale men, so Black Night is as much stoking in horror as much as its own form, particularly as among its other aesthetic aspects including is taxidermy, one of Oscar's colleagues in his own world of preserving animals and letting this woman see his mural of preserved frogs set to drinking absence in a bar which is, with real ones, as macabre as that suggests. The fact that Oscar tries to turn his real sister into his idealised one is itself political as it is psycho dramatic - if you were to consider that even evoking Belgium's colonial past is itself a metaphor for the European subconscious with its own past, something Belgium has still had to struggle with and is something many countries have had to, be it after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 or times of questioning the representation of that past, Oscar rejecting his own life is problematic with the act in a literal sense, only for it to be impossible to erase the real life. That this is also psychodramatic, that his psychosis and the obsession with the idealised sister are there, complicates things. That his new cocoon sister, baring a leopard print coat, more of a cloak of fur, is eroticised and naked, with her striking red hair, adds a further layer of complexity in this character's mind, a representation or a character or both.

Certainly, even if the themes this film have become more sensitive to the Belgian based director's country of living, which is had to still deal with and for some may have not even properly addressed, the context means that this film cannot be dismissed and now gains new complications in its favour to mean something. Black Night is hallucinatory and meant to keep one as a viewer off guard, with a world where Oscar is haunted. A strange man is haunting a man in a leopard pelt in the park, a white man who is a child killer, the same one evoked in Oscar's idealised childhood who mutilated his sister, and when the sun comes out for longer and purges the world in light, not only does the museum come in disarray due to film no longer being possible to shot, least to one of his colleagues, wild animals suddenly roam the streets. Real ones, be it a zebra in a back alley, a leopard and even an elephant. The ending becomes entirely in Oscar's mind as reality, and even when it comes to one key aspect I have wrangled with, the director himself has described in an interview that this past he refers to "in spite of historians’ efforts, stems from a kind of fantasy-ridden delirium sometimes actually quite far removed from the real Belgian Congo"¹, he himself aware of the fantasy that this world evokes, including an awareness of its fiction. The tensions of the film, entirely in dream logic, are found everywhere, even in a scene of a schoolgirl, visiting a museum and played by an actress, randomly coming into Oscar's room and seducing him, only for it to merely scratch him and for her to disappear. A sense of this film having an unreality that forces the viewer out of their comfort, even in the mid-2000s digital sheen, is completely successful, and even if there are questions to still ask in terms of the subjects Black Night evokes in its images, it is a compelling film that will unpack more layers and interpretations when seen over and over.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Mindbender/Ominous

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

 

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1) The full interview can be read HERE.